VI.

Interpretations and Assessment

How people have interpreted the Industrial Revolution depends in large part on their vantage points in space and time. Like most historical transformations, the Industrial Revolution has not only encouraged investigation and analysis but has provoked controversy. The first British social historians to popularize the term “industrial revolution”, following in the wake of earlier critics of industry such as John Ruskin, claimed that while changes in methods of production had increased wealth they had not increased “well-being”. They dwelt more on the “victims” of industrialization than on those who benefited from it. Some later economic historians focused instead on inventors and entrepreneurs, some of them treating the Industrial Revolution as a success story. For others “revolution” was the wrong term, “evolution” the right one. The extent and spread of economic and social transformation had been exaggerated.

Detailed studies of particular industries, even particular business, and of particular regions are essential if “industrialization” is to be assessed, and they make generalization difficult. In any assessment, however—and it must relate not only to Britain but to other countries—what happened to the environment as well as to human relations must form part of the reckoning. So, too, must human aspirations as well as grievances and memories of often mythical “golden ages” before the “intrusion” of steam power. It was as a result of industrialization that the early British socialist Robert Owen, who was himself a mill owner, dreamt of a cooperative “new society” and Karl Marx envisaged what to him would have been the decisive revolution in human history. In retrospect—and in a new age of even greater unprecedented change associated with the rise of the computer—the first British Industrial Revolution, for long abandoned as a model for other countries to follow, now belongs to what seems a distant past.