Cannadine - Pasado y Presente - Revolución Industrial

The Past and Present Society
The Present and the Past in the English Industrial Revolution 1880-1980
Author(s): David Cannadine
Source: Past & Present, No. 103 (May, 1984), pp. 131-172
Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of The Past and Present Society
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THE PRESENT AND THE PAST IN
THE ENGLISH INDUSTRIAL
REVOLUTION I880- 980*
When our ideas on some large historical theme are in a state of disorder, we may
find it useful to make ourselves acquainted with the history of the historiography
of that particular subject.
Interest in the historiography of the Industrial Revolution is not commensurate
with the absolute growth of its literature.2
EVER SINCE CROCEFIRST COINED THE PHRASE, MANY HISTORIANSHAVE
agreed with him that "all history is contemporary history", in the
sense that every generation to some extent rewrites the past in
accordance with the preoccupations of the present.3 Among economic
historians, aware of their peculiarly ambiguous position, in which
they are simultaneously economists appealing to history to test and
validate their theories, and historians employing economic theory
to shape and organize their material, this view is understandably
widespread.4 Yet, like many historical cliches, Croce's dictum is
more frequently stated than subjected to scholarly verification, while
the implications of the remark are never explicitly spelt out. Have
* My interest in this subject was first aroused when I attended a
graduate seminar
in Oxford run by Dr. R. M. Hartwell in 1975, and was further strengthened by
hearing a lecture given by Professor A. O. Hirschman at the Institute for Advanced
Study, Princeton, in 1980. As far as this article is concerned, I am deeply grateful to
Sir John Plumb and Professor Barry Supple for their careful and helpful comments
on an earlier draft.
H. Butterfield, GeorgeIII and the Historians (London, 1957), pp. 8-Io.
2 R. M.
Hartwell, The IndustrialRevolutionand EconomicGrowth(London, 1971),
p. 42
3 B.
Croce, Historyas the Study of Liberty(London, 1941), p. I9; E. H. Carr, What
is History? (Harmondsworth, 1964), pp. 20-I, 24; H. R. Trevor-Roper, "The Past
and the Present: History and Sociology", Past and Present, no. 42 (Feb. I969), p. I5;
G. R. Elton, The Practice of History(London, 1969), pp. 131-2; J. H. Plumb, editorial
introduction to R. Porter, English Society in the EighteenthCentury(Harmondsworth,
1982), p. 7; M. I. Finley, Aspectsof Antiquity:Discoveriesand Controversies(London,
1968), p. 6. For three outstanding attempts to illustrate this, see W. K. Ferguson,
The Renaissancein Historical Thought:Five Centuriesof Interpretation(Boston, 1948);
P. Geyl, Napoleon: For and Against (London, 1949); Butterfield, GeorgeIII and the
Historians. For a different formulation, which stands this cliche on its head, see
J. H. Hexter, Reappraisals in History, 2nd edn. (Chicago, I979), p. 9. For an
alternative concept of "contemporary history" as the study of "the time when the
problems which are actual in the world today first take visible shape", see G.
Barraclough, An Introductionto ContemporaryHistory(Harmondsworth, 1967), pp. 9-
24; E. L. Woodward, "The Study of ContemporaryHistory", Jl. Contemporary Hist.,
i (1966), pp. I-I3.
4 See, for example, M. W. Flinn, The Originsof the IndustrialRevolution(London,
1966), p. I; P. Mathias, "Living with the Neighbours: The Role of Economic
History", in N. B. Harte (ed.), The Study of EconomicHistory: CollectedInaugural
Lectures, 1893-1970 (London, 1971), p. 372; B. E. Supple (ed.), The Experienceof
Economic Growth (New York, 1963), introduction, p. 5.
132 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER I03
successive generations of economic historians really rewritten their

history in accordance with the preoccupations of the present? And
if so, what is the significance of that for their subject? This article is
no more than a preliminary attempt to address such questions. Its
primary objective is to see whether the corpus of writing by economic
historians on the Industrial Revolution can be usefully described in
this way. And, to the extent that it can, the second objective is to
speculate as to how, exactly, this happens.
Like Ferguson's study of the Renaissance in historical thought,
the concern here is with the mirrored reflection of a past historical
phenomenon, rather than with the phenomenon itself.5 Of necessity,
its scope is restricted to the more general and seminal works, and
leaves out many specialized monographs and business histories.
Moreover, the quantity of writing analysed differs from generation
to generation in accordance with the fluctuations in the output of
published works.6 Above all, it is important to stress that this
article does not suggest that economic historians' perceptions of
the Industrial Revolution are totally conditioned by contemporary
criteria. On the contrary, the questions being considered here are
merely how and why it is, in any given generation, that one particular
interpretation of the Industrial Revolution always seems to be more
widespread than others.
Accordingly, this article suggests four phases into which economic
history writing may be divided during the hundred years since
Toynbee's Lectures on the Industrial Revolution effectively began
modern discussion of the subject.7 The first section explores the
years to the I920s, 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 generationof economic histori-
ans, writing from the mid-1920s to the early I950s, reflected current
concerns with war and economic fluctuations by stressing the cyclical
nature of the industrialization process. Their successors, who wrote
from the mid-195os to the early I970S, 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 I974, 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. Such is the
5
Ferguson, Renaissance in Historical Thought,p. 386.
6 See N. B. Harte, "Trends in Publications on the Economic and Social History
of Great Britain and Ireland, 1925-74", Econ. Hist. Rev., 2nd ser., xxx (1977), esp.
pp. 23-6.
7 A. Toynbee, Lectureson the Industrial Revolution in England (London, I884).
PRESENT AND PAST IN THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 133
outline of economic history writing on the Industrial Revolution to
be advanced here. And, in the light of it, a more speculative attempt
will then be made to explore the mechanism by which this process of
generational change and interpretational evolution actually operates.
I
The years from the I88os to the early I920s were the first period in
which self-conscious economic historians investigated the Industrial
Revolution, and they did so against a complex background of hopes
and fears about the society and economy of the time, which greatly
influenced the perspective they took on it. Neo-classical economists
like Marshall were moderately buoyant about the economy during
this period: but for politicians, businessmen and landowners, the
prospects seemed less bright.8 Prices were falling, profitswere corres-
pondingly reduced, and foreign competition was growing: faith
in unlimited economic progress was greatly diminished.9 Royal
commissions investigated depressions in industry, trade and agricul-
ture; the Boer War revealed a nation whose military were incompet-
ent and whose manhood was unfit; and tariff reform was partly based
on a recognition that there were, in the economy, unmistakable signs
of decay.10 At the same time, the working class was increasingly
enfranchised, there was a growing belief that government must be
more actively interventionist on their behalf, trade-unionist mem-
bership went up remarkably, and there were explosions of industrial
unrest in the i88os and early I9IOs.
More particularly, from the I88os, there was a major revival of
interest in the "condition of England" question, particularly with
regard to health, housing and poverty. The reasons for this "remark-
able flowering in the social concern of the English middle classes"
in that decade, and the extent to which it did (or did not) represent
a new departure in social and sociological thought, remain sources
of academic controversy. 1 But what is not in dispute is the massive
outpouring of best-selling literature on the subject in the thirty years
before the First World War, including the Royal Commissionon the
Housing of the WorkingClass, the surveys by Booth and Rowntree,
the investigative journalism sparked off by Mearns's Bitter Cry, the
evocations of slum life in novels such as Morrison's Child of the
Jagow, and the writings of members of the Liberal intelligentsia
8 D. Fraser, The Evolution of the British WelfareState (London,
1973), p. 124.
9 D. Winch, Economicsand Policy: A Historical Study (London, 1972), pp. 33-4.
10 B. B. Gilbert, The Evolution of National Insurancein Great Britain: The Origins
of the Welfare State (London, 1966), p. 83.
n Winch, Economicsand Policy, p. 34; G. Stedman Jones, OutcastLondon:A
Study
in the Relations betweenClasses in VictorianSociety (Harmondsworth, 1976), esp. chs.
II, I6, 17. But cf. E. P. Hennock, "Poverty and Social Theory in England: The
Experience of the Eighteen-Eighties", Social Hist., i (I976).
I34 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER I03
such as C. F. G. Masterman.12 Together, this great outpouring

constituted a guilt-ridden, fearful recognition that poverty and
squalor were not the product of individual shortcomings, but were
endemic in a system which created so much want in the midst of so
much plenty. It was, as Henry George put it memorably, "this
association of poverty with progress" which was "the great enigma
of our times".13 "What", enquired Asquith, reformulatingthe same
proposition more broadly:
is the use of talking about Empire if here, at its very centre, there is always to be
found a mass of people, stunted in education, a prey of intemperance, huddled and
congested beyond the possibility of realizing in any true sense either social or
domestic life?14
Such contemporary revelations exerted a powerful influence, di-
verting scholarly attention towards what G. N. Clark felicitously
described as "social concern with economic conditions".'1 For the
majority of people, it seemed, the Industrial Revolution had not
worked,and it was the desire to discover what had gone wrong which
prompted many of the pioneering studies of the economy of late
eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England. Indeed, it was
Toynbee himself who stated most explicitly this close link between
the present and the past in the history of the Industrial Revolution.
"It would be well", he argued:
if in studying the past we could always bear in mind the problems of the present
. . . You must have some principle of selection, and you could not have a better
one than to pay special attention to the history of the social problems which are
agitating the world now, for you may be sure that they are problems not of
temporary but of lasting importance. 16
Toynbee, as Milner later explained, "was on fire with the idea of a
great improvement" in the material condition of the working classes,
and precisely exemplified that upper-middle-class sense of guilt
which Beatrice Webb was later to describe. 17 Indeed, in My Appren-
ticeship she quoted with approval Toynbee's most anguished and
contrite words:
We - the middle classes, I mean, not merely the very rich - we have neglected
you; instead of justice we have offered you charity; and instead of sympathy we
have offered you hard and unreal advice; but I think we are changing ... We have
wronged you; we have sinned against you grievously .. .; but if you will forgive
us ... we will serve you, we will devote our lives to your service.18
This desire to locate the historical origins of unacceptable contem-
porary social conditions in the Industrial Revolution was equally
12 S.
Hynes, The Edwardian Turnof Mind (Princeton, I968), pp. 54-69; H. J. Dyos,
"The Slums of Victorian London", in his Exploringthe Urban Past: Essays in Urban
History, ed. D. Cannadine and D. Reeder (Cambridge, 1982), pp. I33-9.
33H. George, Poverty and Progress(London, 1883), pp. 6-7.
14 Gilbert, Evolution of National Insurance, p. 77, and ch. I generally.
5 G. N. Clark, The Idea of the Industrial Revolution (Glasgow, I953), p. 27.
16
Toynbee, Lectureson the Industrial Revolution, pp. 3I-2.
7 Lord Milner, "Reminiscence", in ibid. (1908 edn.), pp. xi, xxi.
18 B.
Webb, My Apprenticeship(London, 1926), pp. 182-3.
strong in the Hammonds and Webbs. As P. F. Clarke explains, the

Hammonds did make "an effort at objectivity which gave their work
its scholarly value"; but at the same time they were also "deeply
committed political figures". The Village Labourer,for instance, was
described by the Longmans reader as "sound historically, though
written from a radical point of view", and by Gilbert Murray as
showing "how blind the whole upper and middle class can be to the
condition of the poor" - a phrase which had particularly strong
resonances given the prevailing concerns of the time. Indeed, as an
anti-landlord polemic, the book provided a historical preface to
Lloyd George's land campaign, with its argument that, between I760
and I830, the outcome might have been different in the countryside
if only the upper classes had been more responsible. Likewise, its
sequel, The Town Labourer, was anti-capital and anti-laissez-faire,
"destroying", as Tawney explained, "the historical assumptions on
which our modern slavery is based".19 Above all, the Hammonds'
books provided, in their portraits of rapacious landlords and con-
scienceless capitalists, historical support for the view that free enter-
prise must be controlled, that the state must be more interventionist,
and that trade unions should be protected and strengthened.
The Webbs' writings on the Industrial Revolution contained a
similar prescriptive thrust. Beatrice was profoundly influenced by
her early work for Booth, was racked with guilt about the sufferings
of the lower classes, and saw explicit links between the bad conditions
of the present and the horrors of the Industrial Revolution:
A study of British blue books, illuminated by my own investigations into the
chronic poverty of our great cities, opened my eyes to the workers' side of the
picture. To the working class of Great Britain in the latter half of the eighteenth and
first half of the nineteenth century - that is four-fifths of the entire population- the
"Industrial Revolution" . . .must have appeared . . . as a gigantic and cruel
experiment which, insofar as it was affecting their homes, their health, their
subsistence and their pleasure, was proving a calamitous failure.20
For Beatrice, as for Sidney, the past record and present circumstances
both showed that what was needed was "collective regulation of
the conditions of employment . . .by legislative enactment or by
collective bargaining":21in short, an end to laissez-faire,by promot-
ing stronger unions and greater state intervention. For the Webbs as
for the Hammonds, their writings about the Industrial Revolution
were essentially historical prefaces to contemporary problems. As
Beatrice explained, their History of Trade Unions was "little more
than a historical introduction to the task we had set before us: the
scientific analysis of the structure and function of British trade
unions", and their History of Local Governmentwas but the prologue
19 P. F.
Clarke, Liberalsand Social Democrats(Cambridge, 1978), pp. 154-63, 187-
91, 243-52.
20
Webb, My Apprenticeship,pp. 343-4.
21 Ibid., p.
348.
to "an analysis of English local government as it existed in our own

