CHAPTER 1

HISTORICAL OVERVIEW
The Industrial Revolution was a major turning point in world history.
Historian Eric Hobsbawm believes that it represents the seminal event
in the history of man.1 While not all scholars agree with Hobsbawm,
most support the claim that it ranks alongside the Neolithic Revolution
in terms of its dramatic effect on all aspects of human life. In the Neo-
lithic example, man made the transition from being a hunter and gath-
erer and adopted agriculture as the means to sustain life and organize
his world. Neolithic man settled down and formed agricultural com-
munities and then early cities and survived on the agrarian surplus
provided by the new economic realities. Likewise, within the short
span of three generations, the Industrial Revolution marks a major his-
torical discontinuity. It stimulated the first major transformation of
lifestyle in thousands of years because of the emerging technological
developments, new enterprises and their related business organiza-
tions, the restructuring of labor, and massive demographic shifts that
created a modern urban society with its foundation not based on agri-
cultural but rather on the industrial production, exchange, and con-
sumption of a seemingly endless variety of consumer goods. It opened
a passage to an era of previously untapped energy. Furthermore, the
Industrial Revolution resulted in a phenomenal growth of national
and personal wealth and, like the Neolithic Revolution, stimulated
responses that fundamentally changed existing political, economic,
and social institutions. However, the scope, scale, and impact of the
Industrial Revolution far surpassed in its breadth, depth, and speed of
change the more gradual diffusion of the Neolithic era.
Although the Industrial Revolution had no definitive start date
like its French Revolutionary counterpart, it is apparent that beginning
in the early 18th century, economic and technological developments
supported by political establishments coalesced to alter fundamentally
the landscape of Western civilization, and then by a process of diffu-
sion spread to other societies across the globe. These factors included
the ability of agriculture to support a rapidly growing population and
 THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
2
mobile society, specialization of economic pursuits and class distinc-
tions, the mutual support of scientific inquiry and technical innovation
and their application to commercial applications. There is no dispute
that this phenomenon occurred first in Great Britain. Perhaps no single
image embodies the spirit of the first century of this new age better
than the International Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All
Nations, opened formally by Queen Victoria at Kensington in London
on May 1, 1851. This six-month-long exhibition housed in an impres-
sive glass and iron structure dubbed the ‘‘Crystal Palace’’ was a soaring
monument to the power and vision of the Industrial Revolution and
Great Britain’s dominant role in the era. It demonstrated the para-
mount industrial and engineering milestone that Great Britain had
achieved in the first century of the Industrial Revolution, a position
that surpassed that of its neighbors and brought the nation extraordi-
nary wealth and material success. On the eve of the Great Exhibition,
Queen Victoria penned a diary entry that summed up the bursting con-
fidence and optimism of the country with the simple notation, ‘‘We are
capable of doing anything.’’2
After 1815 the Industrial Revolution spread methodically but
unevenly from the British Isles to northwestern Europe, northern Italy,
the United States, central Europe, Russia, Japan, and ultimately por-
tions of the wider world such as India, the Middle East, and Latin
America. It had a dramatic impact on the political, economic, and
social life of Western civilization and a lesser one on the peripheral
areas. The Industrial Revolution stimulated a major increase in pro-
duction and mass consumption. The ancient sources of power—
human, draught animal, wind, and water—were replaced by coal and
steam and eventually gas and electricity to construct and operate more
sophisticated machinery and stimulate new inventions and increas-
ingly higher levels of productivity. These changes required modified
forms of labor organizations to ensure sustained profits and resulted in
the growth of factory enterprises and new business arrangements to
replace the former widely dispersed domestic workshops and cottage
industries.
