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This article explores why Great Britain became an industrialized and urbanized economy long before France. On the eve of the Great War, agriculture, according to official censuses of population, continued to provide employment for up to 41 per cent of the workforce in France and generated around 35 per cent of the country's national income. In Britain only 8 per cent of the workforce could be officially classified as employed on the land, and agriculture accounted for a mere 5 per cent of gross domestic product. Around 1911, 35 per cent of the population of France resided in towns containing populations of 3,000 and above, while the comparable proportion for Britain was 78 per cent. Structural change in France was in large measure predetermined by a combination of geographical endowments and a system of property rights inherited from its feudal past. Both constraints, operating within the context of pre-chemical and pre-mechanical agricultural systems, so limited the scale and scope of French endeavours to follow the path taken by Britain between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, became almost irrelevant to conditions in France.