time for the use of would-be reformers".22
Thus influenced and motivated, Toynbee, the Hammonds and the
Webbs established the dominant interpretation of the Industrial
Revolution in their generation as "the history of the social problems
which are agitating the world now". It was rapid; it was terrible;
and it was so primarily because of a lack of humane government
intervention. For Toynbee, the old order "was suddenly broken in
pieces by the mighty blows of the steam engine and the powerloom";
innovations "destroyed the old world and built a new one"; it was
a period of "economic revolution and anarchy".23For the Webbs,
the Industrial Revolution was characterized by "wholesale adoption
of power-driven machinery and the factory system", which "took
place around I780".24 And for the Hammonds it "separatedEngland
from her past as completely as the political revolution separated
France from her past"; the "history of the early years of the Industrial
Revolution" was "a history of vast and rapid expansion"; it was
"a departure in which man passed definitely from one world to
another".2
But it was the terrible social results - with the unacceptable
consequences of which they were still living in their own time
that most gripped them. "We now approach", Toynbee wrote in his
famous passage:
a darker period - a period as disastrous and as terrible as any through which a
nation ever passed; disastrous and terrible because, side by side with a great increase
in wealth was seen an enormous increase in pauperism; and production on a vast
scale, the result of free competition, led to a rapid alienation of classes and to the
degradation of a large body of producers.26
"The history of England", agreed the Hammonds:
at the time discussed in these pages reads like a history of civil war . . . Surely,
never since the days when populations were sold into slavery did a fate more
sweeping overtake a people than the fate that covered the hills and valleys of
Lancashire and the West Riding with .. .factory towns.27
For them, the Industrial Revolution created "a profane and brutal
system that spared neither soul nor body, and denied to men and
women the right to human treatment", leading to slavery on a scale
comparable to ancient Egypt, the Roman empire or the American
22
Beatrice Webb, Our Partnership(London, 1948), 147-52. See also V. L. Allen,
"A Methodological Critique of the Webbs as Trade Union Historians", Bull. Soc.
for the Study of Labour Hist., iv (1962), pp. 4-5.
23
24
Toynbee, Lectureson the Industrial Revolution, pp. 31-2.
S. and B. Webb, The History of Trade Unionism(London, 1911 edn.), pp. 34-5.
25 J. L. and B.
Hammond, The Town Labourer,1760-1832: The New Civilization
(London, 1917), pp. 3, 98; J. L. and B. Hammond, The Rise of Moder Industry
(London, 1925), p. 240.
26
Toynbee, Lectureson the Industrial Revolution, p. 84.
27 J. L. and B. Hammond, The Skilled Labourer,1760-1832 (London, 1919), pp.
I, 4.
plantations.28 And for the Webbs, the years 1787-1837 saw "a
positive decline in the standard of life" of the workers, left "the
labourer a landless stranger in his own country", and created towns
where "paving, cleansing, lighting and watching were all lacking",
and where "the crowding together of tens of thousands of poverty-
stricken persons was creating unspeakable nuisances". In short, the
Industrial Revolution produced "results to the common people more
terrible in prolonged agony than those of any war".29
What made this especially dreadful were the "evils of unrestricted
and unregulated capitalism".30 Laissez-faire, the new ideology of the
ruling and capitalist classes, which denied to the labourer the fruits
of his work, and condemned him to a life of poverty and squalor, was
assailed with sustained and impassioned disapproval. For Toynbee,
"complete and unhesitating trust in individual self-interest" was the
same as "the weak being trampled under foot". "This kind of
competition", he concluded, "has to be checked".31 In The Town
Labourer,the Hammonds devoted two chapters to the minds of the
ruling class, condemning them as the "generation that left the
workmen to their fate in the Industrial Revolution", who were
"powerless and helpless, needing the protection of the law and
parliament"which, of course, they did not obtain.32And the Webbs,
too, saw laissez-faire,"fully established in Parliamentas an authorita-
tive industrial doctrine of political economy", as leading to squalid
conditions in industrial towns and to the suppression of trade unions.
"With free competition", they concluded, "and private property in
land and capital, no individual can possibly obtain the full fruits of
his own labour".33
This interpretation of the Industrial Revolution as rapid, terrible
and laissez-faire, was not only articulated by other historians who
were generally radical in their political views, but also by those who
were not. In the thirty years before the First World War, divisions
hardened between the Marshallian, neo-classical economic theorists
(who tended to be in favour of laissez-faire and opposed to tariff
reform), and the "historical economists" (who, whether Fabian,
Liberal, Unionist or Conservative, favoured both collectivism and
28 Hammond, Town Labourer, pp. 31, 39, 59, 171; Hammond, Rise of Modern
Industry,
29 S.
pp. 196, 232, 247.
Webb, Labour in the LongestReign (Fabian tract no. 75, London, 1897), p.
2; S. Webb, "Historic", in Fabian Essays, 6th edn. (London, 1962), p. 69; S. and B.
Webb, The Decay of Capitalist Civilisation (London, 1923), p. 8; S. and B. Webb,
English Local Governmentfrom the Revolution to the Municipal CorporationsAct, 8
vols. (London, 1906-29), i, The Parish and the County, p. 63.
30 Webb, My Apprenticeship, pp. 178, 207.
31 Toynbee, Lectureson the Industrial Revolution, pp. 83-7.
32 Hammond, Town Labourer, chs. IO-II, esp. p. 217.
33 Webb, History of Trade Unionism, pp. 49-50, 91-2.
I38 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 103
tariff reform).34 This widening intellectual gulf - in which the

scientific pretensions of the academic, abstract, deductive economists
were increasingly criticized by the empirical investigations of the
economic historians - transcended those of party politics. The
Webbs, for instance, turned emphatically away from the ahistorical
theorizing of Marshall, and deliberately founded the London School
of Economics in I895, as a centre for the collection of empirical
data, and as a counterpoise to Marshallian Cambridge. To it, they
appointed W. Cunningham and sought to attract W. J. Ashley,
neither of whom shared their party-political loyalties, but both of
whom were in favour of greater government intervention.35
So, because most economic historians were defining themselves
against the laissez-fairetheoreticians, the majority of them - regard-
less of their general ideological and political standpoint - wrote of
the Industrial Revolution as nasty, mean, brutish and fast. For
Ashley, it was characterizedby "great social dangers and difficulties"
and by a state that was too slow to intervene.36 For Cunningham,
its "rapidity and violence" brought "an immense amount of suffer-
ing", in part because laissez-faire "gave the capitalist an excuse for
disclaiming any responsibility for the misery among his opera-
tives".37 For Beard, it came, "suddenly, like a thunderbolt from the
clear sky", creating a system in which "the horrors of the industrial
conditions under unrestrained capitalism" were likened to slavery
or the reign of terror.38 For Gibbins, the "change was sudden and
violent", the "condition of the mass of the people . . . was one of
deepest depression", and the "partialityof the legislature" prevented
the working class from taking "common measures in self-defence".39
For Thorold Rogers, it brought "profound suffering", and was "the
worst time . . . in the whole history of English labour", when trade
unions were "repressed with passionate violence and malignant
watchfulness", and the legislature was intoxicated by laissez-faire.40
And for Townsend Warner, the worst horrorwas an ideology which,
34 Winch, Economicsand Policy, pp. 54, 63-6; A. M. McBriar, Fabian Socialism

and English Politics, 1884 to 1918 (Cambridge, 1962), pp. 5I-7.
35 J.
Maloney, "Marshall, Cunningham and the Emerging Economics Profession",
Econ. Hist. Rev., 2nd ser., xxix (1976), pp. 440-9; J. Maloney, "The Professionalisa-
tion of Economics in Britain, I870-I914" (Univ. of Nottingham Ph.D. thesis, 1981),
chs. 3, 6; B. Semmel, Imperialism and Social Reform: English Social-Imperialist
Thought, 1895-1914 (London, 1960), pp. 26-7, 67-73, 82, 131-3, and chs. IO-II.
36 W. J. Ashley, The Economic Organisationof England: An Outline History (Lon-
don, 1914), pp. I59-61.
37 W.
Cunningham, The Growthof English Industryand Commercein Modem Times,
6th edn. (Cambridge, 1907), pp. 613, 668, 737-45.
38 C.
Beard, The Industrial Revolution (London, I90I), pp. 23, 59.
39 H. de B. Gibbins, Industryin England: Historical Outlines(London, 1896), pp.
341, 421, 423·
40 J. E. Thorold Rogers, Six Centuriesof Workand Wages(London, 1884), pp. 485,
492, 523-5.
PRESENT AND PAST IN THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION I39
in the name of freedom for all, was in practice "freedom for power
to compete with weakness".41
For all these historians, as much as for Toynbee, the Hammonds
and the Webbs, the history of the Industrial Revolution showed the
need for more intervention by government. There might be different
views as to precisely how much collectivism there should be; but the
picture of a more active government on one side, and of more
powerful trade unions on the other, was one to which they all
adhered. Thorold Rogers called for such action, because "every act
of the legislature which seems to interfere with the doctrine of laissez-
faire . . . has added ... to the general well-being of society".42
Townsend Warner noted approvingly that "the tendency to ask for
government interference in industrial concerns generally is on the
increase".43 Beard felt that there was an overwhelming need for
reconstruction after the chaos of the Industrial Revolution, and that
"a corporate society is the hope for the future".44 And Ashley,
after describing the growth of factory legislation and trade unions,
remarked approvingly that:
Society is feeling its way, with painful steps, towards a corporate organization of
industry on the side alike of the employers and the employed; to be then more
harmoniously, let us hope, associated together - with the state alert but intelligent
in the background to protect the interests of the community.45
Set against this background of so all-pervasive a view, Clapham's

riposte in the first volume of his EconomicHistory of Modem Britain
seems even more pointed than is usually allowed, challenging all
three facets of the Industrial Revolution which most earlier writers
had stressed. In the first place, he offered a different picture of its
timing from that which had prevailed since Toynbee. He showed
how gradual and localized the Industrial Revolution was, stressed
"the diversity of the national economic life", examined in great detail
the predominant and non-mechanized industries, and noted how
little change there had been by 1851. His book was, in Herbert
Heaton's phrase, a "study in slow motion", which repeatedly insisted
that "no single British industry had passed through a complete
technological revolution before 1830". "The Lancashire cotton oper-
ative", Clapham noted, "was not the representative workman of the
Britain of King George IV"; "the man of the crowded countryside
was still the typical Englishman"; "the steam engine itself . . .
41 G. Townsend Warner, Landmarksin English IndustrialHistory (London, I889),

pp. 313-I4.
42 Thorold Rogers, Six Centuriesof Workand Wages, pp. 527-8.
43 Townsend Warner, Landmarksin English IndustrialHistory, p. 355.
44 Beard, Industrial Revolution, p. 3.
45 Ashley, Economic Organisationof England, p. I90.
was still small and, outside a limited group of leading industries,

comparatively little used".46
More explicitly, Clapham attacked "the legend that everything
was getting worse for the working man", by presenting statistics
which showed, on the contrary, that in the period after I790, "for
every class of urban or industrial labourer about which information
is available except - a grave exception - such dying trades as
common hand loom cotton weaving, wages had risen markedly
during the intervening sixty years".47 Finally, he examined the
record of the government and the legislature, not in the light of
criticisms retrospectively levelled, but by the more realistic criterion
of what the alternatives were at the time:
Judged as governments are perhaps entitled to be judged, not by what proved
practicable in a later and more experienced day, not by what reformers and poets
dreamed and were not called upon to accomplish, but by the achievement of other
governments in their own day, that of Britain . . . makes a creditable showing.48
Here Clapham was offering an interpretation of the Industrial Revol-
ution deliberately opposed to that which had hitherto prevailed. It
was partly based on the earlier work of Bowley and Wood, and there
had been other, earlier remarks of a tentatively optimistic nature.49
But Clapham was the first major figure to respond so explicitly, and
to make so powerful an opposed case, albeit largely within the terms
of reference already laid down.
He was soon followed by two others. Redford, in his synthetic
account, wrote explicitly in opposition to "the premature generaliza-
tions of popular textbooks", and began his survey by stating that
"the whole trend of modern research has been to show that the
economic changes of the eighteenth century were less sudden, less
dramatic and less catastrophic than Toynbee and his disciples
thought".50 He went on, explicitly acknowledging his debt to Clap-
ham, to stress that "even in the cotton industry the changes were far
less revolutionary than has often been supposed"; that "there was
nothing revolutionary about the changes which were taking place in
the metal and mining industries"; that throughout the first quarter
of the nineteenth century, in cotton, "water power was still more
important than steam power, even in this most progressive branch
of manufacture"; and that the evidence for distress needed to be
46
J. H. Clapham, An Economic History of Modem Britain, 3 vols. (Cambridge,
1926-38), i, The Early Railway Age, 1820-I950, pp. viii, 41, 66, 142, I55.
47 Ibid., pp. vii, 561.
48
Ibid., pp. 315-I6.
49 G. H. Wood, "The Course of Average Wages between I790 and I860", Econ.
Jl., ix (I899); A. L. Bowley, Wages in the United Kingdomin the NineteenthCentury
(Cambridge, I900); G. W. Daniels, The Early English CottonIndustry(Manchester,
1920), pp. 145-8; G. Unwin et al., Samuel Oldknow and the Arkwrights(Manchester,
1924), pp. 241-2.
50 A. Redford, The EconomicHistory of England, 1760-1860 (London, 1931), pp.
v, 4.
analysed in a more careful (and guardedly optimistic) light than was

