The history of the Industrial Revolution is well known, and its protagonist – the United Kingdom – has been analyzed in depth by many experts and researchers over the years. They all agree that the disruption brought about by industrialization had firm foundations in the availability of coal, the commercial power of a British empire still at its peak and certain facilities for entrepreneurship that are intrinsic to Anglo-Saxon culture. And all of this is true, but in the opinion of this notary they hide the main differentiating factor of the equation.
It is none other than talent. You can argue to me that industrial talent was non-existent before the germ of the Revolution itself. Or that it was precisely the above factors that facilitated the great technical developments that came to life in the 19th and 20th centuries. But I ask you, dear readers, broaden the scope to what happened when the Industrial Revolution was already underway.
However, the United Kingdom was not the only European trading power. France or today’s Germany were already actors to take into account and they soon adopted many of the technologies that originally emerged on the Atlantic islands. Therefore, the English had to do something different to gain industrial hegemony for decades.
The analyst Joel Mokyr, in his essay The Holy Land of Industrialismmaintains that the secret of the Industrial Revolution was in a kind of aristocracy of ingenuity: a technical elite that converted useful knowledge into economic and social transformation. We are talking about a tiny percentage of the population (barely 2% of the British workforce) but it inevitably became the true crucible where modernity was tempered.
What a surprise, well-educated people leading a knowledge revolution. Nothing could be further from the truth: this technical aristocracy was made up of men trained in the forge, not at the lectern of a university. While France and Germany began to reproduce polytechnic institutes and faculties everywhere, in the United Kingdom it was the workers and technicians with blackened hands (but quick minds) who kept the pulse of the Industrial Revolution.
Mokyr’s data, modest in figures but rich in meaning, are clear: 8,328 British patented inventions between 1700 and 1840, and a quarter of the innovators came from mechanical trades. They were not philosophers or aristocrats, but artisans with almost telluric intuition.
But in a way, what Mokyr describes is not a story from the past, but a warning to sailors: The wealth of nations does not depend on their geology, but on their anthropology of knowledge. It is not enough to accumulate universities or startups; We must forge ecosystems where practice and theory fit together naturally, like iron and fire in the same forge.
If then British talent was incomparable for its mix of empiricism and craft, today we are witnessing a paradox: There has never been so much formal education, but tacit knowledge is scarce, that which is not taught but transmitted by osmosis in the ins and outs of day-to-day life at plant level (or street level). Today, these attributes are measured in other units: digital skills, agility, capacity for continuous learning. But without this symbiosis of Academia and trade, of white collar and blue collar, we will never be able to materialize the ambitious promises of the current Digital Revolution.
According to the European Innovation Scoreboard 2025, European innovation has fallen slightly, by 0.4% compared to the previous year. It is not a collapse, but it is a symbolic crack. Meanwhile, the IMD World Talent Ranking confirms that the United Kingdom has fallen two positions in attracting talent. What was once the “Holy Land of Industrialism,” in Mokyr’s own words, seems to lose the aura that once distinguished it.
In the 18th century, the British advantage lay in its institutional flexibility: a system of learning based on reputation and not on guilds, malleable, almost anarchic, which allowed knowledge to be transferred without the restraint of formalism. Today, when the educational bureaucracy and the compliance obstacles multiply, That lesson is almost subversive.
Today, while we Europeans debate strategic autonomy and digital talent, it would be appropriate to remember those engineers and millers who, without algorithms or platforms, made a rainy island the epicenter of progress. His legacy was that a job well done has an indelible dignity. Perhaps there lies the authentic industrial heritage of the present: between algorithms and autonomous agents, human hands continue to have a validity that is impossible to ignore.
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