In Margaret C. Jacob's earlier work, some of it in collaboration with others, she has shown that the eighteenth century must be seen as the period where Newtonian natural philosophy became ‘practical’ in the sense of it being incorporated into the mindset of those engaged with technological invention. In her new book, The First Knowledge Economy, Jacob develops this understanding to tell the story of the uneven industrial development in Europe at the threshold of the nineteenth century and to revisit the old question: why Britain first and not its competitors on the Continent? Jacob's primary objective is to make clear that the problem of the origins of what we know as the Industrial Revolution is far too important to be left to the economic historians. If we want a proper understanding of what actually ignited the British industrial and economic development, we have to stop simply comparing wage rates and coal prices and start taking the scientific culture seriously. ‘The human face of industrial innovation has been obscured by the material conditions deemed to be sufficient to explain economic progress' (p. 224), Jacob writes in the concluding chapter, and it is hard not to agree.

The introductory chapter addresses the historiographical problem, that the ‘literature in economic history simplistically argues that Britain industrialized first because it had abundant coal’ (pp. 1–2). Jacob convincingly challenges the high-wage argument, which has been so influential in much economic history, that the reason why the British employed steam engines was because high wages forced entrepreneurs to substitute human fuel with coal. These points are further developed in Chapter 2 on the role of scientific knowledge for coal extraction.

Jacob has organized the book thematically and geographically. The first four chapters explore the role of scientific knowledge in the three branches of industry that most prominently embodied the British industrial development, namely the manufacturing of steam engines, the mining of coal and the textile industry. In the last three chapters of the book Jacob turns to the question of the retardation in industrialization of France and the Low Countries, focusing on levels of scientific education compared to Britain.

Through the lives and correspondences of successful entrepreneurs such as James Watt and Matthew Boulton in Birmingham (Chapter 1), the cotton barons John Kennedy and James M'Connel in Manchester (Chapter 3), and textile manufacturers John Marshall and Benjamin Gott in Leeds (Chapter 4), Jacob shows that when ‘decisions of great economic consequence had to be made, scientific knowledge accompanied economic information; they were woven seamlessly together’ (p. 60). To be the most cost-efficient in, for example, coal extraction at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, one was deeply dependent on a thorough knowledge of the workings of steam engines in order to purchase the model that would be best suited to the specific conditions of the mine. Jacob describes the scientific culture in the decades before and after the French Revolution and points to the crucial role of non-Anglican Christianity, most importantly in Jacob's account Unitarianism, in shaping such a culture.

After demonstrating the level of instruction in Newtonian science among British entrepreneurs and innovators in the last decades of the eighteenth century, Jacob surveys the educational system in France and the Low Countries. Chapters 5 and 6 consider Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary France, while Chapter 7 outlines the complex story of the different developments in Belgium and the Dutch Republic. Jacob tells the fascinating story of the close connections between Enlightenment heritage, economic rationality, secular scientific ideology and centralized educational reform.

It is hard to really criticize a book that is so well documented as The First Knowledge Economy. However, I feel I must. First, Jacob is following the lead of ‘recently reformed’ (p. 7) economic historian Joel Mokyr and his work The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy (2002). One should always be careful projecting modern terms such as ‘the knowledge economy’ back to a time where no such ideas existed. Though I sense in Jacob an explicit emphasis on the historically specific content and context of the first knowledge economy (which may not necessarily be the same as later knowledge economies, such as of the twenty-first century), I am still not sure what the author actually means by the term and, more importantly, what function it serves in her analysis. The same can be said about terms like ‘human capital’, which also appears in the title, but is hardly given any content or explanatory force in the chapters and only used five times, twice in the introduction, once in the beginning of the first chapter, and twice in the conclusion. Jacob opens her introduction by first defining the first knowledge economy as ‘the era of the Industrial Revolution from roughly the 1760s to the 1850s', and explains, ‘Only and first in this period did economic growth based upon technological innovation become continuous' (p. 1). However, Jacob does not elaborate on this or what it actually means. As such, the book as a whole bears the marks of being a collection of individual and very well-researched essays that have been sandwiched between an introduction and a conclusion that have to do a lot of work trying to connect the chapters, address problems in historiography and appeal to contemporary discussions of knowledge economy all at once. Likewise the comparative aspect of the book, looking first at how scientific knowledge was put to work in Britain and then at the state of science education in France and the Low Countries, would have benefited from a more explicit discussion of the kind of knowledge economy we see emerging in the period.

Finally, the publisher might had made some of these petty complaints easier to look past if they had not printed the book on insanely white and shiny paper which at times made it physically painful to read under a reading lamp, and checked that the notes in the first chapter came in the right order.