The “Industrial Revolution” in the Home: Household Technology and Social Change in the 20th Century

Abstract

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 683 Bruland deals in depth with Europe and indicates the causal role in technological change that was played by the organization of work prior to mechanization and by the actions of the workers themselves. Historians of technology will find much of interest in these essays and will find themselves rethinking many aspects of the industrial revolutions that occurred both before and at the time the term was capitalized to denote changes in industry that were the beginnings of our modern industrial world. Jane More Gibson Ms. Gibson is a free-lance historian in Philadelphia, where she specializes in industrial history. She is a member of the National Council on Public History and is a national director of the Society for Industrial Archeology. Her writings and lectures include papers on the Fairmount Waterworks, the International Electrical Exhibition of 1884, and the Kinne Collection of hydraulic turbines. The Industrial Revolution. By Pat Hudson. Sevenoaks, Kent, and New York: Edward Arnold (Hodder & Stoughton) and Roudedge, Chap­ man & Hall (distributor), 1992. Pp. xi + 244; tables, notes, index.£10.99 (paper). This book is a timely reminder that history results from the interaction ofa multiplicity offorces and that repercussions are similarly widespread and interdependent. Modern history cannot be interpreted simply in terms of economic growth. In a British economic and political climate where the Labour Party is divided, commitment to growth is declining, and the hard-won progress in the position of women is threatened, Pat Hudson traces the roots ofthese phenomena in the Industrial Revolution, a period of old and new feudalism. This work is intended as a textbook for undergraduates; it examines current interpretations and older tra­ ditional thinking and aims to start some new ideas. In the past, historians considered that the Industrial Revolution produced fundamental changes in economic, social, and political life, but recently a different view has been taken of the transition to modern industrialized society. Some authors have assessed the extent of the revolution purely by economic measurement. Hudson consid­ ers that this revision of opinion has gone too far and that unique features of changes in the economy and society are being neglected; she seeks to show that important elements have been overlooked in much of the current work. Alterations in trading patterns, the role of the state, demographic behavior, organization, the place of female and child labor, and social relationships are reexamined as essential aspects of the revolution. Much of the recent writing is analyzed. There has been a playing down of the extent of revolutionary change in the late 18th and 19th centuries and the implication that industrial revolution must involve discontinuity in indicators like national income, 684 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE industrial output, capital formation, gross domestic product per head, and productivity. Hudson argues that significant advances in output, growth, or productivity are not essential aspects of an expanding and innovative economy. Innovations may not have an immediate effect on productivity, but repercussions for the workers are considerable, as well as for the family economy, gender relations, and entrepreneurship. Britain’s Industrial Revolution produced a recognition and acceptance of market forces, a radical change in the structure of the economy and the distribution of employment. The shift from rural to urban-based occupations and to industrial and service employment was considerable. Hudson maintains that changes in output and trade were dwarfed by the overwhelming transformation of society. So recent history has artificially separated economic and social repercussions. In her argument against this process, Hudson concen­ trates on the period from the 1760s to the 1830s, with much stress on the 18th century as a whole, as necessary to analysis of change in later decades. She reviews past and recent historians as well as the Marxist debates of the 1950s and 1960s, which contributed to a view of the Industrial Revolution as a period of unprecedented change both eco­ nomic and social. Business histories and modern classics likes David Landes’s Unbound Prometheus (Cambridge, 1969) are also examined. There is reference to the lack ofexchange ofideas between scientists and industrial innovators: scientific advances of the time were very much in the theoretical and analytical spheres, whereas in British industry, a target...