It's not far off the mark to say canals were an important precursor to the Industrial Revolution, but because they carried coal, not amorous Britons. For more information, I highly recommend Richard Rhodes' new book Energy, which discusses this matter in depth.

If it were true that canals caused industrialization, then we would expect to see the great canal builders of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and China to have undergone similar industrial revolutions in their heydays. Since they did not, one should look at what was different about eighteenth century Britain. Coal, carried by canals, is more likely a cause than the canals themselves for the industrial revolution.

Any industry needs fuel, and prior to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in England, that was wood. A growing population on the island burned wood for heat, lighting, and cooking. By the early 1700s, deforestation had made wood less cost-efficient because of high prices and high travel costs for merchants. Fortunately, there were great stores of bituminous coal in Wales, the Midlands, and Scotland which rose to fill the gap in the market. The problem then became transporting heavy coal to cities like Birmingham, London, and Manchester.

Although it was not the first, the Bridgewater canal deserves pride of place when discussing early industrialization. (Side note: it was built by the third Earl of Bridgewater, who in a lovely bit nominative determination, built a canal that at one point bridged OVER a river). As the owner of a coal mine, and inspired by earlier examples in Ireland and France, the earl commissioned a canal that could move coal from his mines to the city of Manchester. Using barges drawn along the canal by horses on a towpath, thirty times more coal could be moved compared to a traditional horse-and-cart. This caused a drop in the price of coal in Manchester, dethroning wood as the fuel of choice in that city.

Coal would also cause the next leap in the industrial revolution with the invention of the Newcomen engine. Mines flood, and pumping out water using animal power was laborious and inefficient. The Newcomen engine, on the other hand, was able to pump greater quantities of water out, allowing for deeper and more productive mines. They were also maddeningly inefficient by modern standards, and were really only practical at sites with a ready store of fuel, like a mine. Fortunately, later innovators like Watt, Savery, and Boulton, made considerable advances in steam engines, leading to their use for industry and transportation- the industrial revolution.

SOURCES:

Rhodes, Richard. Energy. Simon & Schuster, 2018.