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The Past and Present Society

The Present and the Past in the English Industrial Revolution 1880-1980Author(s): David CannadineSource: Past & Present, No. 103 (May, 1984), pp. 131-172Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of The Past and Present Society

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THE PRESENT AND THE PAST INTHE ENGLISH INDUSTRIALREVOLUTION I880- 980*When our ideas on some large historical theme are in a state of disorder, we mayfind it useful to make ourselves acquainted with the history of the historiographyof that particular subject.Interest in the historiography of the Industrial Revolution is not commensuratewith the absolute growth of its literature.2

EVERSINCE CROCEFIRST COINED THE PHRASE, MANY HISTORIANSHAVEagreed with him that "all history is contemporary history", in thesense that every generation to some extent rewrites the past inaccordance with the preoccupations of the present.3 Among economichistorians, aware of their peculiarly ambiguous position, in whichthey are simultaneously economists appealing to history to test andvalidate their theories, and historians employing economic theoryto shape and organize their material, this view is understandablywidespread.4 Yet, like many historical cliches, Croce's dictum ismore frequently stated than subjected to scholarly verification, whilethe implications of the remark are never explicitly spelt out. Have* My interest in this subject was first aroused when I attended a graduateseminarin Oxford run by Dr. R. M. Hartwell in 1975, and was further strengthened byhearing a lecture given by Professor A. O. Hirschman at the Institute for AdvancedStudy, Princeton, in 1980. As far as this article is concerned, I am deeply grateful toSir John Plumb and Professor Barry Supple for their careful and helpful commentson an earlier draft.H. Butterfield, GeorgeIII and the Historians(London, 1957), pp. 8-Io.2 R. M. Hartwell, TheIndustrialRevolution and EconomicGrowth(London, 1971),p. 42

3 B. Croce, Historyas theStudy of Liberty London, 1941), p. I9; E. H. Carr, Whatis History?(Harmondsworth, 1964), pp. 20-I, 24; H. R. Trevor-Roper, "The Pastand the Present: History and Sociology", Past and Present,no. 42 (Feb. I969), p. I5;G. R. Elton, The Practiceof History(London, 1969), pp. 131-2; J. H. Plumb, editorialintroduction to R. Porter, English Societyin theEighteenthCentury Harmondsworth,1982), p. 7; M. I. Finley, Aspectsof Antiquity:Discoveriesand ControversiesLondon,1968), p. 6. For three outstanding attempts to illustrate this, see W. K. Ferguson,The Renaissance n Historical Thought:Five Centuriesof InterpretationBoston, 1948);P. Geyl, Napoleon: For and Against (London, 1949); Butterfield, GeorgeIII and theHistorians. For a different formulation, which stands this cliche on its head, seeJ. H. Hexter, Reappraisals in History, 2nd edn. (Chicago, I979), p. 9. For analternative concept of "contemporary history" as the study of "the time when theproblems which are actual in the world today first take visible shape", see G.Barraclough,An Introduction o Contemporary istory (Harmondsworth, 1967), pp. 9-24; E. L. Woodward, "The Study of ContemporaryHistory", Jl. Contemporary ist.,i (1966), pp. I-I3.4 See, for example, M. W. Flinn, TheOriginsof theIndustrialRevolution(London,1966), p. I; P. Mathias, "Living with the Neighbours: The Role of EconomicHistory", in N. B. Harte (ed.), The Study of EconomicHistory:CollectedInauguralLectures, 1893-1970 (London, 1971), p. 372; B. E. Supple (ed.), The ExperienceofEconomicGrowth(New York, 1963), introduction, p. 5.


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successive generations of economic historians really rewritten theirhistory in accordance with the preoccupations of the present? Andif so, what is the significance of that for their subject?This article isno more than a preliminary attempt to address such questions. Itsprimaryobjective is to see whether the corpusof writing by economichistorians on the Industrial Revolution can be usefully described inthis way. And, to the extent that it can, the second objective is tospeculate as to how, exactly, this happens.Like Ferguson's study of the Renaissance in historical thought,the concern here is with the mirrored reflection of a past historicalphenomenon, rather than with the phenomenon itself.5 Of necessity,its scope is restricted to the more general and seminal works, andleaves out many specialized monographs and business histories.Moreover, the quantity of writing analysed differs from generationto generation in accordance with the fluctuations in the output ofpublished works.6 Above all, it is important to stress that thisarticle does not suggest that economic historians' perceptions ofthe Industrial Revolution are totally conditioned by contemporarycriteria. On the contrary, the questions being considered here aremerely how and why it is, in any given generation, that one particularinterpretationof the Industrial Revolution always seems to be morewidespread than others.Accordingly, this article suggests four phases into which economichistory writing may be divided during the hundred years sinceToynbee's Lectures on the Industrial Revolution effectively beganmodern discussion of the subject.7 The first section explores theyears to the I920s, when contemporary preoccupations with socialsurveys and poverty influenced the prevailing interpretation of theIndustrial Revolution, which emphasized its disagreeable humanconsequences. By contrast, the second generationof economic histori-ans, writing from the mid-1920s to the early I950s, reflected currentconcerns with war and economic fluctuationsby stressingthe cyclicalnature of the industrialization process. Their successors, who wrotefrom the mid-195os to the early I970S, were influenced by the riseof development economics and by the post-war efflorescence ofwestern capitalism and so rewrote the Industrial Revolution oncemore, this time as the first instance of "economic growth". Finally,since I974, as economic growth has become simultaneously lessattractive and less attainable, the Industrial Revolution has beengiven another new identity, this time as something less spectacularand more evolutionary than was previously supposed. Such is the

