ABSTRACT
Twenty-two years of war against revolutionary' and Napoleonic France coincided with the onset of an industrial revolution that, according to an economic and social history orthodoxy, created the social and economic relationships of modern British society. Industrialisation, having according to traditional accounts launched a 'takeoff into sustained economic growth' (Rostow, 1960), created a new world of industrial towns and industrial relations that transformed Britain's middle and lower classes from amorphous groups into articulate, unified and self-aware social entities with specific interests, cultures and aspirations (Briggs, 1959; Perkin, 1969; Thompson, 1968; Hobsbawm, 1964). Industrialisation was not, however, as revolutionary as it once seemed. We are now told that it was slow and gradual rather than fast and disruptive, taking, according to some scholars, 100 years to run its course (Crafts, 1985). It did not drive rural labour into dark satanic mills from 1760 to 1830 nor subject all artisan craftsmen and women to a unilinear process of deskilhng and pauperisation (Sabel and Zeidin, 1985; Berg, 1994a, 1994b). The industrial revolution was not made by professional scientists or engineers, much less by 'big business' or the 'factory system'. Much of the potential for social and economic conflict between land, labour and capital central to Marxist notions of class creation had therefore disappeared from British history in the century between 1750 and 1850.
