Myth of the Month 26: The Industrial Revolution -- pt. 1: Conceiving a Catastrophe
Historiansplaining: A historian tells you why everything you know is wrongShow Notes
Dictionaries, textbooks, and encyclopedias routinely write in grave and solemn tones about the “industrial revolution” that reportedly “transformed” society, first in Britain and then in the rest of the globe, giving painful birth to the modern world. Everything from mystical poems to demographic statistics have been martialed to support the idea of a catastrophic upheaval which disrupted what had been the agrarian, medieval life of the countryside. However, nobody can quite agree on exactly when this revolution took place, and the people supposedly living in the midst of it, in Britain in the 1700s and early 1800s, never noticed that it was happening. In this first lecture, we trace the origins of the concept of the “industrial revolution” in political debates in Restoration-era France and in the philosophical ferment of the German radical press—all before the concept finally made its way back into the country where the great upheaval allegedly took place.
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Image: Print of Albion Mills on fire, by Sheppard, London, 1791
Suggested Further Reading: D.C. Coleman, “Myth, History, and the Industrial Revolution”; Anna Bezanson, “The Early Use of the Term Industrial Revolution,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 36, no. 2; Rondo Cameron, “A New View of European Industrialization”, The Economic History Review, vol. 38, no. 1; Eric Hobsbawm, “Industry and Empire: An Economic History of Britain Since 1750”
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