usually the case. "No modern student of economic history", he
suggested, having summarized the essence of the Toynbee view,
"would allow these statements to pass without challenge".51
The same interpretation, again consciously indebted to Clapham,
was advanced by Lipson, in his larger-scale work published at the
same time. By taking a longer view of economic progress, from the
mid-sixteenth century to the Industrial Revolution itself, Lipson felt
able to argue that the interpretation of Toynbee et al. placed too
much stress on change, while ignoring "the fundamental resemblan-
ces which often lie beneath the surface" in apparently dissimilar
periods. It was, he felt, "the continuity of economic development"
which "must deeply colour our interpretation of the Industrial
Revolution". On the one hand, "large undertakings in the extractive
industries, the textile manufacturers and the metal trades were a
recognized feature of the old industrial system"; on the other, "small-
scale production was still common after the Industrial Revolution".
The conflict between capital and labour went back some five hundred
years; while the movement towards laissez-fairelong antedated Adam
Smith. Accordingly, he summarized his argument as follows: "The
'Industrial Revolution' constituted no breach in the existing order,
but was part of a continuous movement which had already made
marked advance".52
Taken together, the work of Clapham, Redford and Lipson consti-
tuted a formidable assault on the Toynbee-Hammonds-Webbs inter-
pretation of the Industrial Revolution. But in two ways, the novelty
and the appeal of what they were saying was minimized. In the first
place, it should be clear that they all wrote, and all acknowledged
that they were writing, within the terms of reference, the interpreta-
tional framework, already specified by these earlier writers. The
need to attack "the premature generalizations of text books", which
stated that the Industrial Revolution was rapid, terrible and laissez-
faire, only served to show how powerful those generalizations actu-
ally were in defining the problem. Moreover, whatever the force of
this dissenting argument, it was to be many years before develop-
ments in the contemporary economy made it sufficiently "relevant"
for it to be taken up more generally. In the meantime, in the next
generation, the dramaticallychanged circumstancesof the contempor-
ary economy encouraged another interpretation of the Industrial
Revolution, which had little more in common with the Clapham,
51
Ibid., pp. 12-13, 24, 57-65, 78-93, III-17.
52 E. Lipson, The Age of Mercantilism,2 vols. [2nd edn. of vols. ii and iii of his
The EconomicHistory of England] (London, 1934), i, pp. vi, 8, and ii, pp. 53, 249.
See also E. Lipson, "England in the Age of Mercantilism", Jl. Econ. and Business
Hist., iv (1932), pp. 691-3, 699, 705.
Lipson and Redford view than it did with that against which they
were reacting.
II
The period from the mid-I92os to the early 1950s marks the second
distinctive phase in the historiography of the Industrial Revolution.
Like the era before, it was characterized by pessimism about the
economy and the future of capitalism, but this time it was global
rather than merely national. For the international system which had
worked relatively smoothly in the halcyon days of the Gold Standard
had collapsed beyond recovery after the First World War. In 1923,
the Webbs had published The Decay of CapitalistCivilisation, which
argued that, from 1850, "it has been receding from defeat to de-
feat".53 But, as M. M. Postan pointed out a decade later, the
"ossification of the system" was so widespread that such pessimism
was no longer the monopoly of the left:
Among the many things which have affected the position of socialists in the post-
war world has been the loss of their exclusive rights in "the decline of capitalism"
. . .However much they differ about the origin and the causation, they all agree
about the reality of the disease and its symptoms. The dwindling of international
trade, the cessation of international migrations, the strangulation of international
credit, recur in official speeches and in letters to the press.54
And this anxiety was only further fuelled by the Second World
War, as Schumpeter explained in 1943. "It is", he observed, "a
commonplace that capitalist society is, and for some time has been,
in a state of decay".55
Contemporaries were most concerned, not with those elements of
growth which economic historians have retrospectively come to
discern in the inter-war economy, but with the destabilizing effects
of war, the decline of the great staples, the unprecedentedly high
level of unemployment, and the violent cyclical fluctuations in the
economy. The immediate post-war boom collapsed in the slump of
1921-2 (when the Webbs wrote The Decay of Capitalist Civilisation),
and was succeeded by a weak and uneven upswing, which reached
its high point in I929. There followed the great crash, with its trough
in I932 (shortly after which Postan wrote his article), and then a
gradual revival, which lasted until 1937, after which there was a
sharp downswing, only arrested by the greater disaster of the Second
World War. The years immediately after 1945 were almost as uncer-
tain: the odd numbered years were in general bad (especially with
devaluation in 1949), and the even numbered years were generally
53 Webb, Decay of Capitalist Civilisation, p. 4.
54 M. M. Postan, "Recent Trends in the Accumulation of Capital", Econ. Hist.
Rev., Ist ser., vi (1935), p. I.
55 Quoted in D. S. Landes, The Unbound Prometheus:TechnologicalChange and
IndustrialDevelopmentin WesternEuropefrom 1750 to the Present (Cambridge, 1969),
p. 536.
good (especially with the Korean War boom of 1950), while the early
1950s were clouded by the fear of a major slump in the United States.
Not surprisingly, pessimism and anxiety remained the dominant
mood in the years immediately after 1945. Writing two years later,
for example, Sir Oliver Franks stressed how Oxford undergraduates,
shortly to be thrust upon the job market, were worried about the
future. "The world to which they look forward", he noted, "seems
insecure, impoverished and uncertain. Their frame of mind looks
back beyond the 1940s to the 1930s. What they fear is large-scale
unemployment".56 In I952, a conference was held in England on
the trade cycle, which concluded that, although recent fluctuations
had not been quite as severe as in the inter-war years, this "should
not tempt us to draw hasty conclusions about the disappearance of
the old cycle". On the contrary, as E. A. G. Robinson observed,
"anyone who has lived through the past seven years in close touch
with the changing fortunes of the British economy would find it
impossible to think of that period as one of undisturbed tranquill-
ity".57 In 1953, C. A. R. Crosland, sharing the general anxiety that
there might be a United States slump in the near future, suggested
that "cyclical changes . . .would continue, with the recession of
1937-8 perhaps providing an approximate norm".58 And it was the
same anxiety which stimulated J. K. Galbraith to write the history
of the last great crash, in the hope that it might provide some useful
insights for the future.59
Predictably, the main work of professional economists in these
years was concerned with these cyclical fluctuations. Most of the
statistics of such movements were compiled in the United States
where, under the directorship of Wesley C. Mitchell and A. F.
Burns, the National Bureau of Economic Research produced a series
of books of ever-increasing quantitative precision and refinement.60
Attempts were made to establish how far there was an international
cycle, to discern what features successive cycles had in common,
56 Sir 0.
Franks, CentralPlanning and Controlin War and Peace (London, I947),
p. 21.
57 E. A. G. Robinson, "Industrial Fluctuations in the United
Kingdom, 1946-52",
in E. Lundberg (ed.), The Business Cycle in the Post-War World(London, 1955), pp.
37-8. See also the introduction, p. xv.
58 C. A. R. Crosland, Britain's Economic Problems (London, 1953), p. I83.
59 J. K. Galbraith, The Great Crash, 1929, 2nd edn. (Boston, 1961), pp. ix, 4, 193-
5. The book was first published in I955.
60 See, for example, W. C. Mitchell, Business Cycles (London, 1913); W. C.
Mitchell, Business Cycles: The Problem and the Setting (London, 1927); W. C.
Mitchell, Business Cycles and their Causes (London, 1950); W. L. Thorp, Business
Annals (London, 1926); A. F. Burns and W. C. Mitchell, MeasuringBusiness Cycles
(London, 1946). For evidence of the continuing liveliness of trade cycle literature in
the decade after the Second World War, see the works discussed in two review articles:
H. M. Somers, "What Generally Happens during Business Cycles - and Why", Jl.
Econ. Hist., xii (1952); H. H. Segal, "Business Cycles: Methodology, Research and
Public Policy", Jl. Econ. Hist., xiv (I954).
and to measure the duration and amplitude of such movements.61

Explaining them, however, proved to be more difficult. One ap-
proach was to look for exogenous causes, so-called "randomshocks",
such as war (obviously attractivein the aftermathof 1914-18), climate
or political crisis. But in general, endogenous explanations, which
sought to discern the dynamics of the cycle within the economy
itself, proved to be more popular. For Hawtrey, the business cycle
was a credit cycle which could best be explained in monetary terms.
For Schumpeter, it was the long waves which mattered most, and
these were precisely related to the clustering of innovations. But for
Keynes, it was again the shorter run fluctuations which concerned
him, which he explained in terms of effective demand, especially
investment.
For economists with a historical interest, there was an obvious
appeal in seeing whether these contemporary cycles could be traced
back as far as the Industrial Revolution itself. And for the historian
familiar with economic theory, there was an equally strong tempta-
tion to apply it directly to the period of the Industrial Revolution to
see what might emerge if it was viewed from a cyclical perspective.
Either way, these approaches served to establish new interpretations
of the Industrial Revolution itself, which were neither indebted to,
nor derived from, the earlier interpretational mould. More specific-
ally, the obvious parallels between the wars of 1793-1815 and 1914-
i8, and the phases of readjustment and depression which followed
in both cases, served to focus attention more sharply still on the
period from the I79os to the I82os. At a time when the Gold Standard
had broken down in the twentieth century, there was an obvious
temptation to look at the last period, almost exactly one hundred
years ago, when money, currency, banking and finance had been in
so confused and unstable a state. As T. E. Gregory explained, "the
economic and, in particular, the monetary problems which we are
facing today have a startling resemblance to those which were the
subject matter of contention for two generations a century ago".62
One result of this shift in contemporary concerns was a revived
interest in the extensive material provided on cyclical fluctuations in
Tooke and Newmarch's massive Historyof Prices, which covered the
years from 1793 to 1856, and which was to furnish much of the raw
data used by those who studied the trade cycle in its historical
setting.63 One such study, which embodied the applied economist's
61 The best
guide to this topic is the introduction in D. H. Aldcroft and P. Fearon
(eds.), British EconomicFluctuations, I790-I939 (London, 1972), esp. pp. I-8, 14-25,
43-56.
62 T. E. Gregory, An Introductionto Tookeand Newmarch's"A Historyof Prices and
of the State of the Circulationfrom 1792 to 1856" (London, 1928), p. 8.
63 T. Tooke and W. Newmarch, A Historyof Prices and
of theState of the Circulation
during the Years I793-I856, 6 vols. (London, I838-57).
approach, was Thorp's BusinessAnnals, which included a survey of

the British business cycle from the 1790s to the present.64 At about
the same time, Silberling's calculations illustrated the historian's
approach, providing detailed statistics for commodity prices, bank-
ruptcies and note issues.65 But it was not until 1933 that W. O.
Henderson made a plea for the systematic study of the trade cycle
from a historical standpoint. "The work that has been done on the
subject", he lamented, "has been mainly from the point of view of
the economist not of the historian". But, he argued, because the
differences between cycles were at least as great as the similarities,
the time had come when a historical approach was required.66
In fact, the first sustained study of the Industrial Revolution as a
cyclical phenomenon was more applied than historical. In the 90oos,
the young William Beveridge had begun to collect data on such
matters as climate, wages, prices and births, with a view to taking
"the pulse of the nation".67 More particularly, he was anxious to
establish the impact which cyclical fluctuations made on unemploy-
ment. Accordingly, the first edition of Unemployment:A Problem of
Industry(I909) had contained a survey of business cycles from I860
to 90o8, and in the second edition (1930), he extended his analysis
to incorporate prevailing monetary theory. But he made no attempt
to see the Industrial Revolution in the same terms. "The contrast",
he noted:
between the times before and after 1858 is striking. It is not possible before then
to find a cyclical fluctuation of trade in the sense in which such fluctuation is found
later, as an influence dominant alike over finance and trade in the narrow sense,
and over industry and the whole economic life of the nation.68
Since these business fluctuations were a monetary phenomenon,
largely determined by the credit cycle, by definition they "could not
become regular till the country has a central bank adopting an
automatic credit control".
In the late I930s, Beveridge turned to this matter again, and
examined the I929-37 cycle where, he noticed, textile and metal
industries (both largely dependent on foreign markets) led the way
into and out of depression.69Since by this time he had also abandoned
the monetary view that the trade cycle was primarily a credit cycle,
he now turned back to examine the Industrial Revolution itself.
Contrary to his earlier views, the indexes of industrial production
64
Thorp, Business Annals, pp. 150-62.
65 N. J. Silberling, "British Prices and Business Cycles, I779-I850", Rev. Econ.
Statistics, v (1923), supplement, pp. 219-62.
66 W. 0. Henderson, "Trade Cycles in the Nineteenth Century", History, xviii
(I933), pp. 147-9, I53.
67 J.
Harris, William Beveridge: A Biography (Oxford, I977), pp. 116-19.
68 W.
Beveridge, Unemployment:A Problemof Industry,2nd edn. (London, 1930),
pp. 341-2.
69
W. Beveridge, "Unemployment and the Trade Cycle", Econ. Jl., xlix (I939),
PP. 54, 57, 61-2.
which he constructed for the years 1785-1849 showed "general

agreement ... in respect of the main fluctuations", thus obliging
him publicly to retract his earlier assertion that there were no cycles
in the Industrial Revolution. "The fluctuations of economic activity",
he concluded, ". .. reproduce so many of the features of the modern
trade cycle that we are bound to regard the trade cycle as having
been in operation, in essentials, at least from 1785".70 In a later
paper, he showed that there was the same connection in the Industrial
Revolution as in later years between cyclical fluctuations and export-
oriented industries, thereby demonstrating "the essential unity of
the phenomenon" from the I78os to the I930s.71 Finally, in Full
Employmentin a Free Society, he brought these findings together:
". .. the cyclical movement from 1929 to 1938", he concluded, "is
a lineal descendant of the successive fluctuations which have brought
insecurity to all advanced industrial countries with an unplanned
market economy ever since industry took its modern form".72
As these words suggest, Beveridge's interest in the cyclical aspects
of the Industrial Revolution was as much motivated by contemporary
concerns as had been the interest of the Webbs and Hammonds in
its social consequences. They sought a historical perspective on
poverty; he sought the same perspective on unemployment. As he
admitted, his work was "an inductive study of the facts of fluctua-
tion", and as such was as alien to Keynes, the prime theoretician of
Beveridge's generation, as the work of the Webbs had been to
Marshall. Not surprisingly, the Webbs had appointed Beveridge
director of the London School of Economics in 1919. Ultimately
Beveridge was prepared to concede that his "survey of facts of
fluctuation . . . leads to the same practical conclusion as theoretical
analysis . . .", namely that such cycles were an integral part of a
free market economy.73 But, as a writer who had turned to the
IndustrialRevolution in search of evidence to support his prescriptive
ideas, he urged the theoreticians to take account in their abstract
models of the link between cycles and export industries which he,
by the inductive study of the facts, had been the first to discover.
For Beveridge and the Industrial Revolution, present problems
directed past research in the hope of finding future solutions.
As such, Beveridge's cyclical picture of the Industrial Revolution
was the almost incidental by-product of his contemporary concerns.
But the second, and larger study of cyclical fluctuations in the
70 W.
Beveridge, "The Trade Cycle in Britain before 1850", OxfordEcon. Papers,
iii (I940), pp. 79, 102.
71 W.
Beveridge, "The Trade Cycle in Britain before I850: A Postscript", Oxford
Econ. Papers, iv (1940), p. 75.
72 W.
Beveridge, Full Employmentin a Free Society (London, I944), p. 27.
73 Ibid., pp. I02-3. For the background to Beveridge's thoughts, see Harris,
William Beveridge, pp. 267, 285-6, 363-7, 390-I.
Industrial Revolution undertaken in the I930s approximated more
closely to the type of investigation Henderson had called for. In
1940, W. W. Rostow completed his doctoral thesis on the fluctuations
of the British economy during the second half of the nineteenth
century. It was, as he explained, "a conscious attempt ... to employ
modern economic theory" and was especially indebted to Keynes,
Harrod, Marshall and Pigou. It was both more historical and more
theoretical than Beveridge's work and so, "as current trade cycle
theory would lead one to expect, the amount and character of new
investment was found to be the most important force in fluctuations
in output and employment".74 These conclusions were repeated in
British Economyof the NineteenthCentury,which offered this cyclical
picture of the Industrial Revolution:
On the whole, the impression one receives is that the Industrial Revolution,
regarded as a process of plant expansion and the installation of new industrial
methods and techniques, lurched forward in a highly discontinuous way, with a
high concentration of decisions to expand, or to improve technique, occurring in
the later stages of the major cycles.75
These findings were a spin-off from a larger project which Rostow

