On Humans

Why was industrial modernity born in Europe and not, say, China? This is one of the most consequential questions about the origins of the modern world. Yet asking “why Europe” can mislead. The Industrial Revolution was not a European event. It was a British event.
So why was the steam engine invented in Britain, and not France or Italy?
Oxford professor Robert Allen has worked for decades trying to understand this question.
Allen believes that to understand the path to modernity, we must forget grand generalisations about the West. Instead, he asks us to zoom in on two very specific dynamics that shaped the British economy in the 1700s: cheap fuel and expensive workers. Together, they jolted Britain into a path where ever more work was streamlined with the help of machines and fossil fuels — a path that we are still walking on, with AI and robotics simply the latest sightings on this long march of modernity.
In this episode, we discuss the surprising revelations that led Allen to his theory. We discuss the reasons that British wages were high, and we discuss recent scholarship suggesting that this wasn’t the case–or at least, was not the cause for the Industrial Revolution. We also discuss the more humane side of wages, tracing the history of worker wellbeing from the Black Death to today. 
As always in this series, we finish with our guests’ reflections on the future.

LINKS AND REFERENCES
Do you prefer reading to listening? You can find⁠ a summarised essay ⁠of this conversation, with a bibliography, at our series page:⁠ ⁠https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/research/centres/cage/news/podcasts/⁠⁠

EPISODE INFO
Guest: Robert C. Allen (Nuffield College, University of Oxford and NYU Abu Dhabi)   ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠
Host: Ilari Mäkelä (⁠⁠⁠On Humans⁠⁠⁠)
Contact: ⁠[email protected]

GREAT DIVERGENCE: THE MAKING OF THE MODERN WORLD
This episode is part of a series, produced by Warwick University’s⁠ ⁠CAGE Research Centre⁠⁠ in collaboration with⁠ ⁠On Humans.⁠⁠ The series searches for explanations to why Western Europe and North America overtook China and India as the richest regions of the modern world. Guided by six expert guests, including a winner of the 2025 Nobel Prize in economics, we approach this topic with balance and breadth, exploring everything from colonialism and fossil fuels to science and technology. 
1 | Why the West? Colonies, fossil fuels, and lessons from China (Kenneth Pomeranz)
2 | Did science and the Enlightenment give Europe the edge? (Joel Mokyr)  
3 | Why did the Industrial Revolution happen in Britain? (Robert Allen)  
4 | What happened in the East? China, Japan, and the other path to prosperity (Debin Ma)
5 | The big picture: Measuring the origins of the modern world (Bishnupriya Gupta and Stephen Broadberry)

NAMES MENTIONED
James E. Thorold Rogers | Kenneth Pomeranz | Joel Mokyr | Jane Humphries | Daniel Defoe | Bradford J. (Brad) DeLong | Branko Milanovic | Daron Acemogly | Oded Galor

KEYWORDS
Economics | History | Global Economic History | Industrial Revolution | Age of Inventions | Steam engine| European Miracle | British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective | Wage history | History of labour | Social history | Comparative development | Meiji Japan | Spinning Jenny | Industrial Policy | History of Technology | History of Inventions

"The Industrial Revolution happened after the Scientific Revolution,” says Joel Mokyr, a 2025 Nobel laureate in Economics. “And that is probably not a coincidence.” 
In this episode, Mokyr explores the many surprising ways in which science contributed to Europe’s economic rise. And it wasn’t just science. Europe’s culture was going through a broader change, with less emphasis on venerating the ancients and more desire to solve practical problems. 
But how much did science actually contribute to the Industrial Revolution? And how much praise do Enlightenment figures deserve today? We discuss this and much more in this episode. As always in this series, we finish with our guests’ reflections on the challenges of our future.

LINKS AND REFERENCES
Do you prefer reading to listening? You can find a summarised essay of this conversation, with a bibliography, at our series page: ⁠https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/research/centres/cage/news/podcasts/⁠

GREAT DIVERGENCE: THE MAKING OF THE MODERN WORLD
This episode is part of a series, produced by Warwick University’s ⁠CAGE Research Centre⁠ in collaboration with ⁠On Humans.⁠ The series searches for explanations to why Western Europe and North America overtook China and India as the richest regions of the modern world. Guided by six expert guests, including a winner of the 2025 Nobel Prize in economics, we approach this topic with balance and breadth, exploring everything from colonialism and fossil fuels to science and technology. 
1 | Why the West? Colonies, fossil fuels, and lessons from China (Kenneth Pomeranz)
2 | Did science and the Enlightenment give Europe the edge? (Joel Mokyr)  
3 | Why did the Industrial Revolution happen in Britain? (Robert Allen)  
4 | What happened in the East? China, Japan, and the power of the state (Debin Ma)
5 | What about the rest of the world? Measuring the origins of the modern economy (Bishnupriya Gupta and Stephen Broadberry)

