‘Industrialisation’ as a Historical Category

Abstract

When Engels sought in 1845 to summarise the emergence of the English working class, he began as follows: The history of the working class in England begins in the second half of the last century, with the invention of the steam-engine and of machinery for working cotton. These inventions gave rise, as is well known, to an industrial revolution, a revolution which altered the whole of bourgeois society; one whose world-historical significance is only now beginning to be recognised. (Engels, 1969, p. 37, amended) The casual manner in which the term ‘industrial revolution’ is introduced here, as if it were common parlance, is counterpointed by the statement that only recently had the revolution been recognised for what it was — some eighty years after its inception, according to Engels’ chronology. And in fact, Engels’ use of the term ‘Industrial Revolution’ here is far from repeating common usage, in German (the book was originally published in Leipzig) or in English. The term had been used in Adolphe Blanqui’s Histoire de l’economie politique en Europe, where the industrial revolution is described as ‘taking possession’ of England in a manner reminiscent of the French revolution (1837, Vol. 2, p. 209) but there is no reason to suppose that Engels had read this book, and it was only translated into English in the 1880s. In some respects then, it is possible to say that the phrase which Engels passes off as ‘well known’ represents the first usage in an English context1.