had joined in I939. It had been begun three years earlier under the
direction of A. D. Gayer, it was funded by the Columbia University
Council for Research in the Social Sciences, and it was much indebted
intellectually to Mitchell, Burns and the National Bureau. On a far
greater scale than Beveridge, it assembled statistics on prices, trade,
investment, industry, agriculture, finance and labour; it analysed
and processed them in accordance with the most sophisticated tech-
niques of the National Bureau; and it interpreted them on "the
assumption that theoretical concepts developed in modern business
cycle theory are relevant to an analysis of the course of events in our
period".76 Not surprisingly, given the scale of operation, the figures
superseded the earlier compilations of Silberling, Beveridge and
Thorp. By 1941, the project was completed; but the Second World
War delayed publication until 1953 when it finally appeared as the
two-volume Growth and Fluctuations of the British Economy, I790-
i850.
As one reviewer noted, "despite its title, the book is much more
concerned with fluctuations than with growth": it was, in the words
of the authors, "a general economic history of Great Britain from
74 W. W. Rostow, "British Trade Fluctuations, 1868-1896: A Chronicle and a

Commentary" (Yale University Ph.D. thesis, 1940), summary, pp. 454-60, 488-93,
569.
75 W. W. Rostow, British Economyof the NineteenthCentury(Oxford, 1948), p. 54.
76 A. D. Gayer, W. W. Rostow and A. J. Schwartz, Growthand Fluctuations
of the
British Economy, 1790-1850: An Historical, Statistical and TheoreticalStudy of Britain's
Economic Development, 2 vols. (Oxford, I953), i, p. xxx.
1790 to I850 written from the perspective of business fluctuations".77

Their interest in the "recurrent characteristics of ebb and flow"
meant that they were making a "different line of inquiry" into the
Industrial Revolution from the economic historians of the previous
generation. "This study", they rightly noted, "asks a set of questions
quite different from those addressed to the data, for example, by
Professor Clapham".78Moreover, it was, in its theory, a quintessenti-
ally post-Keynes book. The credit cycle was dismissed: "monetary
phenomena", the authors concluded, "can be most usefully regarded
... as a reflection of more deep-seated movements".79 And the
fundamental force underlying the cycles was not so much harvests
or exports (except with the minor cycles) but fluctuations in invest-
ment. As T. S. Ashton noted, "we can almost see the multiplier at
work".80
Ashton himself, in his Ford Lectures given at Oxford in 1953-4,
directed his later endeavours along similar channels, as he studied
eighteenth-century fluctuations. Although he disclaimed any exten-
sive use of trade cycle theory on the grounds that the data were
inadequate, and although he found political crises, trade, harvests
and the elements to be more important than investment, the book
was as much a work of its time as the volumes of Gayer et al. Its
indebtedness to trade cycle theoreticians was, in fact, considerable,
and the publisher marketed it as a work of applied economics, hoping
that "economists may find interest in the demonstration that what
was later to be known as the trade cycle has an ancestry longer than
some had supposed".81 At almost the same time as Ashton lectured
and Gayer et al. appeared, R. C. O. Matthews published his more
detailed study of the I830s which, by "subjecting a single brief
period to close study", sought to make clear "the complexity of the
fluctuations experienced". Again, it was concerned with cyclical,
rather than developmental, aspects of the Industrial Revolution: "an
inquiry along the present lines does not by itself permit us to assess
the place of the fluctuations studied in the longer run evolution of
the national economy". And, unsurprisingly, it concluded that "the
mainstay of the British cycle was domestic investment".82
Like Toynbee, the Webbs and the Hammonds in their generation,
77 R. C. O. Matthews, "The Trade Cycle in Britain, I790-I850", Oxford Econ.
Papers, vi (1954), p. 98; Gayer, Rostow and Schwartz, Growthand Fluctuationsof the
British Economy, i, p. xxxiii.
78
Ibid., i, pp. xxxiv, 2.
79 Ibid., ii, pp. 532-3, 559.
80 T. S. Ashton, "Economic Fluctuations, 1790-1850", Econ. Hist. Rev., 2nd ser.,
vii (I955), PP. 380-I.
81 T. S. Ashton, Economic Fluctuations in England, I700-I800 (Oxford, 1959),
publisher's blurb and pp. 29, 34, Io5, 178.
82 R. C. O. Matthews, A Study in Trade Cycle History: Economic Fluctuations in
Great Britain, 1833-1842 (Cambridge, 1954), pp. xiii-xiv, 219.
these historians of the trade cycle were writing the history of the
Industrial Revolution as "the history of the social problems which
are agitating the world now".83 There was the same search for the
historical origins of contemporary problems: it was just that "the
problems of the present" had changed, and the direction of enquiry
into the past had changed along with them. But, like the earlier
interpretation in its time, the cyclical view of the Industrial Revol-
ution was paramount in its generation, but never all-pervasive.
Lipson, for instance, in his new general survey, not only continued
to assault the Toynbee et al. interpretation, but also offered a
more ample perspective on the Industrial Revolution as a whole by
suggesting that "the population of England more than trebled in the
nineteenth century, yet at the end of the century, the masses were
in a material sense better off than at the beginning".84
But the most seminal formulation of this broader view came from
Ashton who, in his small, synthetic study, turned away from the ups
and downs of the industrialization process to explore and proclaim
the long-term advantageswhich it brought with it. As any comparison
with nineteenth-century Ireland or with the contemporary under-
developed world served to show, he argued, only the Industrial
Revolution held out the prospect of raising the standards of living
for the majority of the people. "There are", he concluded:
today on the plains of India and China men and women, plague-ridden and hungry,
living lives little better, to outward appearance, than those of the cattle that toil
with them by day and share their places of sleep by night. Such Asiatic standards,
and such unmechanized horrors, are the lot of those who increase their numbers
without passing through an Industrial Revolution.85
At the time of writing, when general pessimism about the economy
was further darkened by the vicissitudes of post-war fluctuations,
such optimistic confidence in the long-term benefits of industrializa-
tion was unusual and unfashionable. But within a decade, the im-
proved circumstances of the western economies, and the change of
interest from internal anxieties to external development, meant that
these words became, for the next generation of economic historians,
almost a sacred text.
III
Between the mid-195os and the early 1970s, the unexpected, unprece-
dented efflorescence of western capitalism transformed Ashton's
words into "one of the most influential paragraphsin the writing of
economic history in the present generation".86 Two decades of
83
Toynbee, Lectureson the Industrial Revolution, pp. 3I-2.
84 E. Lipson, The Growth of English Society: A Short Economic History, 2 vols.
(London, 1950), ii, p. 221.
85 T. S. Ashton, The Industrial Revolution, I760-1830 (London, 1948), p. I6I.
86 P.
Mathias, The First Industrial Nation: An EconomicHistory of Britain, I700-
I914 (London, 1969), p. 6.
sustained economic growth, resulting from increased investment,

rising productivity and technological progress, combined with lim-
ited inflation and full employment to create a rapidly rising standard
of living for the majority of the people of western Europe. Of course,
rates of growth differed, both between the United States and Europe
and within Europe itself: but all western nations benefited, and
Britain was no exception. As Postan put it, surveying Europe's post-
war development in words much more optimistic than he had used
earlier:
To the historian as well as to the ordinary observer, the unique feature of the post-
war economy in the west is its growth. It reveals itself in various signs of ever-
mounting affluence, as well as in more sophisticated statistical and economic
measurements.87
Or, as David S. Landes noted more pithily, "the Europeaneconomies

seemed to have learned the secret of eternal growth and pros-
perity".88
The result was equally unprecedented optimism on the part of
contemporary commentators. Galbraith abandoned his interest in
slumps, and announced that the affluent society had arrived in the
west, that the twin problems of poverty and production had been
overcome, that economic growth was a certain solvent of inequality,
and that inter-war anxieties about insecurity and unemployment
had been eliminated. Economists, he argued, must abandon their
professional (and historically conditioned) predilection for misfor-
tune and failure, and recognize that they must now come to terms
with prosperity and success.89 In England, where the economy
seemed to be growing faster than at any time since Victoria's heyday,
and where there was an unprecedented boom in consumer goods,
Galbraith'spicture seemed equally applicable.90R. A. Butler, when
chancellor of the exchequer, predicted that the standard of living
would double in twenty-five years, and Macmillan, when Prime
Minister, claimed (or warned) that "You've never had it so good".91
Like many of his generation who had lived through the uncertainties
of the inter-war years, Andrew Schonfield celebrated the transforma-
87 M. M. Postan, An Economic History of WesternEurope, 1945-1964 (London,
1967), p. I.
88
Landes, UnboundPrometheus,p. 498.
89
J. K. Galbraith, The Affluent Society (London, 1962 edn.), pp. io-I6, 30, chs.
3, 7, 8, 23. For the background to this, see J. K. Galbraith, A Life in Our Times
(Boston, 1981), pp. 335-7, 339-40.
90 T. W. Hutchinson, Economicsand EconomicPolicy in Britain, 1946-1966 (Lon-
don, 1968), pp. 93-5. The three classic books which caught and articulatedthis mood
were C. A. R. Crosland, The Future of Socialism (London, 1956); R. Hoggart, The
Uses of Literacy (London, 1957); M. Young, The Rise of the Meritocracy,1870-2033
(London, I958).
91 M. Pinto-Duschinsky, "Bread and Circuses? The Conservatives in Office, I95I-
1964", and P. Oppenheimer, "Muddling Through: The Economy, I95I-I964", both
in V. Bogdanor and R. Skidelsky (eds.), The Age of Affluence, I951-1964 (London,
I970), pp. 55-8, 118-20.
tion of western capitalism "from the cataclysmic failure which it

appeared to be in the 1930s into the great engine of prosperity of the
post-war western world".92
For economists and government officials, there were three major
consequences of these changes: the decline of interest in the trade
cycle, the pursuit of economic growth at home, and the rise of
development economics. In the two decades from the early 1950s, the
business cycle, tamed by Keynesian government policies, assumed so
attenuated a form, with growth continuing even in downswings, that
one group of economists returned a qualified but definite "yes" to
the question: is the business cycle obsolete?93 "Had the idea of the
business cycle not existed", observed Martin Gilbert, "it would
hardly have been invented to describe the post-war fluctuations in
Europe".94 "The European economy", agreed Postan, "was all
but depression free. Such unevenness and recessions as there were
differed from the pre-war ones not only in amplitude but also in
timing and significance".95 To the more optimistic commentators,
indeed, emancipation from the thraldom of cyclical fluctuations
seemed complete. "There is no reason to suppose", wrote Andrew
Schonfield, "that the patterns of the past, which have been ingeni-
ously unravelled by the historians of trade cycles, will reassert
themselves in the future".96
So, as the cyclical model was dethroned, the growth model was
put in its place.97 Going for growth became the consuming obsession
of western governments, the shared aim of ostensibly opposed politi-
cal parties, and a major preoccupation of applied economists who,
extending Keynes's work on investment, assigned to capital a crucial
role in the growth process.98 "In all European countries", Postan
remarked, "economic growth became a universal creed, and a com-
mon expectation to which governments were expected to conform.
To that extent, economic growth was the product of economic
growthmanship".99 Nations within Europe aspired to outdo each
other in growth, and all sought to catch up the United States. In so
far as government planning agencies were introduced, it was to plan
for growth, as in France between 1948-65, and as in Britain with the
92 A.
Schonfield, Modem Capitalism: The ChangingBalance of Public and Private
Power (London, I965), p. 3.
93 R. A. Gordon, "The
Stability of the US Economy", and R. C. O. Matthews,
"Post-War Business Cycles in the UK", both in M. Bronfenbrenner (ed.), Is the
Business Cycle Obsolete? (New York, 1969), pp. 4-5, 28, 99, 131-2; F. W. Paish,
"Business Cycles in Britain", Lloyds Bank Rev., xcviii (1970), p. I.
94 M. Gilbert, "The Post-War Business Cycle in Western Europe", Amer. Econ.
Rev., Papers and Procs., lii (I962), pp. 00o-I.
95 Postan, Economic History of WesternEurope, pp. 18-19.
96 Schonfield, Modern Capitalism, p. 62.
97 Gordon, "Stability of the US Economy", p. 26.
98
Bogdanor and Skidelsky (eds.), Age of Affluence, introduction, pp. Io-II.
99 Postan, EconomicHistory of WesternEurope, p. 25.
setting up of N.E.D.C. in I962. Significantly, the Labour gov-