As the impact of the Industrial Revolution deepened, Europe, the
Western world, and then selected portions of the globe underwent a
distinct transition from an agrarian and handicraft society to one
fueled by factories, machines, and more specialized labor. Factory
owners and industrial financiers at first resorted to any means available
to stoke the industrial engine with little regard for human or environ-
mental consequences. As a result, conditions for the workers took an
initial step backwards as the factories were dirty, monotonous, unsafe,
and difficult places in which to toil. As people moved from the farm
Historical Overview
3
areas to the growing industrial cities, bulging populations erased large
portions of the rural landscape and the more simple, traditional, and
personal characteristics of agrarian life. This rapid and uncharted
growth of the urban areas placed new challenges on political author-
ities who attempted to cope with housing shortages and overcrowding,
poor sanitation and recurrent epidemic disease, and nagging social
issues such as abandonment of children, crime, alcohol abuse, and
prostitution. Relief for these disturbing social ills and blemishes of
industrialization did not appear until courageous and dedicated reform-
ers spurred governments to legislate improvements in the later 19th
century. Other changes were the rise of a wealthy and politically influ-
ential middle class and the massive growth of an urban proletariat
whose initially faint voice slowly became loud as the 19th century pro-
gressed, a clamor that eventually transformed the nature of Western
politics. Finally, this new environment stimulated in Western nations a
fresh and insatiable appetite for raw materials and new resources to
pursue ever-increasing levels of economic growth. As a result, funda-
mental changes occurred regarding the relationship of Western states
with each other and the rest of the world as industrial power became
the major vehicle by which nations attempted to subdue wide portions
of the globe and compete for economic, territorial, and strategic
advantage. In summary, the Industrial Revolution was the culmination
of complex changes churning in Europe beginning in the 18th century.
The marriage of invention and entrepreneurship, a shifting labor sup-
ply, the growth of international trade, new and enterprising business
ventures, and eventual government involvement and direction contrib-
uted to the explosion of economic growth known as the Industrial Rev-
olution and, despite fits and starts, a heretofore unknown level of
progress and prosperity.

What the Historians Say: Selected Viewpoints

No serious historian doubts that the Industrial Revolution had its
origins in Great Britain, and that by the middle of the 19th century sig-
nificant industrial activity had spread to the areas of northwestern
Europe and the new republic of the United States. Over the course of
the next half century, the stirrings of some degree of industrialization
had appeared in portions of southern, southeastern, and Eastern
Europe, Russia, parts of the former British Empire, a few areas of Latin
America, and Japan. The impact and momentum of the Industrial Rev-
olution was maintained throughout the 20th century and has contin-
ued to influence developments in other parts of the globe. In all cases
 THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
4
the Industrial Revolution stimulated significant economic, political,
and social changes in countries or regions in which its reach was felt,
at times through the adoption or imitation of earlier developments or
perhaps in the establishment of unequal partnerships.
But what does the term Industrial Revolution actually entail and
how has the transformation that it represents been interpreted by
historians? The Industrial Revolution remains the subject of intense
debate amongst historians. Scholars agree that observable economic,
technical, political, and social change can be observed in the 18th and
19th centuries. However, significant historical questions continue to
generate reappraisal of the era. When did the Industrial Revolution
begin? Was the Industrial Revolution indeed a ‘‘revolution’’ or merely a
longer evolutionary process? What were the significant pre-conditions
or causes of the Industrial Revolution? At what point had the Indus-
trial Revolution run its course? Was there one Industrial Revolution or
two? What roles did technology or politics play? How does one evalu-
ate nations that industrialized later in comparison to those who experi-
enced the phenomenon initially? These and other questions remain
fundamental to understanding the full implications of the Industrial
Revolution. Indeed, the term Industrial Revolution itself, although ini-
tially appearing in the first quarter of the 19th century, only assumed a
firm place in the historical literature in the 1880s. And, even though
some later historians have expressed disdain for the term, they gener-
ally have been unable to shed its widespread use in the literature and
admit that no alternative designation better encapsulates the true
essence of the period.
Arnold Toynbee began the serious historical discussion of the role
of industrialization in his 1884 Lectures on the Industrial Revolution in
England.3 He argued that beginning in the late 18th and early 19th cen-
turies a visible, dynamic change swept first across Great Britain and
then moved almost simultaneously to the European continent and the
United States. Toynbee opined that several factors had coalesced by the
18th century to produce this distinct phenomenon: a rapid rise in Brit-
ish population, a significant increase in agricultural productivity, the
emergence of the factory system, the growth of internal and worldwide
trade, and a visible and dramatic redistribution of wealth in the nation.