NAMES MENTIONED
Joel Mokyr | Robert Lucas | David Hume | Isaac Newton | Antoine Lavoisier | Joseph Black | James Watt | John Robison | Josiah Wedgwood | Sadi Carnot | Margaret Jacob | Evangelista Torricelli | Galileo Galilei | Blaise Pascal | Otto von Guericke | Aristotle | Denis Diderot | William Harvey | Song Yingxing | Marco Polo | Zheng He | Louis XIV | Avner Greif | Guido Tabellini | Kenneth Pomeranz | Adam Smith | Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot | Montesquieu | Voltaire | Confucius | al-Ghazali | Ptolemy | Euclid | David Ricardo | Karl Marx | Hippocrates | Galen | Xi Jinping | Joseph Needham | Nigel Farage | Joseph Stalin | Trofim Lysenko | Robert Allen

KEYWORDS
Economics | History | Global Economic History | Intellectual History | Age of Inventions | Rise of the West | European Miracle | Enlightened Economy | Culture of Growth | Gift of Athena |Industrial Revolution | History of technology | History of inventions  
INFO
Guest: Joel Mokyr (⁠Northwestern University)⁠
Host: Ilari Mäkelä (⁠On Humans⁠)
Contact: ⁠[email protected]⁠
Music by Aleksey Chistilin (Lexin_Music) via Pixabay.

Why did Western Europe become the richest region of the early modern world? Was the rise of the West powered by colonization, inventions, or something else entirely? And what happened to the medieval might of China and India?
The term “great divergence” is increasingly used by historians who want to study this immense question, but who want to do it carefully, without falling into traditional East-West clichés. 
This episode marks the beginning of a five-episode series exploring the state of this research, produced by the University of Warwick’s CAGE Research Centre in collaboration with the On Humans Podcast.
In this opening episode, we meet Kenneth Pomeranz, the historian of China who coined the term "great divergence" in a field-defining book of the same name. We begin by discussing Pomeranz’s groundbreaking approach and the surprising answers that he arrived at. In the second half of the episode, we zoom out and place the rise of the West into the broader story about the history of humanity – a story Pomeranz divides into four parts, with the fifth one beginning right now.
Enjoy!

LINKS AND REFERENCES
Do you prefer reading to listening? You can find summary essays, bibliographies, and much more at our series page: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/research/centres/cage/news/podcasts/

GREAT DIVERGENCE
The making of the modern world
This episode is part of a series, produced by Warwick University’s CAGE Research Centre in collaboration with On Humans. The series searches for explanations to why Western Europe and North America overtook China and India as the richest regions of the modern world. Guided by six expert guests, including a winner of the 2025 Nobel Prize in economics, we approach this topic with balance and breadth, exploring everything from colonialism and fossil fuels to science and technology. 
1 | Why the West? Colonies, fossil fuels, and lessons from China (with Kenneth Pomeranz)
2 | Did science and the Enlightenment give Europe the edge? (Joel Mokyr)  
3 | Why did the Industrial Revolution happen in Britain? (Robert Allen)  
4 | What happened in the East? China, Japan, and the power of the state (Debin Ma)
5 | What about the rest of the world? Measuring the origins of the modern economy (Bishnupriya Gupta and Stephen Broadberry)

NAMES MENTIONED
Joel Mokyr | Brad DeLong | Arthur Wigley | Jan De Vries | Robert Allen | Simon Schama | Isaac Newton | Vasco da Gama | Jonathan Spence| Anthony Wrigley | Thomas Malthus | Nate Hagens | Charles Lockyer | Marshall Hodgson | Aristotle | Plato | Jared Diamond | Adam Smith | 

KEYWORDS 
Economics | History | Global Economic History | Malthusian Economics | Fossil Fuel Economics | Economics of Colonialism | Rise of the West | European Miracle | California School of Economics | Atlantic Trade | Industrial Revolution | Second Industrial Revolution | Historic living standards

INFO
Guest: Kenneth Pomeranz (University of Chicago)
Host: Ilari Mäkelä (On Humans Podcast)
Contact: [email protected]
Music by Aleksey Chistilin (Lexin_Music) ⁠via Pixabay.⁠

Something big is coming soon. Stay tuned!
Whilst waiting, you can enjoy one of my all-time favourites from the archives.
A lot of the recent episodes have mentioned the impact of bipedalism in the human story, but the remarks have hardly done justice to the depth of the matter.
Jeremy DeSilva did it justice.
Enjoy! 

