ABSTRACT
T HE Industrial Revolution is a general term used todescribe the series of economic changes which trans-formed European society in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Exception is sometimes taken to the phrase on the ground that revolutions are unknown in economic history. Sudden catastrophic change, it is said, is inconsistent with the slow gradual process of economic evolution. And the criticism is not without point. The Industrial Revolution was neither sudden nor catastrophic in the ordinary sense of these words. I t was a movement spread over a period of a hundred and fifty years, and its origins can be clearly discerned in forces actively at work since the close of the Middle Ages. But the term is not without a certain appropriateness. The changes which it describes were so far-reaching and profound, so tragic in their strange mixture of good and evil, so dramatic in their combination of material progress and social suffering, that they may well be described as revolutionary. To call them such, at any rate, helps to remind us that the rapidity of economic change during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was greater than in any previous age, and that the price exacted in the shape of social suffering was more than usually heavy.
