Introduction

The term ‘Industrial Revolution’ was popularised by the historian Arnold Toynbee in 1880, but he did not invent the idea; the idea of a British ‘industrial revolution’ first appeared in the 1820s in France, where writers contrasted the British révolution industrielle with their own French révolution politique.  The term was also used by the communist writers Freidrich Engels and Karl Marx when describing the suffering of the working classes. 

As most of the history written in the 19th and early 20th centuries, it saw the Industrial Revolution as the work of ‘great men’ – of inventors and entrepreneurs.  “The change was sudden and violent”, wrote H Gibbons in 1896. “In little more than 20 years all the great inventions of Watt, Arkwright and Boulton had been completed”. 

Part of the idea behind the term was that all these writers, and many that followed them in the next hundred years, saw the Industrial Revolution as a catastrophe – Toynbee called the period “as disastrous and as terrible as any through which a nation ever passed” – which overwhelmed the nation, and especially its poor … including even a nostalgia for the past, summed up in the title of Peter Laslett’s book of 1965: The World We Have Lost. 

A Positive Boon 

So that, fairly much, was how things stayed until 1948, when TS Ashton’s Industrial Revolution was published. Ashton changed how historians looked at the 'Industrial Revolution' in three ways. He saw it as: 

•   most of all, a positive – a development which had allowed all the benefits and wealth of the 20th century.

•   much more than just technology and economy – it included, he said social, intellectual and other aspects.  

•   less of a ‘revolution’ (a ‘discontinuity’) and more as “a sudden quickening of the pace” of changes which had begun far earlier. 

Really, Ashton suggested, the term ‘Industrial Revolution’ was unhelpful to historians, giving a wrong impression of the changes but, he concluded, it was in such common use that it was impossible to suggest an alternative. 

After Ashton, there was a surge in interest in the Industrial Revolution.  A bitter debate took place between historians who thought the Industrial Revolution improved the standard of living, and those who thought it harmed it. 

Historians also studied different aspects of the changes beyond the solely economic – e.g. scientific and cultural.  In the 1980s, the Conservative Party under Margaret Thatcher gave the idea a political twist, and changed the school curriculum to celebrate “the periods of our history when the greatest progress was achieved” – they liked the old-fashioned version of the Industrial Revolution, with its great men and entrepreneurial spirit. 

Then, as the manufacturing base of the British economy declined, the former industrial areas discovered another aspect to the Industrial Revolution – 'heritage' – and saw its achievements as something celebrate and to attract the tourists; in 2017 DC Coleman deplored “a rosily entrepreneurial version of the Industrial Revolution as myth, sanitized for tourists and theme parks”. 

Challenging the Industrial Revolution 

Although they disagreed about many things, however, all these differing approaches to the subject set their debates firmly within the concept of an ‘industrial revolution’. 

After 1948, however, there was a growing revisionism about whether the 'Industrial Revolution' happened at all. 

It started as a debate about dates.  When did the ‘Industrial Revolution’ begin?  Toynbee had set his Industrial Revolution as beginning in 1760.  Ashton had suggested a “quickening of the pace” after 1782, and WW Rostow too set the period of ‘take-off into sustained growth’ as happening in the 1780s.  

But Deane and Cole (1962) placed it in the 1740s; the business historian Charles Wilson saw the origins of growth in 1660s; and the American historian of Britain’s coal industry, JU Nef, placed it back in the 1540s. 

In 1989 the American sociologist IM Wallerstein surprised the economic history community by deciding that: “technological revolutions occurred in the period 1550-1750, and after 1850, but precisely not in the period 1750-1850”. 

Finally, JCD Clark looked at the figures, decided that a growth rate of one-point-something per annum was unremarkable, and declared: “there was no ‘Industrial Revolution’, historians have been chasing a shadow”. Taking him up, some historians have avoided the term ‘Industrial Revolution’ altogether, and there have been suggestions that it ought to be banned from textbooks.  

“One of the mythic phenomena of British history” was how DC Coleman described it in 2017. 

Towards a compromise? 

Despite these problems, the term ‘Industrial Revolution’ shows no signs of disappearing yet – it is certainly still in EVERY school textbook of the period, often in an old-fashioned, 19th century, ‘Great-Inventors-What-A-Catastrophe’ way! 

And surely it is impossible to deny that something happened?  Maybe 1850 was not different enough from 1750 to justify the term ‘revolution’.  But there is no denying – as we saw in the webpage on The Age of Change – the world in 1914 was VERY different from that of 1700.

The feeling of most historians nowadays is that, although they might not want to go so far as to ban the term altogether, we need to appreciate that the traditional way of looking at the ‘Industrial Revolution’ is too simplistic, that the developments were massively complex and intricate, and that we have a lot to learn about its different aspects yet.

1  TS Ashton, The Industrial Revolution, 1948

The word "revolution" implies a suddenness of change that is not, in fact, characteristic of economic processes. 

Capitalism had its origins long before 1760, and attained its full development long after 1830; there is a danger of overlooking the essential fact of continuity. 

But the phrase 'Industrial Revolution' has been used by a long line of historians and has become so firmly embedded in common speech that it would be pedantic [pompous] to offer a substitute.

2  AE Musson, The Growth of British Industry, 1978

In 1850 …
• half the population was still living in rural areas, over a fifth of the occupied population was engaged in agriculture and the next biggest occupational group was in domestic service;
• the great majority of industrial workers were skilled handicraftsmen or labourers, working in small workplaces or at home;
• only a small minority of the total labour force was in factories;
• many industries were still unmechanized, and in many of those where machinery had been introduced, it had as yet made only limited progress;
• only in a few industries such as cotton, coal and iron had steam power been introduced on a large scale; water-wheels were still numerous and widespread;
• much of the production and trade of the country was still in limited local markets.

Truly, much of the England of 1850 was not very strikingly different from that of 1750.

3  Joel Mokyr, The British Industrial Revolution, 1999

Before 1750 periods of growth were followed by decline and stagnation.

The Industrial Revolution was 'revolutionary' because the technological progress it witnessed and the subsequent transformation of the economy were not temporary events – they moved society in a permanent different economic direction…

The effects of the Industrial Revolution were so profound that few political revolutions had such far-reaching consequences.