5 Ferguson, Renaissancein Historical Thought,p. 386.6 See N. B. Harte, "Trends in Publications on the Economic and Social Historyof Great Britain and Ireland, 1925-74", Econ. Hist. Rev., 2nd ser., xxx (1977), esp.pp. 23-6.7 A. Toynbee, Lectureson the IndustrialRevolution in England (London, I884).

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PRESENT AND PAST IN THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 133outline of economic history writing on the Industrial Revolution tobe advanced here. And, in the light of it, a more speculativeattemptwill then be made to explore the mechanism by which this process ofgenerational change and interpretationalevolution actually operates.

IThe years from the I88os to the early I920s were the first period inwhich self-conscious economic historians investigated the IndustrialRevolution, and they did so against a complex backgroundof hopesand fears about the society and economy of the time, which greatlyinfluenced the perspective they took on it. Neo-classical economistslike Marshall were moderately buoyant about the economy duringthis period: but for politicians, businessmen and landowners, theprospectsseemed less bright.8Prices were falling, profitswere corres-pondingly reduced, and foreign competition was growing: faithin unlimited economic progress was greatly diminished.9 Royalcommissions investigated depressions in industry, trade and agricul-ture; the Boer War revealed a nation whose militarywere incompet-ent and whose manhood was unfit; and tariffreform was partlybasedon a recognition that there were, in the economy, unmistakablesignsof decay.10 At the same time, the working class was increasinglyenfranchised, there was a growing belief that government must bemore actively interventionist on their behalf, trade-unionist mem-bership went up remarkably,and there were explosions of industrialunrest in the i88os and early I9IOs.More particularly, from the I88os, there was a major revival ofinterest in the "condition of England" question, particularlywithregardto health, housing and poverty. The reasonsfor this "remark-able flowering in the social concern of the English middle classes"in that decade, and the extent to which it did (or did not) representa new departure in social and sociological thought, remain sourcesof academic controversy.1 But what is not in dispute is the massiveoutpouring of best-selling literatureon the subject in the thirty yearsbefore the First World War, including the Royal Commission n theHousing of the WorkingClass, the surveys by Booth and Rowntree,the investigative journalism sparked off by Mearns'sBitter Cry, theevocations of slum life in novels such as Morrison's Child of theJagow, and the writings of members of the Liberal intelligentsia

8 D. Fraser, The Evolution of the British WelfareState (London, 1973), p. 124.9 D. Winch, Economicsand Policy: A HistoricalStudy (London, 1972), pp. 33-4.10B. B. Gilbert, The Evolutionof National Insurance n GreatBritain: The Originsof the WelfareState (London, 1966), p. 83.n Winch, Economicsand Policy, p. 34; G. Stedman Jones, OutcastLondon:A Studyin the Relations betweenClasses in VictorianSociety(Harmondsworth, 1976), esp. chs.II, I6, 17. But cf. E. P. Hennock, "Poverty and Social Theory in England: TheExperience of the Eighteen-Eighties", Social Hist., i (I976).


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such as C. F. G. Masterman.12 Together, this great outpouringconstituted a guilt-ridden, fearful recognition that poverty andsqualor were not the product of individual shortcomings, but wereendemic in a system which created so much want in the midst of somuch plenty. It was, as Henry George put it memorably, "thisassociation of poverty with progress" which was "the great enigmaof our times".13 "What", enquired Asquith, reformulatingthe sameproposition more broadly:is the use of talking about Empire if here, at its very centre, there is always to befound a mass of people, stunted in education, a prey of intemperance, huddled andcongested beyond the possibility of realizing in any true sense either social ordomestic life?14

