ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the years to the 1920s, when contemporary preoccupations with social surveys and poverty influenced the prevailing interpretation of the Industrial Revolution, which emphasized its disagreeable human consequences. By contrast, the second generation of economic historians, writing from the mid-1920s to the early 1950s, reflected current concerns war and economic fluctuations by stressing the cyclical nature of the industrialization process. Their successors, who wrote from the mid-1950s to the early 1970s, were influenced by the rise of development economics and by the post-war efflorescence of western capitalism and so rewrote the Industrial Revolution once more, this time as the first instance of ‘economic growth’. Finally, since 1974, as economic growth has become simultaneously less attractive and less attainable, the Industrial Revolution has been given another new identity, this time as something less spectacular and more evolutionary than was previously supposed.
