ABSTRACT
In the process of what could best be called “making sense of the Industrial Revolution,” few articles have been more influential than Gilboy’s eloquent plea to view demand as an equal partner in bringing about the most profound economic change in human history (Gilboy, 1932). The notion that both sides of the demand and supply equation come into play in the explanation of the crucial questions, such as “why England first” or “why the eighteenth century,” has made sense to more than a generation of economic historians better trained in handling Marshall’s scissors than Occam’s razor. The appearance of Keynes’s General Theory a few years later lent additional support to the notion that demand was somehow important.
