Was the Industrial Revolution The Industrial Revolution?
There was an Industrial Revolution, and it was slow. The debate’s been over for two decades. The gradualists, armed with new growth accounting techniques, have won, exorcising forever the Ashtonian vision of an eighteenth-century leap into exponential growth. Where historians once thought the spinning jenny, steam engine, and factory system the immediate preconditions of England’s dramatic transformation, they now accept that these advances emerged in a trickle in a few tiny sectors. Nicholas Crafts, a primary exponent of this “limited-gradualist” view, opens a recent survey on produ...
Source: substack.com