If Not Britain, Where? The Case for a French Industrial Revolution

There is a good argument for it not to be about the innovators, but rather about the long buildup of compound growth in land use, longevity, and wealth in the preceding century in England, distinctly from other areas of Europe. The thought leaders and innovators of that era and the preceding centuries tended to be cosmopolitan, mobile, and well connected between parts of Europe, so one can't really invoke them as though they were geographically fixed, a regional phenomenon.

http://ideas.repec.org/p/cte/whrepe/wh016301.html

During the 17th and 18th century the English economy underwent a dramatic transformation: its capacity to feed and increasing population increased impressively. ... Perhaps for the first time in the history of any country other than a land of recent settlement, rapid population growth took place concurrently with rising living standands.

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The notion of life expectancy provides the most important tool to examine the phenomenon of mortality, taking into account the age structure of the population. Life expectancy at age x is the average number of years that a person of age x will still survive at a given date. The most commonly used indicator is e(0), life expectancy at birth (or at age 0), but sometimes other statistics like e(1), e(5), e(20), e(50), are also tabulated. Their main advantage is that they capture age-specific mortality profiles: for instance, an increase in mortality concentrated in the age-group between 20-25 (due, for instance, to a long war) would affect e(0) but not e(30) because the probability of survival, given that a person is already 30, does not change.

Decisions about future capital and consumption are not taken by the agent when he is born but, rather, when he is twenty or twenty five years old. Therefore, the relevant survivial profile for considering the influence of mortality over investment choices is given by adult life expectancy. In fact, making the distinction between e(0) and adult life expectancy is expecially important for our problem because adult mortality behaves in a completely different way from infant and child mortality in the first half of the 18th century: adult mortality rates decreased very sharply from the end of the 17th century, while infant and childhood mortality rates were unusually high between 1680 and 1750.

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If life cycle inspiration was present in rural England in the 18th century, farmers who were becoming aware that old people were gradually living for longer periods must have been more concerned about their own means of subsistence in the future. This may have been an important stimulus to reduce consumption, increase savings and take into account longer horizons.

These sorts of revolutions are built on previous discoveries. The industrial revolution was guaranteed to happen with advances in metallurgy and mathematics. It happened in Britain because the British empire was top dog, economically, but it could just as easily have happened anywhere in Europe or in all of it.