services, until a generation or more later. The first ocean steamship company, the P&O, was established only in 1837. The Stockton & Darlington, conventionally and plausibly the first true railway, did not open until 1825, and railways only became widespread in the 1840s.
Transportation thus seems to be been a great laggard through the first two generations of the Industrial Revolution. This is in striking contrast to later times, when developments in transportation--railway, motorcar, and aeroplane--have been nearly the symbol of industrial progress. It might seem fruitless, then, to look to transportation to understand when or why the Industrial Revolution developed in Britain.
This essay, however, will argue that what may be called a proto-industrial revolution overtook British transport, particularly inland transport, in the course of the 18th century. Horse-drawn canal boats and stage coaches may look archaic to our eyes, yet both prefigured the railway in crucial ways. Moreover, the social and economic forces that brought the canals, stage coaches, and turnpikes into being were, it will be suggested, the ones that brought about the Industrial Revolution itself.
Without those underlying conditions, industrialism would not have been viable even if the technology had been present. Had some wealthy mechanical genius contrived to build Watt's engine or even a railway in Elizabethan England, it would have been a mere novelty and would likely have soon fallen out of use, because the society and economy could not have found a sufficiently productive use for it to justify the complexity and expense.
An approximate analogy does in fact exist, for a canal several miles in length, fitted with locks, was built in early Elizabethan times, the Exeter Lighter Canal of 1564-66. The essential technical features of this canal, albeit in simplified form, were not unlike those of canals being built as late as the 183...