The Supply of Raw Materials in the Industrial Revolution

ny great increase in the output of industry, such as began in England towards the end of the eighteenth century, must have as its counterpart an equally great increase in the input of industrial raw materials at the other end of the process of production.1 The problem of providing an adequate raw material supply had been acute in many branches of industry in earlier centuries. The removal of these constrictions is intimately connected with several important aspects of the rapid growth which occurred, and its study affords a vantage point from which they can conveniently be surveyed. The most important change in raw material provision which took place was the substitution of inorganic for organic sources of supply, of mineral for vegetable or animal raw materials. This was a sine qua non of sustained industrial growth on a large scale, for when industrial growth is based upon vegetable and animal raw materials present success can usually be obtained only at the cost -of future difficulties. England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries provides some typical examples of the dilemma which confronts industries when they use animal or vegetable raw materials. The iron industry of the Weald was able to expand without prejudice to its future prosperity only up to the point at which the annual cut of timber equalled the yearly increment of new growth. Any expansion beyond this point could take place only at the cost of contraction in the future. Expansion without prejudice to future supplies could, of course, have been secured if more land had been devoted to the production of timber, but in a country where the area of unused land was small more woodland meant less ploughland or pasture. Competition for the use of scarce land was a perennial problem in these circumstances and a permanent, radical increase of industrial raw material supply was very difficult to obtain. Those Tudor pamphleteers who complained that the sheep were eating up men