ORIGINAL SHOW NOTES
Humans are odd in many ways. But perhaps the oddest of our features is our upright posture. We walk on two legs. And we are the only mammal to do so. 
So why do we walk upright? And why does it matter? 
Jeremy DeSilva is a fossil expert and a professor of paleoanthropology at Dartmouth College. He is also the author of a remarkable book, aptly titled First Steps: How Upright Walking Made Us Human
DeSilva’s treatment of the subject is sweeping: while tracing the journey of human posture, he draws remarkable links between bipedalism and many facets of the human condition, from difficult births to complex language and from lower back pains to the beauty of friendships.
In this episode, we talk about questions such as:
What Darwin got right and wrong about the role of walking in human evolution
When and why did we start walking upright?
Why the common picture of human evolution is wrong - and what would be a better picture
Why walking makes us fragile
How our ancestors survived bone fractures - and why this is a big deal
Why is human birth so difficult
Why walking is so good for us: introducing the “myokines”
What studying the human journey has taught DeSilva about our species
_________
Please consider becoming a supporter of On Humans. Even small monthly donations can make a huge impact on the long-term sustainability of the program.
Visit: ⁠⁠Patreon.com/OnHumans ⁠⁠
_________
Names mentioned
Charles Darwin / Ian Tattersall / Donald Johanson / Mary Leakey / Sherwood Washburn / Richard Wrangham (ep 21) / Kristen Hawkes (ep 6) / Holly Dunsworth / Daniel Lieberman 

Mentioned hominin species
Sahelanthropus / Ardipithecus / Australopithecus (e.g. Lucy) / Homo habilis / Homo erectus / Homo sapiens

Music by Aleksey Chistilin (Lexin_Music) ⁠via Pixabay.⁠

Imagine a group of ancient humans, crafting stone tools at the dawn of humankind. What did these creatures look like? 
To find out, we can stare at the skulls in museums or glance at reconstructions made by paleo-artists. Not a bad start. But what if we move the lens and zoom into their surroundings? What was the scientific “Garden of Eden” like? Was it a lush forest, a dry savanna, or an icy cave? And what can the answer tell us about human nature more broadly?
Denise Su is a world-leading expert on these questions. A paleoecologist at Arizona State University’s Institute of Human Origins, she uses ever-more imaginative ways to get a glimpse into the nature and the weather that set the stage for the human story.
In this episode, we focus on two kinds of “changes” in the ecology of human evolution: both the actual climate change that drummed the beat of human origins, and the theoretical changes in the views of scientists thinking about these topics. Indeed, this episode digs deep into one of the hotly contested questions about the reasons why humans evolved: "the savanna hypothesis".
According to the savanna hypothesis, our naked, upright species evolved because African forests were shrinking and dry savannas emerged instead. Other apes stayed in the shrinking forests, but our brave ancestors took the shot, conquering the vast flatlands. As they did so, they started standing upright to better walk on the savanna and lost their fur, to sweat away the heat of the scorching sun.
I have told versions of this story on the show, and so have many senior guests. Yet even a brief Google search will give you plenty of critics telling that the savanna hypothesis is nothing but a convenient myth.⁠ Articles by Denise Su⁠ are often included in the evidence. So what’s going on? Listen to the episode to find out!
TIMELINE 
Last common ancestor with humans and chimpanzees: 6–7 million years ago 
Ardipithecus ramidus: 4.5–4.2 million years ago 
Australopithecus anamnesis: 4.2–3.8 million years ago 
Austrolopithecus afarensis (e.g. Lucy): 3.9–2.9 million years ago 
Australopithecus deyiremeda: 3.5–3.3 million years ago 
Earliest Homo: about 2.8 million years ago 
Homo erectus: 1.9 million–112,000 years ago 
Homo sapiens: 300,000 years ago till present 

FACT-CHECKING
No factual errors have been detected so far. However, timing estimates and species names are still debated. Furthermore, the “hours” in the metaphorical clock can shift a fair amount based on the “midnight”: our last common ancestor with chimpanzees lived 6 to 7 million years ago, with some estimates pushing the date as far as 8 million. In the episode, our clock is tuned to 6 million years ago. 
If you see an error, you can get in touch using the form below.

LINKS
Support: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Patreon.com/OnHumans⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠
Articles & newsletter: OnHumans/Substack.com
Get in touch: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://forms.gle/h5wcmefuwvD6asos8⁠⁠⁠⁠
Music by Aleksey Chistilin (Lexin_Music) ⁠via Pixabay.⁠
KEY WORDS
anthropology | archaeology | paleontology | human origins | human behavioural ecology | savanna hypothesis | paleolithic | paleoecology | hominid fossils | carbon isotopes C3/C4 | human evolution | human biology | climate change | human futures