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The British Industrial Revolution: An Economic Perspective. Edited by Joel Mokyr * Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1993. xi + 362 pp. Tables, figures, notes, bibliography, and index. Cloth, $58.00, ISBN 0-8133-8509-1; paper, $21.95, ISBN 0-8133-8510-5.
The contributions to this collection of essays are very different in their length, pitch, and coverage. Almost half the book is taken up by Joel Mokyr's survey of the debates about the Industrial Revolution in Britain.
Mokyr organizes the survey around polar interpretations: on the one hand, the classic view, according to which dramatic technical changes in certain sectors of manufacturing led to discontinuous changes in productivity and accelerating economic growth; and, on the other hand, a modern revisionist interpretation, which has involved reworking the macroeconomic (and some microeconomic) data for the period of the Industrial Revolution to indicate a slower rate of growth than was implied by the classic "revolutionary growth" paradigm, and indeed a slower rate of growth than the pioneering quantifiers, Phyllis Deane and W. A. Cole, estimated. The revisionists are New Economic Historians who marry quantification with formal modeling. Sometimes attached to questions about the chronology, timing, causes, and consequences of British industrialization is a further debate about the usefulness of the metaphor of "revolution." More heat than light appears to be shed here (see Rondo Cameron, Contention: Debates in Society, Culture and Science [1994]).
Mokyr's objective is to synthesize the old and new interpretations by arguing that, important as the recent revisions are, macroeconomic evidence on growth and structural change is only part of the story. Although growth may have been slower than hitherto implied or thought, significant changes can still be observed at the level of the firm and the household, most clearly (and here is the tie-in with the classic view) in the nature of technical change.
The industrial revolution may not, in fact, have been nearly as abrupt and as sudden as some of its historiography suggests. Yet its importance as an event in economic history stands undiminished. Before the industrial revolution technical change and economic growth did occur sporadically in the experience of Europe and Asia but were inevitably checked by stronger forces. After 1750 the fetters on sustainable economic changes were shaken off....What ultimately matters is the irreversibility of events...