ABSTRACT
Cliometric research has led to a considerable revision of an earlier conventional wisdom concerning the pace and nature of economic growth during British industrialization. Britain is still very much an early industrializer and a country whose employment structure became non-agricultural to an unusual extent, but can now be seen as a case of relatively slow overall growth involving a gradual acceleration rather than a take-off in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (Crafts 1985a). These revisions to the quantitative record of British economic development make this an opportune moment to reflect on contrasts between British industrialization and that of later developers with reference to some of the themes brought forward by Gerschenkron’s ‘economic backwardness’ approach to nineteenth-century European economic history.