ernment's National Plan, introduced in I965, was described as "a
plan to provide the basis for greater economic growth". As Sir Roy
Harrod put it two years later, "growth . .. has priority over all other
objectives".100
One consequence of the west's buoyancy about its own prosperity
and its capacity to engineer and manage that prosperity was the
growing belief that it might be possible to accomplish similar econ-
omic miracles of development in the Third World, via technical
assistance, trade and (especially) the injection of capital. As Kennedy
proclaimed in his inaugural speech, in the high noon of western
optimism: "To those people in the huts and villages of half the globe
struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best
efforts to help them help themselves". In practice, this meant a
massive expansion in foreign aid, to be deployed according to the
prescriptions laid down by development economists, who were the
burgeoning first cousins of growth economists. 10 The success of the
Marshall Plan in reviving war-weary Europe seemed to augur well
for parallel endeavours further afield; the affinity between the prob-
lems of unemployment in the west and underemployment in the
Third World seemed clear; and it was but a short step from invest-
ment for growth at home to investment for development abroad. On
both fronts, it was the commitment to growth, and the belief that
this could be brought about by "a massive injection of capital",
which was of crucial significance.102
All this profoundly influenced the way in which economic histori-
ans addressed the Industrial Revolution. Rostow, for example, in
the I950s, shifted his interests from fluctuations to growth. In the
first edition of his book with that title, he noted how "the issues of
economic development from relatively primitive beginnings have
increasingly occupied the minds of economists and policy makers in
100 The National Plan,
Parliamentary Papers, 1964-5 [Cmd. 2764], xxx, p. I;
Hutchinson, Economics and Economic Policy, pp. I25-30, 207-II; Sir R. Harrod,
Towardsa New EconomicPolicy (London, 1967), p. 70.
101For the background to this, see A. O. Hirschman, "The Rise and Fall of
Development Economics", in his Essays in Trespassing:Economics to Politics and
Beyond (Cambridge, 198 ), pp. 7- 3. For the early classics of development economics,
see N. S. Buchanan and H. S. Ellis, Approachesto EconomicDevelopment(New York,
I955); H. Leibenstein, Economic Backwardness and Economic Growth (New York,
I957); G. M. Meier and R. E. Baldwin, Economic Development: Theory, History,
Policy (New York, 1957); B. Higgins, Economic Development:Prospects, Principles
and Policies (London, 1959); S. Kuznets, Economic Growth and Structure(London,
I965).
102 R. E. Cameron, "Some Lessons of History for Developing Nations", Amer.
Econ. Rev., Papers and Procs., lviii (1967), p. 3I3. Of course, there was, within this
shared set of assumptions, a major debate about whether growth should be "balanced"
or "uneven". For the two views, see, respectively, R. Nurkse, Problemsof Capital
Formationin UnderdevelopedCountries(Oxford, 1953); A. 0. Hirschman, TheStrategy
of Economic Development(New Haven, Conn., 1958).
the west".103 And within seven years, he reported "a most remark-
able surge of thought centred on the process of economic growth".
"A good part", he added, "of the contemporary effort in economic
history is directly shaped by the concern with public policy designed
to accelerate growth in the underdeveloped regions of the world,
which emerged in the decade after World War Two".104 So, the
Industrial Revolution was no longer seen as something terrible
because unregulated, or cyclical because unregulated, but as the
first example of sustained economic growth which accomplished in
England by private enterprise what must now be promoted in the
Third World by government agency. It ceased to seem something
bad which should have been tamed by government intervention,
and became instead something good which must be replicatedby
government aid.
Accordingly, as Rostow further observed, "the major common
task and meeting place of economists and historians are to be found
in the analysis of economic growth";'05 and, in his best-selling book,
The Stages of EconomicGrowth, he offered his own contribution, as
an economic historian, "to the formation of a wiser public policy".
It was, explicitly, "a non-communist manifesto", which argued how
and why the west could bring economic development to the Third
World more efficiently and satisfactorily than Soviet Russia.106 It
was addressed, not only to policy makers at home, but to "the men
in Djakarta, Rangoon, New Delhi and Karachi; the men in Tehran,
Baghdad, and Cairo; the men south of the desert too, in Accra,
Lagos, and Salisbury". And its message was simple: that the study
of industrial revolutions in the past offered the best guide to the
promotion of economic development in the future. "It is useful, as
well as roughly accurate", he noted, "to regard the process of
development now going forward in Asia, the Middle East, Africa,
and Latin America as analogous to the stages of preconditions and
take-off of other societies, in the late eighteenth, nineteenth, and
early twentieth centuries".107
Thus were past, present and future, economic history and econ-
103 W. W. Rostow, The Process of EconomicGrowth (Oxford, 1953), p. 227.
104 W. W. Rostow, The Process of EconomicGrowth, 2nd edn. (Oxford, 1960), pp.
v-vi, 335. For Rostow's other "programmatic"books, see W. W. Rostow, An American
Policy in Asia (London, 1955), pp. viii, 12-15, ch. 7; W. W. Rostow, The United
States in the World Arena: An Essay in Recent History (New York, 1960), pp. 432,
444-6, 464; W. W. Rostow, View from the Seventh Floor (London, 1964), pp. I-2, 14,
26, 29.
105
Rostow, Process of Economic Growth (2nd edn.), p. 343.
106 W. W. Rostow, The
Stages of Economic Growth:A Non-CommunistManifesto
(Cambridge, 1960), p. I37. Between 1960 and 1972, The Stages sold 260,000 copies
in the original English version alone. See J. D. Heyl, "Kuhn, Rostow and Palmer:
The Problem of Purposeful Change in the 'Sixties", The Historian, liv (1982), p. 300
n. 4.
107 Rostow, Stages
of Economic Growth, pp. i66, I39.
omic development, brought together. For the policy maker, The

Stages of Economic Growth was a prescriptive essay, which drew
support from historical examples; for the economic historian, it was
a reinterpretationof the industrialization process in general (and that
of Britain in particular) which drew on contemporary development
theory. By assigning to capital accumulation and investment a crucial
role in the take-off, it gave historical validation to the "massive
injection of capital" theory. And by its stress on leading sectors, it
offered historical support to the proponents of unbalanced growth.
But by citing Britain as the paradigm case of industrialization, with
capital accumulation, take-off and leading sectors as the initiators of
economic growth and, hence, the modern world, it produced a
picture of the Industrial Revolution fundamentally different from
that which had prevailed in the two earlier generations of interpret-
ation.108 Instead of being the historical tap-root of contemporary
problems, it was the past guide to present endeavours, the historical
goal of future aspirations. "What Professor Rostow has tried to do",
noted Phyllis Deane, "is to interpret British economic history in a
way that has immediate policy implications for those concerned with
the problems of today's pre-industrial economies".109
Nor was Rostow alone in this as, in the expansive days of the
I96os,110 a variety of economic historians portrayed the Industrial
Revolution in terms - if not always in precise details - indebted
to Rostow and the growth and development approach. "The focus
of the economic history of the I950's and I960's", noted M. W.
Flinn, "reflecting the switch of theoretical studies from short-term
to long-run movements, has shifted sharply towards the study of
economic development in its historical context".111Deane described
her book as "a product of the current interest in economic develop-
ment", as "an attempt to apply the concepts and techniques of
development economics to a vital section of the historical record".112
Peter Mathias wrote "from the standpoint of the economist interested
in development", who noted at the outset that, "in many senses, all
nations concerned with economic growth at the present time are
treading the path Britain first set foot on in the eighteenth cen-
tury".113 E. J. Hobsbawm admitted that his book reflected "the
interests of the present . . . the problems of economic development
108 Ibid.,
pp. IO-II, 34-6. The central idea of the book was acknowledged to be
indebted to W. A. Lewis, The Theoryof EconomicGrowth(London, I955), esp. pp.
208, 225-6, 235.
109 P. Deane, The First Industrial Revolution (Cambridge, 1965), p. 116.
o0Harte, "Trends in Publications", pp. 23-8.
" Flinn, Origins of the Industrial Revolution, p. 2.
12
Deane, First Industrial Revolution, p. vii.
113
Mathias, First Industrial Nation, p. 5. See also the review by W. H. B. Court
in Econ. Hist. Rev., 2nd ser., xxii (1969), p. 563.
and industrialization".114 And R. M. Hartwell summarized the
consequential shift in perspective thus: "today, in a world in which
two-thirds of mankind are still desperately poor, and are finding it
difficult to improve their lot, the English industrial revolution is
seen more as a spectacular and successful example of growth than as
a catastrophe".115
So, in economic history as in economic theory, the cyclical model
was dethroned and the growth model substituted. "There is no
doubt", noted Hartwell, "that the economists' preoccupation with
growth has jolted the historian into a more careful and more explicitly
theoretical analysis of the causes of English growth".116 Explicitly
and regardless of ideological approach, the Industrial Revolution
was rewritten in this way, as "a fundamental discontinuity in world
economic development", in which there was "a radical shift in the
structure of the economy, in the composition of total output, and in
the distribution of employment, which gives concrete meaning to
the idea of an Industrial Revolution".117 As a result, this new
generation of textbooks in the I960s spoke little of social conse-
quences or of the trade cycle.118 Their bibliographies included the
works of development economists. They made extended references
to contemporary underdeveloped countries (especially Nigeria and
India) when describing pre-industrial England. They all adopted
sectoral analysis, and spoke of a shift of productive resources away
from agriculture and towards industry and services.119 They saw
Britain as blazing the trail which the Continent, the United States
and the rest of the world were ultimately to follow.120
More precisely, the study of particular aspects of the growth
process was illuminated by these present-day concerns. Hartwell,
for instance, felt encouraged to take an "optimistic" view of the
standard of living in the Industrial Revolution because there was
114 E.
J. Hobsbawm, Industryand Empire:From 1750 to thePresentDay (Harmonds-
worth, 1969), p. Io.
15 Hartwell, Industrial Revolution and Economic Growth, p. 58.
116 Ibid., pp.
I6I-4.
117 R. M.
Hartwell, "The Causes of the Industrial Revolution: An Essay in
Methodology", in R. M. Hartwell (ed.), The Causes of the Industrial Revolution in
England (London, 1967), pp. 54, 79.
118 Dean and Mathias each
gave it a (brief) chapter; Hartwell and Hobsbawm
hardly touched on it at all.
119The key work here, to which all the late I96os textbooks were indebted, was
P. Deane and W. A. Cole, British EconomicGrowth, 1688-1959, 2nd edn. (Cambridge,
I967), esp. pp. xix, 3. The statistics they provided, on the basis of eight-sector
disaggregation, made it possible to outline the main quantitative features of long-
term economic change in Britain, especially the rate of growth and the shifts in
structure. It is also noteworthy that the authors thanked Simon Kuznets "who initiated
the inquiry as one of a series of similar studies in different countries". The book was
published under the auspices of the University of Cambridge Department of Applied
Economics.
120
For example, Landes, Unbound Prometheus,ch. 3, "Continental Emulation".
"a priori scepticism, on the basis of the modern theory of economic

development, that economic progress over a long period could make
the rich richer and the poor poorer".T12 Schumpeter's entrepreneur,
previously the man who initiated cycles, was given a face-lift, and
reappearedas the heroic figure who initiated economic growth. "The
distinctive feature of growth is entrepreneurship", observed Arthur
Lewis, and the economic historians nodded their approval.122 Studies
of the rich, the successful and the famous among businessmen
mounted, and their sensitivity to economic opportunity, and their
part in creating it, was greatly extolled.123 In the same way, there
was a great interest in the part played by banking in financing this
first example of economic growth. One such study of finance in the
Industrial Revolution was explicitly intended "to shed light on a
pressing practical problem - namely financing economic develop-
ment" by providing "development economists, planners and policy
makers who are wrestling with the theoretical and practicalproblems
of an industrial take-off with empirical grist for their respective
mills".124
Thus was growth established as the predominant interpretation,
as the facts of the Industrial Revolution were selected and organized
in accordance with the theory of economic development. And yet,
even as this happened, there was a recognition among those who
employed it that the theory was not entirely appropriate, that the
model did not fit completely, that Britain was first to industrialize
and therefore more unique than paradigmatic. In part, this arose
from the rapid rejection of the more specific parts of Rostow's take-
off, as detailed studies of capital accumulation and the role of cotton
suggested evolutionary rather than revolutionary progress.125More
generally, Deane conceded that there was little to be gained from
analysing pre-industrial England as if it was like a contemporary
underdeveloped country: it was not over-populated, it was not go
per cent agricultural, it was a society rich in resources, high in
121 Hartwell, Industrial Revolution and Economic Growth, pp. I03-4.
122
Lewis, Theoryof EconomicGrowth,p. 265; A. K. Cairncross,Factorsin Economic
Development (London, 1962), p. 31.
123 C. H.
Wilson, "The Entrepreneur in the Industrial Revolution in Britain",
Explorationsin EntrepreneurialHistory, vii (1955), pp. 132, 134, 138; N. McKendrick,
"Josiah Wedgwood and Factory Discipline", Hist. Jl., iv (1961), p. 5I: "To achieve
these ends he demanded complete obedience and complete submission . . . Of his
own energy and devotion there is ample evidence. His energy was remarkable and
little daunted him".
124 R. E.
Cameron, Banking in the Early Stages of Industrialization:A Study in
ComparativeEconomicHistory (New York, 1967), pp. ix, 3.
125 P. Deane and H. J. Habakkuk, "The Take-Off in Britain", in W. W. Rostow
(ed.), The Economicsof Take-Off into Sustained Growth(London, 1963), esp. pp. 80-
2. These findings were incorporated in all the I96os textbooks. See Landes, Unbound
Prometheus,pp. 77-9; Hobsbawm, Industryand Empire, p. 75; Hartwell, Industrial
Revolution and Economic Growth, p. 28; Deane, First IndustrialRevolution, pp. I07-
8, 153-4; Mathias, First Industrial Nation, pp. 3, I3.
literacy, and with a well-developed market system.126 By I85I, as

