A Historiography of the First Industrial Revolution

Abstract

THE COURSE AND NATURE of the almost 800-year-long development process in England, which produced the structural and technological transformation controversially referred to as the Industrial Revolution, have been carefully laid out in the preceding chapter. The task now is to show how historians have explained the causes of this major historical event. Since the first systematic study by Arnold Toynbee in the 1880s, economic historians have periodically taken stock of the state of knowledge in the field. One of the earliest such exercise was by T. S. Ashton in 1937, in which we are informed that those who taught economic history before World War I “had but a meagre shelf from which to make up our story of the Industrial Revolution.” Between the wars the literature grew quickly. Ashton was, therefore, able to report excitedly, just before World War II, that the problem for students of the Industrial Revolution was “no longer a question of finding raiment to cover intellectual nakedness, but of which many garments to assume.” The literature on the subject has grown continuously since then. In 1965, Max Hartwell published the first “reasonably comprehensive and critical survey” of the various attempts by economic historians to explain the causes of the Industrial Revolution. The latter work presents a critical discussion of the different explanations favored by scholars. Since that publication, similar critical surveys of the literature on the causes of the Industrial Revolution have been published, the most recent and probably the most comprehensive being the one by Joel Mokyr.