Such contemporary revelations exerted a powerful influence, di-verting scholarly attention towards what G. N. Clark felicitouslydescribed as "social concern with economic conditions".'1 For themajority of people, it seemed, the Industrial Revolution had notworked,and it was the desire to discover what had gone wrong whichprompted many of the pioneering studies of the economy of lateeighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England. Indeed, it wasToynbee himself who stated most explicitly this close link betweenthe present and the past in the history of the IndustrialRevolution."It would be well", he argued:if in studying the past we could always bear in mind the problems of the present. . . You must have some principle of selection, and you could not have a betterone than to pay special attention to the history of the social problems which areagitating the world now, for you may be sure that they are problems not oftemporary but of lasting importance.16Toynbee, as Milner later explained, "was on fire with the idea of agreat improvement" in the material condition of the workingclasses,and precisely exemplified that upper-middle-class sense of guiltwhich Beatrice Webb was later to describe.17 Indeed, in My Appren-ticeshipshe quoted with approval Toynbee's most anguished andcontrite words:

We - the middle classes, I mean, not merely the very rich - we have neglectedyou; instead of justice we have offered you charity; and instead of sympathy wehave offered you hard and unreal advice; but I think we are changing ... We havewronged you; we have sinned against you grievously .. .; but if you will forgiveus ... we will serve you, we will devote our lives to your service.18This desire to locate the historicalorigins of unacceptablecontem-porary social conditions in the Industrial Revolution was equally12 S. Hynes, The EdwardianTurnofMind (Princeton, I968), pp. 54-69; H. J. Dyos,"The Slums of Victorian London", in his Exploringthe UrbanPast: Essaysin UrbanHistory, ed. D. Cannadine and D. Reeder (Cambridge, 1982), pp. I33-9.33H. George, Poverty and Progress(London, 1883), pp. 6-7.14 Gilbert, Evolution of National Insurance,p. 77, and ch. I generally.5 G. N. Clark, The Idea of the IndustrialRevolution(Glasgow, I953), p. 27.16 Toynbee, Lectureson the IndustrialRevolution, pp. 3I-2.7 Lord Milner, "Reminiscence", in ibid. (1908 edn.), pp. xi, xxi.18 B. Webb, My ApprenticeshipLondon, 1926), pp. 182-3.

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PRESENT AND PAST IN THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 135strong in the Hammonds and Webbs. As P. F. Clarkeexplains, theHammonds did make "an effort at objectivity which gave their workits scholarly value"; but at the same time they were also "deeplycommitted political figures". The VillageLabourer, or instance, wasdescribed by the Longmans reader as "sound historically, thoughwritten from a radical point of view", and by Gilbert Murray asshowing "how blind the whole upper and middle class can be to thecondition of the poor" - a phrase which had particularly strongresonances given the prevailing concerns of the time. Indeed, as ananti-landlord polemic, the book provided a historical preface toLloyd George'sland campaign, with its argumentthat, between I760and I830, the outcome might have been different in the countrysideif only the upper classes had been more responsible. Likewise, itssequel, The Town Labourer,was anti-capital and anti-laissez-faire,"destroying", as Tawney explained, "the historical assumptions onwhich our modern slavery is based".19 Above all, the Hammonds'books provided, in their portraits of rapacious landlords and con-scienceless capitalists, historical support for the view that free enter-prise must be controlled, that the state must be more interventionist,and that trade unions should be protected and strengthened.

The Webbs' writings on the Industrial Revolution contained asimilar prescriptive thrust. Beatrice was profoundly influenced byher early work for Booth, was racked with guilt about the sufferingsof the lower classes, and saw explicit links between the bad conditionsof the present and the horrors of the Industrial Revolution:A study of British blue books, illuminated by my own investigations into thechronic poverty of our great cities, opened my eyes to the workers' side of thepicture. To the working class of Great Britainin the latter half of the eighteenth andfirst half of the nineteenth century- that is four-fifthsof the entirepopulation- the"Industrial Revolution" . . .must have appeared . . . as a gigantic and cruelexperiment which, insofar as it was affecting their homes, their health, theirsubsistence and their pleasure, was proving a calamitous failure.20For Beatrice,as for Sidney, the pastrecord andpresentcircumstancesboth showed that what was needed was "collective regulation ofthe conditions of employment . . .by legislative enactment or bycollective bargaining":21 n short, an end to laissez-faire,by promot-ing stronger unions and greaterstate intervention. For the Webbs asfor the Hammonds, their writings about the Industrial Revolutionwere essentially historical prefaces to contemporary problems. AsBeatrice explained, their History of Trade Unions was "little more

than a historical introduction to the task we had set before us: thescientific analysis of the structure and function of British tradeunions", and their Historyof Local Governmentwas but the prologue19 P. F. Clarke, Liberalsand Social Democrats Cambridge, 1978), pp. 154-63, 187-91, 243-52.20 Webb, My Apprenticeship,pp. 343-4.21 Ibid., p. 348.


