Industrial Growth and Industrial Revolutions

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The idea of the Industrial Revolution is one of the few items in the private language of economic historians which has passed into common parlance. By now the Industrial Revolution has surely earned its -right, along with ancient Greeks and early economists, to be called . But as Sir George Clark pointed out some while ago,2 other industrial revolutions are amongst us. In the writings of economic historians, revolutions abound. Leaving aside more than one commercial and agrarian , the student of our subject is confronted with a succession of industrial revolutions. The late Bronze Age, the thirteenth century, the fifteenth century, the century from 1540 to 1640, the later seventeenth century and, passing over the classical industrial revolution, the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries-in all these periods it seems there may be observed industrial revolutions in the economic development of England alone. Other countries have their claimants, for example, Germany and Japan in the late nineteenth century.3 At the present time, the possibilities of automatic factories opened up by the development of electronic devices and their use in industrial control, has stimulated talk of an imminent second industrial revolution .4 This is largely an offspring of the writings of engineers, mathematicians and others normally unacquainted with the works of economic historians. Were they familiar with these they would find, for example, in the writings of the late Professor Schumpeter, that the notion of a second industrial revolution had long made its appearance. This variety of uses of the term industrial revolution can scarcely fall to be confusing. May it not be that the term has achieved its wide application at the expense of losing its true significance ?