Mathias, Deane and Landes all admitted, the overall picture of the
country and economy was very different from that suggested by a look
at the most advanced sectors: agriculture was still (if diminishingly)
dominant, and the textile and metal industries employed a relatively
small proportion of the labour force. 127 Indeed, Hartwell went even
further, not only suggesting that the facts of British industrialization
in many ways did not accord to the theories of growth, but also that,
if they showed anything, it was that "any simple theory of, or policy
for, growth is absurd".128
Others saw this even more explicitly. B. L. Anderson examined the
small-scale, face-to-face world of Lancashire finance, and concluded
that banking was more a response to industrialization than a cause
of it.129 G. R. Hawke argued that the importance of railways had
been overrated, and that they only contributed about io per cent of
national income in I865.130 And, for the earlier phase of the Indus-
trial Revolution, S. D. Chapman began to chip away at the conven-
tionally supposed importance of the steam engine. 131More generally,
E. A. Wrigley launched a twofold attack, partly against the stress
on national, aggregate statistics, which concealed important local
variations, and partly against the teleological treatment of the Indus-
trial Revolution which resulted from piling up more and more factors
to explain why it happened in England first. Perhaps, he suggested,
it was all an accident anyway.132
Criticism also came from other quarters. As an economist, D.
Whitehead assailed the idea of "treating the English Industrial
Revolution as closely comparable with the transition to self-sustained
growth in contemporary underdeveloped countries", on the grounds
that "precisely because it is the first - and therefore the most
completely evolutionary case - it is probably the least helpful of
126
Deane, First Industrial Revolution, pp. 7, I5, I7. See also Landes, Unbound
Prometheus, p. 13; Hartwell, Industrial Revolution and Economic Growth, p. 179;
Mathias, First Industrial Nation, pp. 27, 30, I45.
127 Landes, UnboundPrometheus, pp. I05, II8, 120-2; Deane, First Industrial
Revolution, pp. 150, 255, 263, 270-4; Mathias, First IndustrialNation, ch. 9, esp. pp.
259, 263, 271-2.
128 Hartwell, IndustrialRevolution and EconomicGrowth, pp. 8, II, 20. Cf. Elton,
Practice of History, p. 48: "When some writers can treat pre-industrial England, the
economically most advanced society in the Europe of its day, as though it were like
tribal Africa or nineteenth-century India, understanding is destroyed, not assisted".
129 B. L. Anderson, "Provincial Aspects of the Financial Revolution in the Eight-
eenth Century", BusinessHist., xi (1969); B. L. Anderson, "Money and the Structure
of Credit in the Eighteenth Century", Business Hist., xii (I970).
130 G. R. Hawke, Railways and Economic Growth in England and Wales, I840-
1870 (Oxford, 1970), esp. p. 405.
131 S. D.
Chapman, "The Cost of Power in the Industrial Revolution in Britain:
The Case of the Textile Industry", Midland Hist., i (197i), esp. pp. I, 6, i6, 19.
132 E. A. Wrigley, "The Process of Modernization and the Industrial Revolution
in England", Jl. InterdisciplinaryHist., iii (1972-3), p. 259.
any as an example of how to grow".133 H. J. Habakkuk asssailed

the notion historically, by comparing Britain and America in the
early nineteenth century, often to the former's disadvantage. Instead
of taking British growth as given, and merely explaining how it
happened, Habakkuk stood this notion on its head wondering, in a
manner reminiscent of Clapham, not why there was so muchgrowth,
but why so little. Finance, he suggested, was limited, entrepreneurs
were traditionalist, the market was constrained, and innovations
spread slowly, so that steam power was not massively applied until
the I870s.134 "Attention", he suggested:
is normally concentrated on explaining why British economic progress during the
Industrial Revolution was so rapid, compared with that in other countries. But
perhaps the more interesting problem is why English progress in the first half of
the nineteenth century, though very rapid, was not morerapid than it was.135
And at the most general level, B. E. Supple entered a protest
against the all-pervasive appeal of the economic-growth view of the
Industrial Revolution. He pointed out that by becoming part of the
"forced draft" into the development economics paradigm, economic
historians were ignoring other types of economic change, and were
not even analysing the historical process of growth with the diversity
of approaches that it merited.136
Such general warnings against the dominance of the "growth"
approach to the Industrial Revolution in the I960s were no more
widely heeded than were the results of such detailed researches as
also pointed to the same conclusion. For even if the authors of
textbooks were careful to build in reservations, they still approached
the Industrial Revolution from the standpoint of development econ-
omics, hoped that their findings might be of use to those planning
growth in the Third World, and (albeit unintentionally) left many
generations of undergraduates with the sense that it was sudden,
successful and largely connected with investment. As long as "the
problems of the present" remained those of growth at home and
development abroad, this unprecedentedly optimistic picture of the
Industrial Revolution, so very different from that given in the two
preceding generations, prevailed. Only when contemporary circum-
stances altered again would the reservations made in the growth
generation, which themselves harked back to Clapham's earlier
work, become enthroned in their own right, and in their entirety, as
the new interpretation.
133 D.
Whitehead, "The Industrial Revolution as an Example of Growth", in
R. M. Hartwell (ed.), The Industrial Revolution (Oxford, 1970), pp. 24-7.
134 H.
J. Habakkuk, Americanand British Technologyin the NineteenthCentury:The
Searchfor LabourSaving Inventions(Cambridge, 1962), pp. 112-14, 142-7, 151, I75-
89.
135 Ibid., p. I74.
136 B. E.
Supple, "Economic History and Economic Growth", Jl. Econ. Hist., xx
(1960), pp. 554-5.
IV
Since the mid-I970s, the economic climate has again altered pro-
foundly. The two decades of unprecedented post-war prosperity
came to an abrupt end with the energy crisis of 1973-4, and were
followed by a new menace, stagflation, to which Keynesian econom-
ics appeared to offer no antidote. And, at the very time when the
certainty of growth was undermined, the appropriateness of it was
also brought into question. One view, the environmental, most
famously articulated by Schumacher, said that growth should not
happen: "one of the most fateful errors of our age", he wrote, in
explicit attack on Galbraith, "is the belief that 'the problem of
production' has been solved".137 And the other, the ecological, as
exemplified by the Club of Rome report, argued that, in any case,
continued economic growth could not happen because the world's
resources would give out: "for the first time, it has become vital to
inquire into the cost of unrestricted material growth, and to consider
the alternatives to its continuation".138As Rostow aptly summarized
it: "suddenly, in the I970's, the inevitability, even the legitimacy,
of economic growth was questioned".139
The result was a return of pre-growth economics gloom. "The
most remarkable two decades of economic growth in modern his-
tory", Rostow explained, had been superseded by "the greatest
challenge to industrial civilisation since it began to take shape two
centuries ago".140 Once again his interest has shifted in consequence,
from writing historically grounded development manifestos to evolv-
ing "specific lines of policy which might permit the world community
to transit with reasonable success the next quarter century". For him
as for others, the change in circumstances has been remarkable:
An important turning point occurred in the world economy and, indeed, in
industrial civilisation during the first half of the 1970's. A pattern of economic and
social progress which had persisted for almost a quarter century was broken.
Politicians, economists and citizens found themselves in a somewhat new and
uncomfortable world. Familiar modes of thought and action were challenged as
they no longer seemed to grip the course of events. Expectations of the future
became uncertain.141
Galbraith expressed similar sentiments in similar words, recording
137 E. E.
Schumacher, Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People
Mattered (London, 1974), pp. 10-II, 46-7. Since publication, the book has been
through 17 reprints and sold 750,000 copies in English alone.
138 D. H. Meadows et al., The Limits to Growth (New York, 1972), p. 191. For
similar anti-growth views, see D. Bell, The Cultural Contradictionsof Capitalism
(New York, 1976), p. 237; R. Theobald and S. Mills (eds.), The Failure of Success:
Ecological Values vs Economic Myths (Indianapolis, 1973), p. xii. For a (much less
fashionable) restatement of the growth case, see W. Beckerman, In Defenceof Economic
Growth (London, 1974), esp. chs. I, 9.
139 W. W.
Rostow, Gettingfrom Here to There(New York, 1978), pp. I-2.
140
W. W. Rostow, The WorldEconomy: History and Prospect(Austin, 1978), pp.
247, 294.
141 Rostow,
Gettingfrom Here to There, pp. I, 19, 20.
i6o PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 103
the shift from TheAffluentSociety to TheAge of Uncertainty.Whereas

the years 1945-65 were "good and confident years, a good time to be
an economist", the last decade has merely demonstrated once more
"the disarming complexity of the problems mankind now faces".142
Moreover, at the same time that economic growth in the west
became more uncertain and/or more unacceptable, economic develop-
ment became less confident as a discipline and less credible as a
policy.143 In part, this has resulted from the assaults mounted on
the subject by the neo-Marxist left (who argued that development
merely led to further underdevelopment, increased inequality and
the growth of western neo-imperialism), and by the neo-classical
right (who asserted with equal vigour that development merely led
to misallocation of resources and to balance of payments deficits, but
not to economic growth). More significantly, perhaps, it was also
because development economics does not seem to have worked. In
many Third World countries, income distribution has become more
unequal not less; the promotion of economic development has led
to some spectacular retrogression in human rights; and the whole
process of modernization seems more stressful than beneficial. More-
over, there was the gradual and humbling discovery that there was
no such thing as a typical underdeveloped country any more than a
typical Industrial Revolution: a country's size, population, resources
and politics differed so widely that there could be no single recipe for
transformation. As a result, the confidence with which development
economists had turned to their tasks in the I950s and I960s was
much reduced.144
Within this generally pessimistic world climate, the British econ-
omy has suffered more than most in Western Europe. "No subject",
noted Galbraith, "is so lovingly discussed in our own time as the
economic problems of Britain".145 "The British deceleration of the
late I96os", agreed Rostow, "is more marked than for most of the
other major industrial economies, and the subsequent impact of the
price revolution of I972-7 more acute".146Just as Britain shared in
the prosperity of the post-war years to a lesser extent than many
western countries, so, since I974, it has fared worse in this renewed
age of uncertainty, with higher ratesof inflationand greaterunemploy-
ment.147 For the pessimists, this has meant regret at the coming of
a post-industrialized world, with a broken and fragmented working
142
J. K. Galbraith, The Age of Uncertainty(Boston, 1977), pp. 7, 225. For the
background, see Galbraith, Life in Our Times, pp. 528-34.
143 Hirschman, "Rise and Fall of Development Economics",
pp. I, 16-24.
144 Cf. Galbraith, Age of Uncertainty,p. 280: "There is no economic question so
important as why so many people are so poor".
145
146
Ibid., p. 295.
Rostow, WorldEconomy, p. 383.
147 J. E. Alt, The Politics of EconomicDecline: EconomicManagementand Political
Behaviour in Britain since 1964 (Cambridge, 1979), ch. 2, esp. p. 33.
class, weakened unions, and a divided labour party.'48 For the

escapists, it has resulted (as did the depression of the 1930s) in a
nostalgia boom, as evidenced by such best-sellers as Life in the
English Country House and The Country Diary of an Edwardian
Lady. 149And for the optimists, it is seen as the beginning of a "future
that works", based on leisure, culture and education, which is not a
warning but "a model for others in the post-industrial age".'50
These varied responses to British economic problems are unified
by a belief that Britain is now deindustrializing, a notion which has
become the catchword of the late I970s and early I98os.151 It was
the starting-point for Nossiter's optimistic picture of the future that
works, and Bellini's much more pessimistic view is based on similar
evidence.152 Indeed, the latter's account of Britain's economy past
and present stands as a representative statement of the conventional
wisdom on the subject in the early I980s. His picture of declining
prosperity, and a collapsing industrial base suggests a future domi-
nated by the new feudalism, which will combine the old landowning
families (who by definition own the most enduring and valuable
national resource) and the new masters of the media, services and
information. Viewed in this light, Britain's industrial past is seen
merely as an ephemeral episode between the old and the new feudal-
ism: "a flirtation with factory culture", a time when a "factory class
of manual workers" was "temporarily"there, "a passing phase before
the country reverted to its traditionalpattern". So, he concludes, "the
explosion of energy around I750, at the start of the first industrial
revolution, can now be seen for what it really was: for Britain a flash
in the pan".'53
Clearly, this is a very different climate of opinion from that which
prevailed in the years 1955-75 and, as the work of James Bellini
shows, it has led to a major change in popular appraisalof the British
Industrial Revolution from the days when it was seen as the shining
start of the great western success story. At the same time, this general
western crisis of confidence, the defensiveness of development econ-
omics, and the anxiety about the British economy, have had a
profound (and parallel) effect on the way in which economic histori-
148 E.
J. Hobsbawm, The Forward March of Labour Halted? (London, 1981), pp.
3-4, I4-I8.
149 M.
Girouard, Life in the English Country House: A Social and Architectural
History(London, 1978); E. Holden, TheCountryDiary of an EdwardianLady (London,
I977).
150 B. D. Nossiter, Britain: A Future that Works(Boston, 1978), esp. pp. Io4, 227,
231, 234.
151 R. Bacon and W. Eltis, Britain's Economic Problems: Too Few Producers,
2nd edn. (London, 1978), p. x. Cf. Financial Times, 3 July 1980, with an article
"Deindustrialisation is Good for the UK".
152 Nossiter, Future that Works,p. 231; J. Bellini, Rule Britannia:A ProgressReport
for Domesday, 1986 (London, 1981), p. 69.
153 Bellini, Rule Britannia, pp. 5, 6, 63.
T62 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 103
ans have been looking at the Industrial Revolution.154 For the