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I36 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER I03to "an analysis of English local government as it existed in our owntime for the use of would-be reformers".22

Thus influenced and motivated, Toynbee, the Hammonds and theWebbs established the dominant interpretation of the IndustrialRevolution in their generation as "the history of the social problemswhich are agitating the world now". It was rapid; it was terrible;and it was so primarily because of a lack of humane governmentintervention. For Toynbee, the old order "was suddenly broken inpieces by the mighty blows of the steam engine and the powerloom";innovations "destroyed the old world and built a new one"; it wasa period of "economic revolution and anarchy".23For the Webbs,the Industrial Revolution was characterizedby "wholesaleadoptionof power-driven machinery and the factory system", which "tookplacearound I780".24 And for the Hammonds it "separatedEnglandfrom her past as completely as the political revolution separatedFrance from her past"; the "historyof the earlyyearsof the IndustrialRevolution" was "a history of vast and rapid expansion"; it was"a departure in which man passed definitely from one world toanother".2But it was the terrible social results - with the unacceptableconsequences of which they were still living in their own timethat most gripped them. "We now approach", Toynbee wrote in hisfamous passage:

a darker period - a period as disastrous and as terrible as any through which anation ever passed; disastrous and terriblebecause, side by side with agreatincreasein wealth was seen an enormous increase in pauperism; and production on a vastscale, the result of free competition, led to a rapid alienation of classes and to thedegradation of a large body of producers.26"The history of England", agreed the Hammonds:

at the time discussed in these pages reads like a history of civil war . . . Surely,never since the days when populations were sold into slavery did a fate moresweeping overtake a people than the fate that covered the hills and valleys ofLancashire and the West Riding with .. .factory towns.27

For them, the Industrial Revolution created "a profane and brutalsystem that spared neither soul nor body, and denied to men andwomen the right to human treatment", leading to slaveryon a scalecomparable to ancient Egypt, the Roman empire or the American22 Beatrice Webb, Our Partnership London, 1948), 147-52. See also V. L. Allen,"A Methodological Critique of the Webbs as Trade Union Historians", Bull. Soc.

for the Study of LabourHist., iv (1962), pp. 4-5.23 Toynbee, Lectureson the IndustrialRevolution, pp. 31-2.24 S. and B. Webb, TheHistoryof Trade Unionism London, 1911 edn.), pp. 34-5.25 J. L. and B. Hammond, The Town Labourer,1760-1832: The New Civilization(London, 1917), pp. 3, 98; J. L. and B. Hammond, The Rise of Moder Industry(London, 1925), p. 240.26 Toynbee, Lectureson the IndustrialRevolution, p. 84.27 J. L. and B. Hammond, The Skilled Labourer,1760-1832 (London, 1919), pp.I, 4.


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PRESENT AND PAST IN THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 137plantations.28 And for the Webbs, the years 1787-1837 saw "apositive decline in the standard of life" of the workers, left "thelabourera landless strangerin his own country", and created townswhere "paving, cleansing, lighting and watching were all lacking",and where "the crowding together of tens of thousands of poverty-stricken persons was creating unspeakable nuisances". In short, theIndustrialRevolution produced "results to the common people moreterrible in prolonged agony than those of any war".29What made this especially dreadfulwere the "evils of unrestrictedand unregulatedcapitalism".30 Laissez-faire,the new ideology of theruling and capitalist classes, which denied to the labourerthe fruitsof his work, and condemned him to a life of povertyand squalor,wasassailed with sustained and impassioned disapproval. For Toynbee,"complete and unhesitating trust in individual self-interest"was thesame as "the weak being trampled under foot". "This kind ofcompetition", he concluded, "has to be checked".31 In The TownLabourer,the Hammonds devoted two chapters to the minds of theruling class, condemning them as the "generation that left theworkmen to their fate in the Industrial Revolution", who were"powerless and helpless, needing the protection of the law andparliament"which, of course, they did not obtain.32And the Webbs,too, saw laissez-faire,"fully established in Parliamentas an authorita-tive industrial doctrine of political economy", as leading to squalidconditions in industrial towns and to the suppressionof tradeunions."With free competition", they concluded, "and privateproperty inland and capital, no individual can possibly obtain the full fruits ofhis own labour".33This interpretation of the Industrial Revolution as rapid, terribleand laissez-faire, was not only articulated by other historians whowere generally radical in their political views, but also by those whowere not. In the thirty years before the First World War, divisionshardened between the Marshallian, neo-classical economic theorists(who tended to be in favour of laissez-faireand opposed to tariffreform), and the "historical economists" (who, whether Fabian,Liberal, Unionist or Conservative, favoured both collectivism and

28 Hammond, Town Labourer,pp. 31, 39, 59, 171; Hammond, Rise of ModernIndustry, pp. 196, 232, 247.29 S. Webb, Labourin the LongestReign (Fabian tract no. 75, London, 1897), p.2; S. Webb, "Historic", in Fabian Essays, 6th edn. (London, 1962), p. 69; S. and B.Webb, The Decay of Capitalist Civilisation (London, 1923), p. 8; S. and B. Webb,English Local Government rom the Revolution to the Municipal CorporationsAct, 8vols. (London, 1906-29), i, The Parish and the County, p. 63.30 Webb, My Apprenticeship,p. 178, 207.31 Toynbee, Lectureson the IndustrialRevolution, pp. 83-7.32 Hammond, Town Labourer,chs. IO-II, esp. p. 217.33 Webb, Historyof Trade Unionism,pp. 49-50, 91-2.