The result was the collapse of the economic regulation that had pre-
vailed since the middle ages and its replacement with a new spirit of
competition. He emphasized that 1760 marked a distinctive, sharp
break with the past and that the subsequent accelerated pace of indus-
trialization had run its course a century later. Toynbee died before he
could further revise or refine his views; however, his thesis established
a baseline upon which later historiography has been evaluated.
Historical Overview
5
Toynbee’s study soon influenced other historians to make a closer
inspection of the Industrial Revolution, and they offered a number of
challenges to the scope and nature of his thesis. Over the course of the
last century, there has been an ebb and flow of historical commentary
in response to Toynbee. These historians, while often disagreeing with
Toynbee, appeared for the most part either to advance new views
regarding the chronological framework of the era or to offer fresh
interpretations of its impact on various aspects of society by using
modern methodologies. The survey that follows is not intended to be a
complete account of the vast historical commentary on the Industrial
Revolution post-Toynbee but to introduce the student of the era to sev-
eral areas of debate regarding its complexities and controversies and to
encourage further study.
One of the first responses to Toynbee came from S. Webb and B.
Webb and from J. Hammond and B. Hammond.4 These scholars, writ-
ing in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, did not challenge the
notion of the Industrial Revolution. Instead they advanced the idea
that the Industrial Revolution had as it crux the dualism of the creation
of increased wealth but also more poverty, as each of these develop-
ments brought significant change to British society. The tension cre-
ated by the issues of continuity and revolutionary action as opposed to
an evolutionary pace of progress toward industrialization also gained
much attention. In the 1920s Paul Mantoux argued that industrializa-
tion had its roots in a long series of modifications occurring in British
society without which the nation could not have experienced an eco-
nomic transformation by the late 18th century.5 In the 1930s Arthur
Redford appeared to concur at least partially with Mantoux. He argued
that Toynbee’s identification of a specific start point and the implica-
tion that it represented a definite rapid upturn in industrial activity
was inaccurate. Rather, Redford suggested that important industrial ac-
tivity had begun earlier in the 18th century and that 1760 merely rep-
resented the moment that those key changes had slowly progressed to
the visible point that important industrial change could proceed fur-
ther.6 At the same time, J. H. Clapham abandoned use of the term
‘‘Industrial Revolution.’’ He argued that no general industrialization
was visible by the mid-19th century because no real transformation in
the nature of British labor had taken place, although a few industries
such as cotton textiles and iron had made great strides.7 John U. Nef
also criticized Toynbee and stressed the idea of continuity and argued
that his selection of 1760 for the commencement of the Industrial Rev-
olution was too late. Nef stated that Great Britain had an inherent long
tradition of progress and economic change with origins in the commer-
cial and maritime activities that had gained momentum by 1550 and
 THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
6
had run their course by the middle of the 19th century.8 T. S. Ashton
sought the middle ground. His work argued that modern capitalism
had its beginnings before 1760 and had become fully developed by
1830. Ashton also emphasized that several factors impeded the ability
of earlier historians to see the course of the industrialization process:
the normal ups and downs resulting from unproductive investment
and expenditures, initial entrepreneurial mistakes that later industrial-
ists could study and avoid, and the uncertainty and unpredictability in
the natural order of the political process.9 E. Lipson also believed that
the Industrial Revolution was merely another phase of the progress of
historical development and represented its constant nature of continu-
ity and change in which old ways and techniques did not wither away
but rather joined with the newly evolving ones as the nation experi-
enced industrial growth.10 Herbert Heaton expanded this view, arguing
that the Industrial Revolution had a long 300-year history—150 years
of preparation, and another 150 years to run its course.11 Charles
Wilson reinforced these views by arguing that Great Britain’s acceler-
ated industrial growth was not revolutionary and, like Heaton and Nef,
saw its origins in the 17th century.12
These strong challenges to Toynbee’s thesis did not fray it beyond
repair. A resurrection of the idea of a dramatic break appeared in the
1950s and 1960s, particularly with the publication of W. W. Rostow’s
important work, The Stages of Economic Growth.13 Rostow, in an appa-
rent effort to reconcile the views of Toynbee, Clapham, and Nef, took a
different approach in interpreting the historical evidence. He studied
the developed and industrialized nations to determine how their eco-
nomic progress and modernization might aid underdeveloped nations
to achieve the same level of success. In so doing, Rostow identified five
stages of economic growth: (1) traditional society, (2) preconditions
for a take-off, (3) take-off, (4) move to maturity, and (5) era of mass
consumption.