changed circumstances since 1974 have meant an environment in
which the dissenting views of the I960s, and even some of Clapham's
dissenting views of the I920s, have become the new orthodoxy.
Instead of being presented as the paradigmatic case, the first and
most famous instance of economic growth, the British Industrial
Revolution is now depicted in a more negative light, as a limited,
restricted, piecemeal phenomenon, in which various things did not
happen or where, if they did, they had far less effect than was
previously supposed. The study of entrepreneurship, for example,
has shifted dramatically from the big and the successful to the small
and the failed. "The names that have become famous", P. L. Payne
notes, "were not typical entrepreneurs". On the contrary, he suggests
that the average businessman was more likely to be small-scale and
inept than large-scale and successful, a view endorsed by Sheila
Marriner, who argues that bankruptcy may have been as typical a
condition for entrepreneurs in the classical age of the Industrial
Revolution as profits. 155Even more tellingly, Gatrell and Chapman
have explicitly applied the "limits to growth" view by asking why
it was that cotton firms did not grow to more than middle size
between I800 and I850. And their answers - financial restraints
and entrepreneurialpreference for a modest scale of business - hark
back to Habakkuk's earlier formulation, in Gatrell's case explicitly
o. 156
At the same time, the significance of power and transport in the
Industrial Revolution has been fundamentally (and downwardly)
reassessed. Von Tunzelmann, formulating his enquiry in explicitly
contemporary terms, undertook the first "detailed critique of the
'energy crisis' interpretation . . . of the Industrial Revolution". For,
having examined its forward and backward linkages, and its impact
on the textile industry, he concludes that the impact of the steam
engine was relatively small throughout the first half of the nineteenth
century.157Several other studies, in rather different methodological
154 B. E.
Supple, "Economic History in the I980's: Old Problems and New
Directions", Jl. InterdisciplinaryHist., xii (1981), p. 203. For a more general
illustration, see C. P. Kindleberger, Manias, Panics and Crashes: A History of
Financial Crises(New York, 1978), p. 3, where he notes that there were many books
on this subject in the I930s, but few between 1947 and 1973. "More recently", he
adds, "with the world-wide recession of 1974-75, the industry has picked up".
in the NineteenthCentury(London, 1974),
155 P. L. Payne, British Entrepreneurship
pp. 24-5, 30-4; S. Marriner, "English Bankruptcy Records and Statistics before
I850", Econ. Hist. Rev., 2nd ser., xxxiii (1980), pp. 351, 366.
156 V. A. C. Gatrell, "Labour, Power and the Size of Firms in Lancashire Cotton
in the Second Quarter of the Nineteenth Century", Econ. Hist. Rev., 2nd ser., xxx
(I977), p. Io7; S. D. Chapman, "Financial Restraints on the Growth of Firms in the
Cotton Industry, 1790-1850", Econ. Hist. Rev., 2nd ser., xxxii (1979), p. 65.
157 G. N. von Tunzelmann, Steam Power and British Industrializationto i860
(Oxford, 1978), p. 8, chs. 5-7.
traditions, and all heavily indebted to the 1871 Return of Factories

and Workshops,have shown how limited was the diffusion of steam
power as late as 1871 and, correspondingly, how widespread was
the continued use of human and animal power in small units of
production.158Samuel in particular, acknowledging his indebtedness
to Habakkuk, has attacked the conventional view of the mid-Vic-
torian economy as being characterized by forward and backward
sectors: for him, "uneven development" is a better description,
which does justice to the fact that mechanization actually increased
the number of labour-intensive jobs.159And, in parallel, F. M. L.
Thompson has shown how the coming of railways led to an increase
in the number of horses employed throughout the nineteenth century
rather than a reduction.160
There have been some broader shifts in emphasis, too. Instead of
stressing how much had happened by 1851 (whatever the qualifica-
tions), it is now commonplace to note how little had actually altered
(whatever the qualifications). Some studies, explicitly indebted to
Wrigley, have stressed how limited and localized were the changes
resulting by mid-century.161 Others have argued that the atypical
experience of industrial Lancashire has too frequently been the basis
of national generalizations, whereas in fact it was the mercantile
and consumer-dominated Home Counties which provided the main
stimulus to economic growth.162 One recent quantitative study has
suggested that British economic growth between 1770 and 1815 was
about a third slower than was previously supposed; another has re-
interpreted the period of "take-off" as one of stagflation; while a
158 A. E.
Musson, "Technological Change and Manpower", History, lxvii (I982),
pp. 240-I; A. E. Musson, "Industrial Motive Power in the United Kingdom, I800-
70", Econ. Hist. Rev., 2nd ser., xxix (1976), pp. 416, 436; J. W. Kanefsky, "Motive
Power in British Industry and the Accuracy of the 1870 FactoryReturns",Econ. Hist.
Rev., 2nd ser., xxxii (1979), pp. 360, 374. And see this explicit statement in D.
Greenberg, "Reassessing the Power Patterns of the Industrial Revolution: An Anglo-
American Comparison", Amer. Hist. Rev., lxxxvii (1982), p. 1240: "Over the past
decade, as continuing crises have forced us to recognize the profound global impact
of energy utilization, we have looked with renewed interest at the power patterns of
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The possible end of the fossil era in industrial
nations raised the specter of limited growth, and encouraged the kind of questioning
that has led historians to discover how very little information underlay orthodox
propositions about the role of steam".
159 R. Samuel, "The Workshop of the World: Steam Power and Hand
Technology
in Mid-Victorian Britain", History Workshop,no. 3 (I977), esp. pp. 7-8, 47-8. See
also the editorial pp. I-5.
160 F. M. L. Thompson,
"Nineteenth-Century Horse Sense", Econ. Hist. Rev.,
2nd ser., xxix (1976), pp. 64-6, 77-80.
161 W.
Ashworth, "Typologies and Evidence: Has Nineteenth-Century Europe a
Guide to Economic Growth?", Econ. Hist. Rev., 2nd ser., xxx (1977), pp. 152-4; S.
Pollard, Peaceful Conquest:The Industrializationof Europe, 1760-I970 (Oxford, 1981),
pp. vii, 3, 24, 32, 39.
162 C. H. Lee,
"Regional Growth and Structural Change in Victorian Britain",
Econ. Hist. Rev., 2nd ser., xxxiv (1981), esp. pp. 450-I; M. Fores, "The Myth of a
British Industrial Revolution", History, lxvi (I98I), p. 183.
I64 PASTAND PRESENT NUMBER 103
more impressionistic account has questioned the whole notion of a
mid-Victorian "boom".163The view that Britain was the first indus-
trial nation, whose achievements all others consciously emulated,
has also been severely undermined, especially in the case of France
where, it is now argued, industrialization was taking place in a
different way and where, in any case, for much of the eighteenth
century, its productivity was higher than Britain's.164
In general terms, the resulting picture of the Industrial Revolution
is remarkably similar to that given by Bellini. Rubinstein's study of
English millionaires stresses the "limits to wealth" which prevented
industrial, manufacturing entrepreneurs from becoming remotely as
rich as in the U.S.A. (thereby extending Gatrell's formulation), and
notes how the majority of the very rich, especially in the classical
phase of the Industrial Revolution, were the landowners and financi-
ers, those very groups whose survivaland renaissancehave so preoccu-
pied Bellini.165 And M. J. Wiener's study of cultural attitudes,
stimulated by a recognition that the "economic Sargasso Sea" in
which the British economy found itself in the late I970s was a
problem with "a long history", adds another dimension by stressing,
not merely the limits to industrial advance and middle-class forma-
tion by 1851, but also the limited extent to which there had ever
been a commitment to the growth mentality. "Britain's transition"
to an industrial society, he notes, "was marked by admirablypeaceful
gradualism, but also, thereby, by a certain incompleteness". "In the
world's first industrial nation", he adds, "economic growth was
frequently viewed with suspicion and disdain", and "industrializa-
tion did not seem quite at home", with the result that the survival of
patrician cultural values "restrainedratherthan stimulated economic
growth".166Again, it is what did not happen, rather than what did,
that is important: the limits to growth not the conditions for it.
This change in emphasis - from what had been accomplished by
1851 to what had not, from "the take-off into sustained growth" to
the "limits to growth", from national aggregatesand sectoral analysis
to regional variations and uneven development, from the few large
163 C. K.
Harley, "British Industrialization before 1841: Evidence of Slower
Growth during the Industrial Revolution", Jl. Econ. Hist., xlii (1982); J. Mokyr and
N. E. Savin, "Stagflationin Historical Perspective: The Napoleonic Wars Revisited",
Research in Econ. Hist., i (1976), esp. pp. I99-200: "the events of the Napoleonic
period in England can be usefully compared to our own time"; R. Church, The Great
VictorianBoom, I850-I873 (London, 1975), pp. 76-8.
164 N. F. R. Crafts, "Industrial Revolution in England and France: Some Thoughts
on the Question 'Why Was England First?' ", Econ. Hist. Rev., 2nd ser., xxx (1977),
p. 440; P. K. O'Brien and G. Keyder, EconomicGrowthin Britain and France, 1780-
I914 (London, 1978), pp. 21, 90, 146-50, I94.
165 W. D. Rubinstein, Men of Property: The Very Wealthy in Britain since the
IndustrialRevolution (London, 1981), pp. IO, 46, 60-I, Io2-Io, 159-62, 178-80, I90.
166 M. J. Weiner,
English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, i85o-
1980 (Cambridge, 1981), pp. ix, 3, 7, 8, IO.
and successful businessmen to the many small and inept entre-
preneurs - has now become an orthodoxy so widespread that (like
the previous prevailing interpretations) it transcends any claim to be
the exclusive preserve of any particular methodology or ideological
approach. For example, those of Mathias's collected essays written
in the I970S show a decided shift in emphasis from the argument
made in The First Industrial Nation. There, the starting-point was
development and growth, with the qualifications gradually and care-
fully made; here, it is the other way round. British growth, he notes,
was first, and therefore unlike "all subsequent case histories". "In
the I970'S", he continues, we can say "with some historical assur-
ance" that Britain "has always been a slow growing economy". And,
elsewhere, there is greater scepticism than before of the work of
development economists in so far as they relate to the diffusion of
skills, the accumulation and application of capital, diagnoses of
poverty, and programmes of foreign aid. Ashton's "influential para-
graph" is much less in evidence here than it was a decade earlier.167
More generally, A. E. Musson's recent survey explicitly sets out
to debunk what he regards as "the general interpretation presented
in most textbooks", namely that "the industrial revolution had taken
place by 1850, that the factory system had triumphed". This "older
view", that "it was a sudden, cataclysmic transformation starting
around 1760" is, he argues, "clearly no longer tenable". Accord-
ingly, he stresses the extent to which consumer goods industries
remained handicraft industries, located in small workshops; the
degree to which, as shown in the 185 census, patterns of employment
and occupational structure remained dominated by traditionalcrafts-
men, labourers and domestic servants; and the very slow rate at
which factories spread and steam power was diffused. "If", he notes,
"the Industrial Revolution is located in the period I760-I830, as it
frequently is, then there are good grounds for regardingit as the Age
of Water Power". "British economic historians", he concludes,
"have generally tended to place too much emphasis on the Industrial
Revolution of 1750 to I850 . . . Much of England of 1850 was not
very strikingly different from that of 1750".168
Even the most recent general survey, for all its methodological
novelty, reaches conclusions remarkably similar, not only to those
167 P.
Mathias, The Transformationof England (London, 1979), pp. 10-14, 36, 43,
89-90, 140-2, 146. The essays referred to were first published in 1972, 1973, 1975
and 1976. The point can be made even more forcibly in the light of the recent second
edition of the author's textbook: P. Mathias, The First IndustrialNation: An Economic
Historyof Britain, 1700-1914, 2nd edn. (London, 1983). Many of the earlierreferences
to Third World countries, to development economics and to the value of the British
case to those interested in contemporary problems of development have been deleted.
Cf. pp. 5, 27 and 187 in the first edition with pp. 4, 27 and 167 in the second.
168 A. E. Musson, The Growthof British Industry(London, 1978), pp. 8, 62-5, Io7-
14, 139-42, 149.
of economic historians working in rather a different idiom, but also

to contemporary commentators like Bellini. Here, for instance, is
N. L. Tranter:
The British Industrial Revolution was a very modest affair which emerged slowly
from the past as part of a long, evolutionary process, not as a sharp, instantly
recognizable break from traditional experience: its technology was small-scale and
comparatively primitive; it needed relatively little additional investment capital;
its capacity for introducing labour-saving technology was circumscribed; and its
pace was gradual and uncoordinated.169
And here is D. N. McCloskey:
The Industrial Revolution was the central event of modern history, British or other,
more in memory than in happening . .. In i86I, at the end of the customary dating
of the Industrial Revolution, only about thirty per cent of the labour force was
employed in activities that had been radically transformed in technique since 1780
. .Britain
· was not in 1861 a cotton mill .. .The explanation and evaluation of
the Industrial Revolution is not the only task of British economic history for the
period 1760 to I860. To repeat an earlier theme, much of Britain's economic life
was only lightly touched by it.170
Or, as he puts it elsewhere, Britain before the I87os may have been
rapidly industrializing, but it "had still an agriculturaleconomy".171
At the moment, this "limits to growth" interpretation of the
Industrial Revolution carries all before it, in the United States as in
Britain, among old economic historians as among new. The last
quarterof the eighteenth century has been eclipsed by the last quarter
of the nineteenth as the period when the most important changes
took place, when Britain became a class-based, urban society; when
steam power was massively applied and diffused; and when the
economy became "mature". Again, this is a shared view. Here is
M. E. Rose:
Economic and social developments in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, rather than in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, may have
effected a greater disruption in the work practices and attitudes of the English
people. 172
And here, once more, is Musson:
There are good grounds for regarding the period 1850-1914 as that in which the
Industrial Revolution really occurred, on a massive scale, transforming the whole
economy and society much more widely and deeply than the earlier changes had
done. 173
Compared with the interpretations which held sway during the
three preceding generations, this "limits to growth" view of the
Industrial Revolution has not yet been paramount for a long time.
169 N. L. in R. Floud and D. N.
Tranter, "The Labour Supply, I780-I860",
McCloskey (eds.), The Economic History of Britain since 1700, 2 vols. (Cambridge,
1981), i, p. 226.
170 D. N. McCloskey, "The Industrial Revolution, I780-I860: A Survey", in
Floud and McCloskey, EconomicHistory of Britain, i, pp. I04, I09, 124.
171 D. N. McCloskey, Enterpriseand Tradein VictorianBritain: Essays in Historical
Economics(London, 1981), p. I5I.
172 M. E.
Rose, "Social Change and the Industrial Revolution", in Floud and
McCloskey (eds.), EconomicHistory of Britain, i, p. 275.
173 Musson, Growth British Industry, pp. 150-I.
of
Nor, true to the pattern of previous phases, is it absolutely all-

