ABSTRACT
Almost a century has passed since the publication of Arnold Toynbee’s famous Lectures on the Industrial Revolution (1884).2 Historians of all persuasions have since come to the conclusion that the Industrial Revolution in Britain constituted a new point of departure in human history, an event of such moment to daily life that it compares to the advent of monotheism or the development of language. Consequently, a vast literature has emerged dealing with its various aspects, written by historians, economists, and sociologists, both left wing and right wing, English and foreign. Little agreement has emerged among the experts about the fundamental questions. There is, first, the mere question of definition: what exactly was the Industrial Revolution?3 Of the many attempts to sum up what the Industrial Revolution meant, Perkin’s is perhaps the most eloquent. In his words, it was “a revolution in men’s access to the means of life, in control of their ecological environment, in their capacity to escape from the tyranny and niggardliness of nature . . . it opened the road for men to complete mastery of their physical environment, without the inescapable need to exploit each other” (Perkin, 1969, pp. 3-5). More changed in Britain than just the way in which goods and services were produced. The nature of family and household, the status of women and children, the role of the church, how people chose their rulers and supported their poor, what they knew about the world and what they wanted to know-all of these were transformed. It is a continuing project to discover how these noneconomic changes affected and were affected by economic change. The Revolution was, in Perkin’s irresistible phrase, a “more than industrial revolution.” By focusing on economics we isolate only a part, though a central part, of the modernization of Britain.
