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Was There an Industrial Revolution?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

R. M. Hartwell
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Extract

The question is absurd—of course there was an industrial revolution, as obviously as there was a French Revolution—but let me take it seriously. It is absurd because it is counterintuitive—intuition based on the obvious differences between developed and underdeveloped economies, between industrial and agricultural areas, between cities and villages, between factories and farms, between industrial workers and peasants, differences which point unambiguously to the revolutionary nature of industrialization—and because it can be asked only with a heroic disregard of the massive historical evidence for the existence of the industrial revolution. Other phrases used to describe it—“the great transformation” (Polanyi 1985), “the great divide” (Tawney 1982), and “the great discontinuity” (Hartwell 1971)—also underline its revolutionary character, in terms of the break with the past, the changing of the economy, and the making of a new society quite different from that which preceded it.

Type
Comment and Debate
Information
Social Science History , Volume 14 , Issue 4 , Winter 1990 , pp. 567 - 576
Copyright
Copyright © Social Science History Association 1990 

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