ABSTRACT
The expression “Industrial Revolution” has been a successful one and is used ordinarily not just by economic historians but by scholars of any discipline and by the general public. However, it has its detractors, among them a historian as relevant as Rondo Cameron, who maintained that what happened in England during the eighteenth century to the mid nineteenth century was not a revolution, nor was it (exclusively) industrial. As a matter of fact, what we call the English Industrial Revolution was really the speeding up of a process that had been initiated centuries earlier. As Alfred Marshall wrote on the cover page of his book Principles of Economics, ‘Natura non facit saltum’ (“Nature does not leap”). In the social sciences this would be equivalent to stating that in society there are no revolutions, but rather evolution. Already in the European late Middle Ages (1000-1500), as we have seen, a process of technical progress began, the feudal links gradually dissolved, and the market economy expanded, to the point that some have written about a “thirteenthcentury industrial revolution” (Carus-Wilson 1966a). We have seen, as well, that during the early modern period, prior to the eighteenth century, the English and Dutch economies experienced strong growth accompanied by significant technical progress (some also have written about a “seventeenthcentury industrial revolution”: Nef 1962: chapter I, passim). Therefore, the economic expansion which took place during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries appears in reality to be a prolongation of a sequence of events that had been developing for quite some time. However, this sequence of events speeded up to such a degree that in certain fields, especially in technology, it can be considered and referred to as a revolution. When the Industrial Revolution is mentioned, a series of memorable
inventions come to mind. These appeared in England in three particular areas: textiles, energy, and iron and steel. But there were other sectors, especially chemicals, transportation, and certain consumer industries, such as food or ceramics, construction, agriculture, and finances, in which there were rapid and important changes as well. It must be made clear that if we consider these sectors widely, the innovations or inventions cease to be exclusively British, and the European continent, undoubtedly in second place, still plays a significant role in the Industrial Revolution, which then becomes a
European phenomenon and not just a British one. Even if Great Britain was the protagonist in the Industrial Revolution drama, there were a number of significant secondary characters of Continental origin involved. The two most spectacular inventions, however, are exclusively British: the
cotton spinning and weaving machines and the steam engine. Both appeared almost simultaneously in the 1770s. Let us begin with cotton.
