Industrial Revolution

Through the 1950s and into the 1960s, the idea of the Industrial Revolution was that it was the work of some genius inventors who created machines used primarily in the textile industry but also in mining that eliminated blocks to assembly line production. Then everybody was crowded into factories and the new brave world opened up. In fact, one of the most interesting books and great classics that is still in print was written by an economic historian at Harvard who's still around called David Landes. It's a good book called The Unbound Prometheus, which was basically that. Some of the inventions that I briefly describe in your reading, the spinning jenny, etc., refer to that. Well, that kind of analysis led one to concentrate on England, where the Industrial Revolution began, and to view industrialization as being a situation of winners and losers. That analysis has been rejected greatly over the past years, because the Industrial Revolution is measured by more than simply large factories with industrial workers and the number of machines. This is the point of the beginning of this. The more that we look at the Industrial Revolution, the more we see that the Industrial Revolution was first and foremost an intensification of forms of production, of kinds of production that were already there. Thus, we spend more time looking at the intensification of artisanal production, craft production, domestic industry which we've already mentioned, that is, people, mostly women but also men and children, too, working in the countryside. The rapid rise of industrial production was very much tied to traditional forms of production.