The sheer volume of Patrick O’Brien’s writings on the Industrial Revolution, the geographical stretch of the comparative mode of analysis employed, and the unusual effective combination of detailed political history and economic history (which his current essay exemplifies1) all these make for an intimidating proposition to discuss.2 The defining features of O’Brien’s writings on the Industrial Revolution include the role of the state, particularly, in its strong fiscal form, the political capacity of the state to collect taxes to pay for public goods.3 The Royal Navy, imperialism and mercantilism are embodied in this feature. The other is the feature of globalization centering on the history of the hierarchical structuring of the global economy, in which the Industrial Revolution was a critical factor in the ‘long nineteenth century’. Rather than discuss O’Brien’s voluminous writings on the Industrial Revolution, what this essay proposes to do in the limited space allotted is to expand upon some of the major issues raised in O’Brien’s writings that are not fully developed and whose implications for the significance of the Industrial Revolution for the nineteenth-century global economy are not sufficiently explored. These issues are O’Brien’s emphasis on the role of the Royal Navy, imperialism and mercantilism (that does not explicitly elaborate the central place of the Atlantic economy which can be demonstrated using comparative history of the economies of England’s major counties); the history of the Navy after the Civil War (showing the role of British merchants in the Atlantic world which O’Brien’s narrative does not include); mischaracterization of the Industrial Revolution relative to more recent industrializations in the so-called periphery, especially Asia, by ‘liberal’ economic historians (high wages as prime mover, labour-intensive versus capital-intensive industrialization processes, possibly

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工业革命与全球化：Patrick O'Brien 贡献的讨论

帕特里克·奥布赖恩 (Patrick O'Brien) 关于工业革命的著作数量之多，所采用的比较分析模式的地理范围，以及详细的政治史和经济史（他目前的文章就是例证）的不同寻常的有效结合，所有这些都使人望而生畏。 2 奥布莱恩关于工业革命的著作的定义特征包括国家的作用，特别是在其强大的财政形式中，国家征收税收以支付公共物品的政治能力。 3 皇家海军、帝国主义和重商主义都体现在这一特点中。二是以全球经济等级结构史为中心的全球化特征，其中工业革命是“漫长的十九世纪”的关键因素。本文不讨论奥布莱恩关于工业革命的大量著作，而是建议在有限的篇幅内扩展奥布莱恩著作中提出的一些主要问题，这些问题尚未完全展开，它们对意义的影响对 19 世纪全球经济的工业革命的研究还不够充分。这些问题是奥布莱恩对皇家海军、帝国主义和重商主义的作用的强调（这并没有明确阐述大西洋经济的中心地位，这可以通过英格兰主要国家的经济比较历史来证明）；内战后海军的历史（展示了英国商人在大西洋世界中的作用，奥布莱恩的叙述没有包括在内）；