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tariff reform).34 This widening intellectual gulf - in which thescientificpretensionsof the academic, abstract,deductive economistswere increasingly criticized by the empirical investigations of theeconomic historians - transcended those of party politics. TheWebbs, for instance, turned emphatically away from the ahistoricaltheorizing of Marshall, and deliberatelyfounded the London Schoolof Economics in I895, as a centre for the collection of empiricaldata, and as a counterpoise to MarshallianCambridge. To it, theyappointed W. Cunningham and sought to attract W. J. Ashley,neither of whom shared their party-political loyalties, but both ofwhom were in favour of greater government intervention.35

So, because most economic historians were defining themselvesagainst the laissez-faire heoreticians, the majorityof them - regard-less of their general ideological and political standpoint - wrote ofthe Industrial Revolution as nasty, mean, brutish and fast. ForAshley, it was characterizedby "greatsocialdangersand difficulties"and by a state that was too slow to intervene.36 For Cunningham,its "rapidity and violence" brought "an immense amount of suffer-ing", in part because laissez-faire "gave the capitalist an excuse fordisclaiming any responsibility for the misery among his opera-tives".37For Beard, it came, "suddenly, like a thunderboltfrom theclear sky", creating a system in which "the horrors of the industrialconditions under unrestrained capitalism" were likened to slaveryor the reign of terror.38For Gibbins, the "change was sudden andviolent", the "condition of the mass of the people . . . was one ofdeepest depression", and the "partialityof the legislature"preventedthe working class from taking "common measuresin self-defence".39For Thorold Rogers, it brought "profound suffering", and was "theworst time . . . in the whole history of English labour", when tradeunions were "repressed with passionate violence and malignantwatchfulness", and the legislature was intoxicated by laissez-faire.40And for Townsend Warner, the worst horror was an ideology which,

34 Winch, Economicsand Policy, pp. 54, 63-6; A. M. McBriar, Fabian Socialismand English Politics, 1884 to 1918 (Cambridge, 1962), pp. 5I-7.35 J. Maloney, "Marshall, Cunninghamand the Emerging Economics Profession",Econ. Hist. Rev., 2nd ser., xxix (1976), pp. 440-9; J. Maloney, "The Professionalisa-tion of Economics in Britain, I870-I914" (Univ. of Nottingham Ph.D. thesis, 1981),chs. 3, 6; B. Semmel, Imperialism and Social Reform: English Social-ImperialistThought,1895-1914 (London, 1960), pp. 26-7, 67-73, 82, 131-3, and chs. IO-II.36 W. J. Ashley, The EconomicOrganisationof England:An OutlineHistory(Lon-don, 1914), pp. I59-61.37 W. Cunningham, The Growthof English Industryand Commercen Modem Times,6th edn. (Cambridge, 1907), pp. 613, 668, 737-45.38 C. Beard, The IndustrialRevolution (London, I90I), pp. 23, 59.39 H. de B. Gibbins, Industry n England:Historical Outlines(London, 1896), pp.341, 421, 42340 J. E. Thorold Rogers, Six Centuries f Workand Wages(London, 1884), pp. 485,492, 523-5.

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PRESENT AND PAST IN THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION I39in the name of freedom for all, was in practice "freedom for powerto compete with weakness".41

For all these historians, as much as for Toynbee, the Hammondsand the Webbs, the history of the Industrial Revolution showed theneed for more intervention by government. There might be differentviews as to precisely how much collectivism there should be; but thepicture of a more active government on one side, and of morepowerful trade unions on the other, was one to which they alladhered. Thorold Rogers called for such action, because "every actof the legislaturewhich seems to interfere with the doctrine of laissez-faire . . . has added ... to the general well-being of society".42Townsend Warner noted approvingly that "the tendency to ask forgovernment interference in industrial concerns generally is on theincrease".43 Beard felt that there was an overwhelming need forreconstruction after the chaos of the IndustrialRevolution, and that"a corporate society is the hope for the future".44 And Ashley,after describing the growth of factory legislation and trade unions,remarked approvingly that:

Society is feeling its way, with painful steps, towards a corporate organization ofindustry on the side alike of the employers and the employed; to be then moreharmoniously, let us hope, associated together - with the state alert but intelligentin the background to protect the interests of the community.45Set against this background of so all-pervasivea view, Clapham'sriposte in the first volume of his EconomicHistory of Modem Britainseems even more pointed than is usually allowed, challenging allthree facets of the Industrial Revolution which most earlier writershad stressed. In the first place, he offered a different picture of itstiming from that which had prevailed since Toynbee. He showedhow gradual and localized the Industrial Revolution was, stressed"the diversity of the nationaleconomic life", examined in greatdetailthe predominant and non-mechanized industries, and noted howlittle change there had been by 1851. His book was, in HerbertHeaton's phrase, a "study in slow motion", which repeatedlyinsistedthat "no single British industry had passed through a completetechnological revolution before 1830". "The Lancashire cotton oper-ative", Claphamnoted, "was not the representativeworkmanof theBritain of King George IV"; "the man of the crowded countrysidewas still the typical Englishman"; "the steam engine itself . . .

41 G. Townsend Warner, Landmarks n English IndustrialHistory(London, I889),pp. 313-I4.42 Thorold Rogers, Six Centuriesof Workand Wages, pp. 527-8.43 Townsend Warner, Landmarks n English IndustrialHistory, p. 355.44 Beard, Industrial Revolution, p. 3.45 Ashley, EconomicOrganisationof England, p. I90.


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was still small and, outside a limited group of leading industries,comparatively little used".46More explicitly, Clapham attacked "the legend that everythingwas getting worse for the working man", by presenting statisticswhich showed, on the contrary, that in the period after I790, "forevery class of urban or industrial labourer about which informationis available except - a grave exception - such dying trades ascommon hand loom cotton weaving, wages had risen markedlyduring the intervening sixty years".47 Finally, he examined therecord of the government and the legislature, not in the light ofcriticisms retrospectively levelled, but by the more realistic criterion

of what the alternatives were at the time:Judged as governments are perhaps entitled to be judged, not by what provedpracticable in a later and more experienced day, not by what reformers and poetsdreamed and were not called upon to accomplish, but by the achievement of othergovernments in their own day, that of Britain . . . makes a creditable showing.48Here Claphamwas offering an interpretationof the Industrial Revol-ution deliberately opposed to that which had hitherto prevailed. Itwas partly based on the earlier work of Bowley and Wood, and therehad been other, earlier remarks of a tentatively optimistic nature.49But Claphamwas the first major figure to respond so explicitly, andto make so powerful an opposed case, albeit largelywithin the termsof reference already laid down.He was soon followed by two others. Redford, in his syntheticaccount, wrote explicitly in opposition to "the prematuregeneraliza-tions of popular textbooks", and began his survey by stating that"the whole trend of modern research has been to show that theeconomic changes of the eighteenth century were less sudden, lessdramatic and less catastrophic than Toynbee and his disciplesthought".50 He went on, explicitly acknowledging his debt to Clap-ham, to stress that "even in the cotton industry the changeswere farless revolutionary than has often been supposed"; that "there wasnothing revolutionaryabout the changes which were taking place inthe metal and mining industries"; that throughout the first quarterof the nineteenth century, in cotton, "water power was still moreimportant than steam power, even in this most progressive branchof manufacture"; and that the evidence for distress needed to be

46 J. H. Clapham, An EconomicHistory of Modem Britain, 3 vols. (Cambridge,1926-38), i, The Early Railway Age, 1820-I950, pp. viii, 41, 66, 142, I55.47 Ibid., pp. vii, 561.48 Ibid., pp. 315-I6.49 G. H. Wood, "The Course of Average Wages between I790 and I860", Econ.Jl., ix (I899); A. L. Bowley, Wagesin the UnitedKingdom n the NineteenthCentury(Cambridge, I900); G. W. Daniels, The Early English CottonIndustry(Manchester,1920), pp. 145-8; G. Unwin et al., Samuel Oldknowand theArkwrights Manchester,1924), pp. 241-2.50 A. Redford, The EconomicHistory of England, 1760-1860 (London, 1931), pp.v, 4.