pervasive. The work of Wrigley and Schofield, in particular, embod-
ies a powerful (if thus far rather ignored) argument in favour of
rehabilitating the Industrial Revolution as a time of "massive econ-
omic changes" forming "a radicalbreak with the past". 74 In general,
however, it is the "limits to growth" intrepretation which now holds
the field, and Flinn's words, admittedly addressed to the third
generation of economic historians, seem equally applicable to their
descendants today:
The several generations of historians who have studied the Industrial Revolution
... have each reflected, as is the habit of historians, the particular point of view
of their ages ... And just as each generation has benefited, so it has differed, from
its predecessor, so the present generation, while it may pride itself on yet another
fresh approach, would be unwise to sweep aside the earlier interpretations too
hastily. 175
V
This is a necessarily compressed account of a long span of history
writing, and thus an unavoidably selective summary of a large
amount of economic history. The general conclusion seems to be
that, in accordance with Croce's dictum, economic history is, in his
sense, contemporary history. Whether they intend to or not, whether
they know it or not, and whether they like it or not, economic
historians write tracts of their times and often for their times. Rightly
or wrongly, contemporaries discerned four readily identifiablephases
in the evolution of the British (and, latterly, world) economy since
the I88os; and, during the same hundred years, the four generations
of economic history writing on the Industrial Revolution have each
evolved a dominant interpretation sufficiently akin to these contem-
porary perceptions of the economy for it to be more than mere
coincidence. The fit is close enough to be remarkable.
It is, however, never total and not always exact. In part, this is
because each of the four dominant interpretations is a creation of
demand as well as of supply. In the I920S, for instance, more people
read the Hammonds than read Clapham, perhaps because their
pessimistic picture of the Industrial Revolution seemed more appro-
priately to mirror contemporary experience. Not until the I950s and
I96os did Clapham's "optimistic" interpretationattractmuch notice,
and not until the late 1970s and early I98os did his "limits to growth"
argument become popular. And this has been equally valid in other
generations. During the 1960s, for instance, more people took notice
of Rostow than of Habakkuk or Supple, not because he was "right"
and they were "wrong", but because, again, his work seemed better
174
E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The Population History of England, 154I-
1871: A Reconstruction(London, I98I), pp. 440-I.
175 Flinn, Origins of the Industrial Revolution, p. 14.
attuned to the prevailing mood and circumstances. And now, in the

same way, the "limits to growth" school commands more attention
than Wrigley and Schofield's argument that the Industrial Revol-
ution was, indeed, a major turning-point in human history. To this
extent, the economic history of the Industrial Revolution that every
generation rewrites may be more a creation of the audience than of
the authors.
To make the same point from the supply side, it seems clear that
the product provided has always been more complex than those
who have demanded it have assumed it to be. For the dominant
interpretation of the Industrial Revolution in each generation has
never been completely all-pervasive: economic historians have kept
their interpretation options open to a greater extent than popular
impressions of their work might sometimes imply. Like all historians,
they have always told us more about the time of which they write
than of the time in which they live.176 In part, this is because the
subject has its own inner, evolutionary logic, in which accumulated
knowledge and formulated hypotheses themselves influence future
developments by stimulating further research in particular direc-
tions. The way in which the Hammonds' writings provoked Clapham
into articulating the "optimistic" case which had previously not been
extensively made is one obvious example of this, and the work
undertaken by Deane and Habakkuk to test the quantitative aspects
of Rostow's "take-off" thesis is another. So it would clearly be a
mistake to formulate Croce's proposition in too reductionist a way,
and to argue that the writings of economic historians in the Industrial
Revolution are merelyan instance of ideas as superstructure.
Moreover, the dynamics of the scholarly process and the leads
and lags in interpretational fashion further enhance the subject's
evolutionary autonomy. It takes time for a new phase in the develop-
ment of the contemporary economy to reveal itself as such; it takes
time for research projects to be conceived, defined, undertaken,
written up and published; and graduate students may be influenced
by supervisors whose outlooks were partly conditioned by earlier
economic circumstances. In the case of the trade cycle interpretation
of the Industrial Revolution, for instance, the exhortations for such
work did not come until the I930s; the Second World War delayed
the research programme still further; and the most important books
on this subject were not published until the early I950s. But it was
the preoccupations of the inter-war years which explained their
appearance then, not the similar problems of the immediate post-
war decade: theymerely ensured that the books received wide notice
and sympathetic attention when, finally, they were published. So,
176
P. Gay, Style in History (London, I975), pp. 17, 212.
while there may be discernable generations of economic performance
and of economic history, they do not always correspond exactly in
time.
In these ways, the application of Croce's dictum to the historio-
graphy of the Industrial Revolution needs to be modified and hedged
about with reservations. But even so, the evidence seems sufficiently
robust to leave the core of the cliche intact. Whatever qualifications
have to be made, each generation of economic historians has evolved
a dominant interpretation of the Industrial Revolution which bears
so strong an affinity with contemporary circumstances that it cannot
be merely accidental. But if that is so, then how is it to be explained?
What is the mechanism whereby "the preoccupations of the present"
influence the economic history of the past? And, more precisely,
which particular "preoccupations of the past" exert that influence?
Is it contemporary political ideas, or some rather vague conventional
wisdom, or an even more general perception of contemporary econ-
omic performance? Is it the application of a particular form of
theory evolved with reference to the contemporary economy, or of a
fashionable methodology in vogue at a certain time?
If historians are analysed individually, or generations studied
separately, the answer is probably different in each case. Neverthe-
less, if the four generations are taken together, it appears that unified
perceptions of economic performance are probably a more influential
facet of "the preoccupations of the present" than methodological
determinism, ideological preconception or political commitment.
Among the first generation of economic historians, for instance, it
would clearly be inappropriate to discount Fabian socialism, social
surveys and Blue Books in explaining the interpretation of the
Industrial Revolution advanced by the Webbs or the Hammonds.
But so many writers took a similar view who did not share their
ideology, politics and methodology as to make this an inadequate
explanation for the generation as a whole. Likewise, in the second
period, Keynesians like Rostow, sceptics like Ashton, and non-
Keynesians like Beveridge all chose to work on the cyclical nature
of the Industrial Revolution; just as, in the third phase, the Industrial
Revolution as described by Hartwell or Hobsbawm looks more alike
(at least from this distance in time) than dissimilar: profoundly
influenced by Rostow and theories of economic growth even when
disagreeing with them. And, in the latest stage of economic history
writing, the view that not much had happened by 1851 is held by
the left and right, by new economic historians and by those working
in more traditional idioms.
If this unified perception of economic performanceis the "preoccu-
pation of the present" which is the most all-pervasive in influencing
approaches to the past, then how does it actually affect interpretations
170 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 103
of the Industrial Revolution? Does it merely influence the topics

chosen for research? Or determine the conclusions that will be
reached about them? Or, more generally, thereby influence broader
interpretations about the Industrial Revolution as a whole? Again,
the answer will no doubt differ if a particularhistorian or generation
is considered. But taking them all together, it seems to be the case that
the choice of topic of itselfinfluences not only specific conclusions but
also more general interpretations. The very decision to approach the
Industrial Revolution, in accordance with "the preoccupations of the
present", by way of social consequences, or cyclical fluctuations, or
economic growth, or the limits to growth makes it morerather than
less likely that self-reinforcing conclusions will be reached, both in
particular and in general. Of course, there will be debate within
these parameters as to whether (for instance) the business cycle was
dominated by investment or exports, or whether the standard of
living was rising or falling, or whether economic growth was balanced
or unbalanced. But such controversies are disagreements within a
shared set of assumptions about the overall approach to the subject,
assumptions which are themselves fundamentally determined by
"the preoccupations of the present".
Put another way, the four generations in the historiography of
the Industrial Revolution which have emerged here - as "social
consequences", as "cyclical fluctuations", as "economic growth"
and as "limits to growth" - each bear a marked resemblance to
the paradigms which Kuhn has discerned as characteristic of the
evolution of scientific thought. Here, too, each phase of interpretation
is characterized by a relatively high degree of internal coherence
within the discipline, in which the community of economic historians
employs shared criteria for choosing problems, where "normal re-
search" is defined as work within that agreed disciplinary matrix,
and where controversies and disagreements occur largely inside that
set of "paradigm-induced expectations". Moreover, both disciplines
seem to evolve in a similar fashion, as one paradigm succeeds another
with, as a result, "a consequent shift in the problems available for
scrutiny, and in the standards by which the profession determines
what should count as an admissable problem".177In Kuhn's field,
the paradigms are of longer duration and of more profound signifi-
cance; but the mechanisms and the movement are strikingly similar
to those discerned here for economic history.
The major difference between Kuhn's picture of change in the
natural sciences and that presented here of change in economic
history concerns the creation of the new paradigm which supersedes
the old. For while Kuhn sees such transformationsas largely intern-
177 T. S.
Kuhn, The Structureof ScientificRevolutions, 2nd edn. (London, I970),
pp. 3-6, 23-5, 36-7.
ally generated, with each new paradigm being born from the old,
the account of economic history given here suggests that the process
is much less insulated from the world outside.178 Of course, in each
generation of economic history, as time passes, the paradigm itself
is increasingly refined and undermined by further research, by a
growing sense that a new interpretation must be found because
diminishing returns are setting in, and so by an increased awareness
of its impending obsolescence. But the content of the new paradigm
which replaces it is not so much established by recasting the old
doubts as new interpretations, but rather by that compound of
contemporary attitudes, interests and anxieties relating to the econ-
omy, loosely called "the preoccupations of the present", which
provide between them the new perspective on the Industrial Revol-
ution which gives the impetus to research and interpretation in the
next phase.
Indeed, it is in this process of changefrom one such paradigm to
another that Croce's dictum about the importance of the present in
shaping perceptions of the past seems most forcibly and influentially
to apply. It is not merely that, at any given moment, the problems
of the present influence the views of the past; it is also that, over
time,changes in the nature of present problems are the majordetermi-
nant in bringing out parallel changes in perspectives on the past. In
the natural sciences, according to Kuhn, it is the ideas which shift
first, and then in consequence the perception of the world. But in
the economic history of the Industrial Revolution, it is much closer
to being the other way round. In the one case, "when paradigms
change, the world itself changes with them"; in the other, when the
world changes, the paradigm changes too.179
VI
This examination of the economic history written yesterday may have
some useful implications for the economic history written today
and tomorrow. In the first place, it suggests that the dominant
interpretation which prevails (albeit not completely) in any given
generation is never more than a partial view of that very complex
process we inadequately refer to as the Industrial Revolution. In that
it draws attention to some important aspect of the subject, it is never
going to be wholly "wrong"; but in that it gives disproportionate
emphasis to a limited number of considerations, it is not likely to be
wholly "right", either. So, as today's new generation of economic
historians zealously overturns the views of their immediate predeces-
sors, they might ponder whether the old arguments which they assail
178
Ibid., pp. 149, I64.
79
Ibid., p. III.
172 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 103
were ever as all-pervasive or as crude as they are sometimes now

made out to have been, and also whether their new formulations are
really likely to be any more absolutely "true" than those which went
before. As Ferguson put it in his study of the Renaissance, in words
equally applicable to the study of the Industrial Revolution: "if the
historian is to interpret the past at all, he must have a point of
view, but he may come closer to objectivity if the point of view is
consciously recognized, and not regarded as absolute".180 Or, as
Supple once put it more briefly: "It would be a great pity if economic
history . . . were to take itself too seriously".181
More polemically, this argument has some particularimplications
for the New Economic History. There is a danger of presenting the
"limits to growth" interpretation of the Industrial Revolution as if
it is a new insight which fittingly and persuasively justifies this new
methodology. But, as has been argued here, Clapham had made
much the same case before, and many economic historiansare making
the identical argument now who have never been near a computer.
It is not so much that a new methodology has produced an appropri-
ately new interpretation, but rather that the dissenting heresies of
one generation have now become entrenched orthodoxies of another,
and have done so by the complex process tentatively explored in
this article, in which methodological innovation features far less
significantly than the foremost propagandists of the New Economic
History might allow. That, at least, seems to be the conclusion
suggested by taking this brief glance at the accumulated corpus of
writing on the Industrial Revolution. Ironically, one of the greatest
weaknesses of present-day economic history is that its practitioners
may forget (or may, indeed, never have known) what their profes-
sional forbears said, and so unwittingly resurrect old heresies in
the mistaken belief that they are new insights produced by new
methodologies. In this sense, it might be truer to say that economic
historians, and especially New Economic Historians, do not take
economic history quite seriously enough.
Christ'sCollege, Cambridge David Cannadine
180
Ferguson, Renaissance in Historical Thought, p. 388.
181
Supple, "Economic History and Economic Growth", p. 566.

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The Past and Present Society

successive generations of economic historians really rewritten their

such as C. F. G. Masterman.12 Together, this great outpouring

strong in the Hammonds and Webbs. As P. F. Clarke explains, the

to "an analysis of English local government as it existed in our own

tariff reform).34 This widening intellectual gulf - in which the

34 Winch, Economicsand Policy, pp. 54, 63-6; A. M. McBriar, Fabian Socialism

Set against this background of so all-pervasive a view, Clapham's

41 G. Townsend Warner, Landmarksin English IndustrialHistory (London, I889),

was still small and, outside a limited group of leading industries,

analysed in a more careful (and guardedly optimistic) light than was

and to measure the duration and amplitude of such movements.61

approach, was Thorp's BusinessAnnals, which included a survey of

which he constructed for the years 1785-1849 showed "general

These findings were a spin-off from a larger project which Rostow

74 W. W. Rostow, "British Trade Fluctuations, 1868-1896: A Chronicle and a

1790 to I850 written from the perspective of business fluctuations".77

sustained economic growth, resulting from increased investment,

Or, as David S. Landes noted more pithily, "the Europeaneconomies

tion of western capitalism "from the cataclysmic failure which it

setting up of N.E.D.C. in I962. Significantly, the Labour gov-

omic development, brought together. For the policy maker, The

"a priori scepticism, on the basis of the modern theory of economic

literacy, and with a well-developed market system.126 By I85I, as

any as an example of how to grow".133 H. J. Habakkuk asssailed

the shift from TheAffluentSociety to TheAge of Uncertainty.Whereas

class, weakened unions, and a divided labour party.'48 For the

ans have been looking at the Industrial Revolution.154 For the

traditions, and all heavily indebted to the 1871 Return of Factories

of economic historians working in rather a different idiom, but also

Nor, true to the pattern of previous phases, is it absolutely all-

attuned to the prevailing mood and circumstances. And now, in the

of the Industrial Revolution? Does it merely influence the topics

were ever as all-pervasive or as crude as they are sometimes now

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