Robbie Bruens October 12, 2010 Age of Revolutions?

/ Anixter

Revolutionary, But Not Just Industrial

When investigating the accuracy of the nomenclature of the historical epoch known as the Industrial Revolution, one must define the terms of discourse precisely. Michael Fores provides a useful menu of possible meanings for industrial and its variants, offering four that seem to be used regularly by scholars of the period. Industry can simply mean a particular sector of an economy (e.g. the textile industry, the insurance industry), or it can refer specifically to the manufacturing sector of a particular economy, or it serves to describe the factory system as applied to manufacturing or finally industrialization may mean the process by which modern life has been producedcharacterized by urban living and more rational guidance for performance at work.1 As Fores points out, the first meaning is hardly useful at all in describing what is meant by the Industrial Revolution. On the other hand, the fourth meaning would apply a sort of circular logic to the discussion by narrowly defining industrial as heralding modernity that we recognize today. Some combination of the second and third will work best in achieving a sort of precision. Fores contentions about the meaning of revolution are less helpful. Outside of the field of physics or astronomy, most would agree that revolution implies a profound or radical change of some kind. But Fores temporal limitation on revolution as a series of events that takes a matter of weeks, months and perhaps up to a decade at most2 to unfold would seem to include only major changes in government and political conditions. Such a definition would accede to a modernists conception of what constitutes rapid change, but a broader view of historical time would allow for a revolution that takes well over a century to play out. Given these considerations, the Industrial Revolution cannot be understood as entirely industrial but can be viewed as distinctly revolutionary. The dramatic changes constitutive of this Revolution were far more than industrial, as they included everything from crucial agricultural and demographic factors to increasingly

1 2

Michael Fores, The Myth of a British Industrial Revolution, pg. 188. Fores, pg. 187.

interdependent international trade relationships. Perhaps most significantly, the Industrial Revolution signaled the socioeconomic transformation of the household. A true picture of the Industrial Revolution would include far more than the admittedly significant industrial advances of the era, and this appears most obviously when viewing the massive demographic shifts and concomitant agricultural innovations. The Industrial Revolution was about more than machines and factories, it encompassed an epochal increase in mens access to the means of life, in control over their ecological environment and a a rise in human productivity, not just industrial but also agricultural [and] demographic on such a scale that it raised as it were, the logarithmic index of society. 3 While it remains unclear whether the unprecedented rate of population growth experienced by Great Britain was due more to increased birth rate or decreased mortality rate,4 the ability of fewer farmers and smaller amounts of land to support many more people is undeniable and began an irreversible trend of population expansion. Industrial does not due this phenomenon justice, nor does it describe the change in the very nature of foodstuff consumption patterns like the increased access by ordinary workers to items like tea and sugar, which had formerly been luxuries.5 However, such patterns can be explained by another very important element of the revolution that cannot be sufficiently denoted as industrial: that of the much more central international trade relationships. When examining the much disputed take-off period of the revolution, economic figures indicate British foreign trade tripled in two decades.6 And when looking at the causes of the revolution, the export trade may have as much or more primacy than the celebrated innovations of industrial technology. During the first half of the eighteenth century, home industries increased their output by seven per cent, export industries by seventy-six percent7 and then these trends actually accelerated at midcentury. Thus Britains revolution was not simply an internal miracle of forward looking industrial entrepreneurs, but instead was

3 4

Harold Perkin, The Origins of Modern English Society, pg. 3. E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, pg. 330. 5 Thompson, pg. 317. 6 Perkins, pg. 2. 7 Hobsbawm, pg. 26.

tied to broader international context where Britain sat in a key position in an expanding network of trading partners and dependent colonial possessions. Finally, the revolution was not confined to the factory or even the workshop, and this might be the clearest way in which the adjective industrial falls short. It worked out some of its most complex implications in the household itself. The increasing importance of money income and realignment of labor roles led to a a new strategy for the maximization of household utility. 8 Jan De Vries describes this socalled industrious revolution as both a precursor to and quite intermingled with the Industrial Revolution itself. Changes at the household level imply a revolution that was as much a social transformation as an economic or industrial one, with one result of household self-sufficiency being replaced by a reliance on commercially produced goods being that the wife was likely to be come an autonomous earner.9 Over the long run then, the revolution had as much of an impact on sexual politics as on industrial concerns such as the automation of labor or dependence on fossil fuels.

8 9

Jan de Vries, The Industrial and Industrious Revolutions, pg. 257. de Vries, pg. 262.