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PRESENT AND PAST IN THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 141analysed in a more careful (and guardedly optimistic) light than wasusually the case. "No modern student of economic history", hesuggested, having summarized the essence of the Toynbee view,"would allow these statements to pass without challenge".51The same interpretation, again consciously indebted to Clapham,was advanced by Lipson, in his larger-scalework published at thesame time. By taking a longer view of economic progress, from themid-sixteenth century to the Industrial Revolution itself, Lipson feltable to argue that the interpretation of Toynbee et al. placed toomuch stress on change, while ignoring "the fundamental resemblan-ces which often lie beneath the surface" in apparently dissimilarperiods. It was, he felt, "the continuity of economic development"which "must deeply colour our interpretation of the IndustrialRevolution". On the one hand, "large undertakingsin the extractiveindustries, the textile manufacturers and the metal trades were arecognizedfeatureof the old industrialsystem"; on the other, "small-scale production was still common after the IndustrialRevolution".The conflict between capitaland labour went back some five hundredyears;while the movement towardslaissez-faire ong antedatedAdamSmith. Accordingly, he summarized his argument as follows: "The'Industrial Revolution' constituted no breach in the existing order,but was part of a continuous movement which had already mademarked advance".52Taken together, the work of Clapham,Redford and Lipson consti-tuted a formidable assaulton the Toynbee-Hammonds-Webbs inter-pretation of the Industrial Revolution. But in two ways, the noveltyand the appeal of what they were saying was minimized. In the firstplace, it should be clear that they all wrote, and all acknowledgedthat they were writing, within the terms of reference, the interpreta-tional framework, already specified by these earlier writers. Theneed to attack "the prematuregeneralizationsof text books", whichstated that the Industrial Revolution was rapid, terrible and laissez-faire, only served to show how powerful those generalizationsactu-ally were in defining the problem. Moreover, whatever the force ofthis dissenting argument, it was to be many years before develop-ments in the contemporary economy made it sufficiently "relevant"for it to be taken up more generally. In the meantime, in the nextgeneration,the dramaticallychangedcircumstancesof thecontempor-ary economy encouraged another interpretation of the IndustrialRevolution, which had little more in common with the Clapham,

51 Ibid., pp. 12-13, 24, 57-65, 78-93, III-17.52 E. Lipson, The Age of Mercantilism,2 vols. [2nd edn. of vols. ii and iii of hisThe EconomicHistory of England] (London, 1934), i, pp. vi, 8, and ii, pp. 53, 249.See also E. Lipson, "England in the Age of Mercantilism", Jl. Econ. and BusinessHist., iv (1932), pp. 691-3, 699, 705.


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Lipson and Redford view than it did with that against which theywere reacting.II

The period from the mid-I92os to the early 1950s marks the seconddistinctive phase in the historiographyof the Industrial Revolution.Like the era before, it was characterized by pessimism about theeconomy and the future of capitalism, but this time it was globalrather than merely national. For the internationalsystem which hadworked relatively smoothly in the halcyon days of the Gold Standardhad collapsed beyond recovery after the First World War. In 1923,the Webbs had published TheDecay of CapitalistCivilisation,whichargued that, from 1850, "it has been receding from defeat to de-feat".53 But, as M. M. Postan pointed out a decade later, the"ossification of the system" was so widespread that such pessimismwas no longer the monopoly of the left:Among the many things which have affected the position of socialists in the post-war world has been the loss of their exclusive rights in "the decline of capitalism". . .However much they differ about the origin and the causation, they all agreeabout the reality of the disease and its symptoms. The dwindling of internationaltrade, the cessation of international migrations, the strangulationof internationalcredit, recur in official speeches and in letters to the press.54And this anxiety was only further fuelled by the Second WorldWar, as Schumpeter explained in 1943. "It is", he observed, "acommonplace that capitalist society is, and for some time has been,in a state of decay".55Contemporarieswere most concerned, not with those elements ofgrowth which economic historians have retrospectively come todiscern in the inter-war economy, but with the destabilizing effectsof war, the decline of the great staples, the unprecedentedly high

level of unemployment, and the violent cyclical fluctuations in theeconomy. The immediate post-war boom collapsed in the slump of1921-2 (when the Webbs wrote TheDecay of CapitalistCivilisation),and was succeeded by a weak and uneven upswing, which reachedits high point in I929. There followed the greatcrash, with its troughin I932 (shortly after which Postan wrote his article), and then agradual revival, which lasted until 1937, after which there was asharp downswing, only arrestedby the greaterdisasterof the SecondWorld War. The years immediately after 1945were almost as uncer-tain: the odd numbered years were in general bad (especially withdevaluation in 1949), and the even numbered years were generally

53 Webb, Decay of Capitalist Civilisation, p. 4.54 M. M. Postan, "Recent Trends in the Accumulation of Capital", Econ. Hist.Rev., Ist ser., vi (1935), p. I.55 Quoted in D. S. Landes, The UnboundPrometheus:TechnologicalChangeandIndustrialDevelopment n WesternEurope rom 1750 to the Present(Cambridge, 1969),p. 536.



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PRESENT AND PAST IN THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 143good (especially with the Korean War boom of 1950), while the early1950s were clouded by the fear of a majorslump in the United States.