Yet, Rostow’s work, like the narrative of his predecessors, also
generated careful historical scrutiny. A new group of scholars, steeped
in emerging techniques of statistical analysis and referred to as the new
economic historians, arose to challenge his assumptions and conclu-
sions. These historians stressed a long, steady process of evolutionary
change rather than a revolutionary event to characterize the Industrial
Revolution. Phyllis Deane, for example, emphasized that a grouping or
clustering of inventions and innovations beginning in the 18th century
was the stimulus for change as opposed to one or two industries, such
as textiles or mining, leading the transformation. Interestingly, the very
title of her work, The First Industrial Revolution,14 revitalized the
notion that this label for the era had achieved a restored legitimacy.
Historical Overview
7
Other writers moved away from looking at the Industrial Revolution as
a whole phenomenon and analyzed its particular parts. These
approaches, following similar lines of inquiry in other areas of the dis-
cipline, for example, highlighted finite slices of industrialization such
as per capita income, wages, and productivity rates. In addition, it
emphasized regional studies, surveyed specific industries such a tex-
tiles, iron, and mining, analyzed the shifting standards of living for
workers, and studied demographic shifts, urbanization, social change,
and the political component in the age of industrialization. Scholars
who embraced these lines of inquiry often used a variety of evidence
such as census reports (particularly beginning in 1831), documents
from parliamentary and royal commissions, mining and manufacturing
operations reports, literary sources, newspaper and periodical articles
exposing factory and city conditions, and eyewitness accounts to
support their contentions.15
For the last three decades the debate about the Industrial Revolu-
tion has taken on new energy. In the 1980s scholars such as N. F. R.
Crafts and E. A. Wrigley reemphasized the gradual advance of industri-
alization. Crafts stressed that Great Britain had reached a significant
level of industrialization by the early 18th century, and the rate of
growth throughout the remainder of the century was slow. Wrigley
argued that economists such as Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus who
lived in the early phases of the Industrial Revolution pointed to the
obvious economic changes occurring around them as the beginning of
a potential economic collapse for Great Britain. Wrigley argued that in
the midst of rapid change these economists could not ascertain the true
direction that industrialization had charted for Great Britain and that
the modifications taking place underneath the surface in Great Britain
eventually proved their pessimism to be misplaced.16 On the other
hand, Toynbee’s view that the Industrial Revolution can be seen as a
break with the past found new life in David Landes’ important 1969
work, The Unbound Prometheus.17 Landes took a fresh look at the early
views regarding the Industrial Revolution. He argued that new inven-
tions and revolutionary procedures adopted in the production proc-
esses in the cotton, iron, and mining industries stimulated
phenomenal economic change and rapid industrial growth in the half
century after 1750. He emphasized ‘‘modernization,’’ although many
historians have since rejected this term. The speed and depth of these
changes brought about a reorganization of the workforce into factories
and ultimately reshaped the political and social landscape of first Great
Britain and then the Western world at large. Thus, the Industrial Revo-
lution as Landes defined it was a watershed moment and indeed a rev-
olutionary event. More recently, in the 1990s, Maxine Berg and Pat
 THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
8
Hudson reinforced Landes’ revolutionary view in opposition to the
gradualists by arguing that the fundamental nature of the change dur-
ing the Industrial Revolution had already become obvious to millions
of people in Great Britain living in its midst by the early 19th cen-
tury.18 Nathan Rosenberg and L. E. Birdzell argued that the growth of
legal and commercial support for enterprising adventurers ensured the
long term success of the Industrial Revolution.19 Joel Mokyr proposed
that industrialization depended heavily on a combination of technical de-
velopment and change coupled with the ingenuity and inquisitive nature
of the inventors who could bring these two trends together to increase
productivity. Mokyr believes that the British leadership role is directly
attributable to the government’s early protection of private interests.20
Robert S. Dublessis approached the issue from the aspect of demand-
driven industrialization. Consumer demand, in his opinion, created the
conditions for enterprising entrepreneurs and inventors to fill the void
with new schemes and approaches.21 Finally, Keith Pomeranz opines that
the strong European tie to the Americas provided a favorable climate for
industrial growth as it led to ready export markets and economic expan-
sion unavailable to the more inward focused areas such as China.22
Although scholars have long accepted the use of the term ‘‘Indus-
trial Revolution,’’ it is certain that the debate surrounding the Indus-
trial Revolution will continue as new evidence and analysis provide
grounds for fresh interpretations. Indeed, no clear cut beginning or
ending of the Industrial Revolution has been agreed upon by all schol-
ars. The unique feature of the Industrial Revolution not only frames
the debate but also reveals the difficulty in defining the complexity of
the era. It was not solely based on a specific or closely related cluster
of events but rather involved the development of certain processes over
time such as mechanization, political reform, and urbanization, etc.
