ory benchmark: The Industrial Revolution. Second, Britain's very success and domination of the world marketplace led to a major shortsightedness on the part of the leaders of the textile industries who failed to recognize the historical inevitabilities of progress, and this shortsightedness led to the eventual collapse of the industrial power Britain had created (Kirby, 1974, 157). The Fatalist view of this situation, espoused by McCloskey (and others cited later) will be examined first.
Did History Play a "Trick?": The Fatalist View
The difficulty of analyzing historical moments as the result of a "trick" (or a random, unpredicted event) is first seen in determining which trick the authors are talking about? Which event along the long time line that describes Britain's cotton industry was most important? Was the opening of the first Indian cotton mill, "The Bombay Spinning Mill," in 1854 the watershed event? Or perhaps we can peg as "the trick" as the American Civil War that had such an incredible effect on both Britain's supplies of raw materiel as well as the rapid growth of the cotton mill industry in Bombay? These arguments could continue forever, and a discussion of them may be entertaining and enlightening but hardly evidentiary in a search for the decline of the British Cotton Industry. One example shall serve to illustrate the illogic of the Fatalist or "trick" theory of argument. Certain facts of the British/Indian relationship have become almost myth. The cherished narrative known to every school lad concerns tales of British visionaries and Indian scoundrels, the Rajs, the battles, the wars, and the money. If we were to analyze a small part of that narrative in Fatalistic format, we would have the following:
B. It discovered a source in India.
C. The East India Company was formed.
D. English sheepherders wanted protection for their products.
E. Britain decided to make its own cotton.
F. Th...