Industrial Revolution

THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION, by UC Davis Economist Gregory Clark

When was the decisive break from the pre-industrial world of slow

technological advance and stagnant living standards to the modern world of

constant technological progress and steadily improving living standards? Most

historians have assigned the dawn of the modern world to England in 1770.

There has followed a long debate about the cause of the Industrial Revolution.

Here I argue that there was no significant break in 1770 from the earlier world.

That break only occurred later in the nineteenth century. Instead the Industrial

Revolution was most likely the last of a series of localized growth spurts

stretching back to the Middle Ages, as in the Netherlands from 1500 to 1660, and

northern Italy in the fourteenth century. Accidents of demand, demography,

trade, and geography made this spurt seem different than what had come before –

but it was really more of the same.

 

Posted via web from jimnichols's posterous