Then, too, some of the difficulty in its interpretation stems from the
fact that more recently much of the scholarship on the Industrial Revo-
lution has been the domain of economists as well as historians. Yet the
Industrial Revolution not only touched the economic realm but also
had a major impact on the political, social, and cultural ones as well.
The opportunity for revisionism and widespread disparity in interpre-
tation perhaps has been a natural development, as the long history of
the era provides ample opportunity for a variety of research, reflection,
and commentary. In addition, it is certainly true that the British experi-
ence with industrialization provided a model for other nations to fol-
low but each did so according to their own specific political
environment, cultural norms, and expectations. Therefore, the pace,
characteristics, and impact of industrialization in France, Germany, the
United States, Russia, and Japan, for example, while sharing similar
Historical Overview
9
characteristics and components with Great Britain, also proceeded at times
along strikingly different lines. But whether the Industrial Revolution rep-
resented a sharp break or proceeded in an evolutionary and gradual fash-
ion, the fact remains that its footprint created fundamental alterations in
the modern world among the societies which it has touched.

Notes
1. E. Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital (London: Weidenfeld and Nicol-
son: 1st Vintage Books, 1975).
2. As quoted in The Pulse of Enterprise: Timeframe 1800–1850
(Alexandria, VA: Time-Life Books, 1993).
3. A. Toynbee, The Industrial Revolution (London: Green and Co., 1894).
4. S. Webb and B. Webb, The History of Trade Unionism (London:
Green and Company, 1884); J. L. Hammond and B. Hammond, The Rise of
Modern Industry (London: Methuen, 1925).
5. P. Mantoux, The Industrial Revolution in the Eighteenth Century: An
Outline of the Beginnings of the Modern Factory System (London: Cape, 1961).
6. A. Redford, The Economic History of England, 1760–1860 (London:
Longman, 1931).
7. J. H. Clapham, An Economic History of Modern Britain (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1930).
8. J. U. Nef, The Rise of the British Coal Industry, 2 vols. (London:
Routledge, 1912).
9. T. S. Ashton, The Industrial Revolution, 1760–1830 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1948).
10. E. Lipson, The Economic History of England (London: Longman, 1934).
11. H. Heaton, ‘‘Introduction’’ in R. M. Hartwell, ed., The Causes of
the Industrial Revolution in England (London: Methuen, 1967).
12. C. Wilson, England’s Apprenticeship, 1603–1763 (London: Long-
man, 1965).
13. W. W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1960).
14. P. Deane, The First Industrial Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1965); see also M. W. Flinn, Origins of the Industrial Revo-
lution (London: Longman, 1966).
15. For these viewpoints see such works as E. P. Thompson, The Mak-
ing of the English Working Class (London: Penguin, 1968) or B. Inglis,
Poverty and the Industrial Revolution (London: Hoddler, 1971).
16. N. F. R. Crafts, British Economic Growth during the Industrial Revo-
lution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985); E. A. Wrigley, Continuity,
Chance and Change: The Character of the Industrial Revolution in England
(Cambridge: University Press, 1985).