ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to give a history of the interpretations of the industrial revolution, and to explain them. History can only survive in a society where there are no 'approved' values, and where all interpretations are subjected to continuous skepticism and investigation. It is quite obvious that interpretations of the industrial revolution in England have not depended entirely on unbiased analysis of the evidence; to an important extent they have resulted from particular attitudes towards social, economic, and political change. The expected economic dividend of modern industrialization is undoubtedly a higher standard of living, and the occasional opponents of such development base their opposition not on this indisputable material advance but on the 'moral risk' involved in the transformation of life by industrialization. The major economic problem of the modern world—as it was with the world of the industrial revolution—is to increase production faster than population.
