ABSTRACT
Arnold Toynbee saw the Industrial Revolution as sudden, rapid, and drastically unfavorable in its reorganization of labor and its larger social effects. T. S. Ashton's ode to industrialization announced a period of positive emphasis on the Industrial Revolution as a major break in the course of history, the opening of an era of sustained technological change and economic growth. Great Britain was then experiencing a population miniexplosion. It could be argued that the very fact of being able so to multiply without incurring a Malthusian rupture—very different from earlier historical experience—was in itself evidence of the unprecedented power of the new technology. The British innovations had wider economic consequences because the demand for the products was potentially larger and supply more elastic. They had wider ramifications within the larger economy. Cheaper cottons displaced competing textiles large urban concentrations of industry occurred because the steam engine freed textile mills from water power and because the British economy redistributed labor.
