As political convulsions have shaken Great Britain's relationship with the world, historians have endeavored to explain its long position as a global economic leader. In How the Old World Ended, Jonathan Scott enters this discussion arguing that Britain became an industrial economic power because of its transnational connections. It was the British Isles’ bond with the Dutch Republic and its settling of colonists in North America, he argues, that enabled the development of the institutions and innovations that fueled Britain's economic leap forward in the second half of the eighteenth century. To make this claim, he builds on scholarship over the last two decades that has charted Anglo-Dutch interaction in Europe and the Americas, and work on the long origins of the history of capitalism and its roots in Dutch commercial innovations. Scott's synthesis gathers together often disparate scholarship on economic, political, and cultural developments to show the long complex history of the emergence of modern capitalism from Anglo-Dutch origins. This story is well told, but Scott's focus on the North Sea and Britain's North American colonies means that his narrative leaves little room for a full discussion of the role of slavery in the creation of modern Britain.

Early in the seventeenth century, it was Dutch developments in fishing, agriculture, trade, and handicraft (especially textile production) that thrust the Dutch Republic to the forefront of European commercial and imperial expansion. With limited land for agriculture and an urban population, Dutch control of the herring fishery and the Baltic grain trade was essential for Dutch success, both freeing agriculture workers to labor in other sectors and helping to foster expertise in waterborne commerce. Located conveniently at the intersection of North Sea trade routes and river and canal connections to the Mediterranean, Dutch cities like Amsterdam became Europe's key entrepôts. Dutch merchants leveraged their geographic position through a series of financial innovations that further enabled the efficient pooling of capital and risk. By the middle of the seventeenth century, the Dutch had built a global network of exchange.

Aided by migration across the North Sea, England began to replicate many features of the Dutch economy, but in Scott's telling the most important of these were the most humble: innovative agricultural practices. New crops, expanding commercial farming, and enclosure made an English agricultural revolution possible and in turn allowed London to transform from a large city to the world's “first world city” by 1700 (225). As the city grew, its concentration of labor, wealth, and expertise together with its expansive markets fueled overseas mercantile ventures as had happened in Amsterdam before. “Without supersize London there might have been no revolutionary modernization of the English state, economy and empire,” and without agricultural change imported from the Netherlands, there would have been no supersize London (40).

As important as human, technological, and cultural exchanges across the North Sea were to Anglo-Dutch growth, competition with the Dutch also fueled England's leap forward. Scott develops this claim most fully when turning to the unique republican fiscal-military state built by successive governments between 1649 and 1702. Inspired by the Dutch Revolt against a similarly “centralizing (‘arbitrary’) monarch” but also “goaded . . . by Dutch [commercial] example[,] the English republic ruthlessly modernized the state's political economy” (66, 289). As evidenced by Parliament's efforts to harness colonial trade for state interests (and shut the Dutch out in the process), and the creation of a navy to protect commerce, a new “republican-mercantile alliance” elevated mercantile interests to principal importance and “reoriented” state “policies and . . . material resources . . . around maritime power” (216). The result was that, by William III's death in 1702, the English state had replicated the unique configuration of economic and political institutions that had made the Dutch Republic so successful.

But if Britain's eventual Industrial Revolution depended so much on processes adopted from the Dutch, why did that transformation not happen first in the Dutch Republic? Scott points to both the importance of the British Isles’ superior access to raw materials and its more centralized government, but most importantly he singles out British North America's rapidly expanding settler population and those colonists’ unique “capacity to consume” manufactured goods (42). This argument distinguishes Scott's work from other scholars’ on the origins of the Industrial Revolution, like that of Kenneth Pomeranz who also argued that North America mattered but rather as a provider of raw materials (The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the Making of the Modern World Economy, 2000). Building on work on the economics and culture of the North American consumer revolution, Scott argues it was demand for manufactured goods from English settler-colonists who fueled Britain's economic takeoff.

Largely (and unapologetically) a synthetic work, Scott's recounting of these developments is accessible for the general reader and useful for instructors teaching outside their field. Yet Scott tells a familiar story that has surprising gaps. The most notable of these is his decision to ignore the long debate about the impact of slavery on English economic development. Instead, Scott frames his study as not to engage in this conversation. Focusing on North American consumption of manufactured goods, for example, means he can ignore the Williams thesis and almost a century of elaboration and refinement of the links between slavery and British economic and institutional development. Scott acknowledges but dismisses this work in the course of several sentences (268–69). Similarly, Scott's focus on European migrants “seeking liberty of conscience,” first in the Dutch Republic then in the British Isles and in British North America, as central factors in creating expanding markets largely ignores how important the trans-Atlantic slave trade was to fueling market activity in both the Dutch and British empires (80).

In the end, Scott's neglect of slavery (which is discussed on just five pages) is a missed opportunity in what is otherwise an innovative synthesis of the long origins of the Industrial Revolution. Scott is right that modern capitalism was built from transnational processes, but the most important of these was the astonishing scale and cruelty of the transatlantic slave trade and of slavery.