Not surprisingly, pessimism and anxiety remained the dominantmood in the years immediately after 1945. Writing two years later,for example, SirOliver Franks stressed how Oxford undergraduates,shortly to be thrust upon the job market, were worried about thefuture. "The world to which they look forward", he noted, "seemsinsecure, impoverished and uncertain. Their frame of mind looksback beyond the 1940s to the 1930s. What they fear is large-scaleunemployment".56 In I952, a conference was held in England onthe trade cycle, which concluded that, although recent fluctuationshad not been quite as severe as in the inter-waryears, this "shouldnot tempt us to draw hasty conclusions about the disappearanceofthe old cycle". On the contrary, as E. A. G. Robinson observed,"anyone who has lived through the past seven years in close touchwith the changing fortunes of the British economy would find itimpossible to think of that period as one of undisturbed tranquill-ity".57 In 1953, C. A. R. Crosland, sharing the general anxiety thatthere might be a United States slump in the near future, suggestedthat "cyclical changes . . .would continue, with the recession of1937-8 perhaps providing an approximate norm".58And it was thesame anxiety which stimulated J. K. Galbraithto write the historyof the last great crash, in the hope that it might provide some usefulinsights for the future.59Predictably, the main work of professional economists in theseyears was concerned with these cyclical fluctuations. Most of thestatistics of such movements were compiled in the United Stateswhere, under the directorship of Wesley C. Mitchell and A. F.Burns, the National Bureau of Economic Researchproduceda seriesof books of ever-increasingquantitative precision and refinement.60Attempts were made to establish how far there was an internationalcycle, to discern what features successive cycles had in common,

56 Sir 0. Franks, CentralPlanning and Control n War and Peace (London, I947),p. 21.57 E. A. G. Robinson, "Industrial Fluctuations in the United Kingdom, 1946-52",in E. Lundberg (ed.), The BusinessCycle in thePost-WarWorld(London, 1955), pp.37-8. See also the introduction, p. xv.58 C. A. R. Crosland, Britain's Economic Problems(London, 1953), p. I83.59 J. K. Galbraith, TheGreatCrash, 1929, 2nd edn. (Boston, 1961), pp. ix, 4, 193-5. The book was first published in I955.60 See, for example, W. C. Mitchell, Business Cycles (London, 1913); W. C.Mitchell, Business Cycles: The Problem and the Setting (London, 1927); W. C.Mitchell, Business Cycles and their Causes (London, 1950); W. L. Thorp, BusinessAnnals (London, 1926); A. F. Burns and W. C. Mitchell, MeasuringBusinessCycles(London, 1946). For evidence of the continuing liveliness of trade cycle literature inthe decade after the Second World War, see the works discussed in two review articles:H. M. Somers, "What Generally Happens during Business Cycles - and Why", Jl.Econ. Hist., xii (1952); H. H. Segal, "Business Cycles: Methodology, Research andPublic Policy", Jl. Econ. Hist., xiv (I954).


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and to measure the duration and amplitude of such movements.61Explaining them, however, proved to be more difficult. One ap-proachwas to look for exogenous causes, so-called "randomshocks",such as war(obviously attractive in the aftermathof 1914-18), climateor political crisis. But in general, endogenous explanations, whichsought to discern the dynamics of the cycle within the economyitself, proved to be more popular. For Hawtrey, the business cyclewas a credit cycle which could best be explained in monetaryterms.For Schumpeter, it was the long waves which mattered most, andthese were precisely related to the clustering of innovations. But forKeynes, it was again the shorter run fluctuations which concernedhim, which he explained in terms of effective demand, especiallyinvestment.For economists with a historical interest, there was an obviousappeal in seeing whether these contemporary cycles could be tracedback as far as the Industrial Revolution itself. And for the historianfamiliarwith economic theory, there was an equally strong tempta-tion to apply it directly to the period of the IndustrialRevolution tosee what might emerge if it was viewed from a cyclical perspective.Either way, these approachesserved to establish new interpretationsof the Industrial Revolution itself, which were neither indebted to,nor derived from, the earlier interpretationalmould. More specific-ally, the obvious parallelsbetween the wars of 1793-1815 and 1914-i8, and the phases of readjustment and depression which followedin both cases, served to focus attention more sharply still on theperiodfrom the I79os to the I82os. At a time when the Gold Standardhad broken down in the twentieth century, there was an obvioustemptation to look at the last period, almost exactly one hundredyears ago, when money, currency, banking and finance had been inso confused and unstable a state. As T. E. Gregoryexplained, "theeconomic and, in particular, the monetary problems which we arefacing today have a startling resemblance to those which were thesubject matter of contention for two generations a century ago".62One result of this shift in contemporary concerns was a revivedinterest in the extensive materialprovided on cyclical fluctuations inTooke and Newmarch's massive Historyof Prices, which covered theyears from 1793 to 1856, and which was to furnish much of the rawdata used by those who studied the trade cycle in its historicalsetting.63 One such study, which embodied the applied economist's61 The best guide to this topic is the introduction in D. H. Aldcroft and P. Fearon(eds.), British EconomicFluctuations,I790-I939 (London, 1972), esp. pp. I-8, 14-25,43-56.62 T. E. Gregory,An Introductiono Tookeand Newmarch's"A Historyof Pricesandof the State of the Circulation rom 1792 to 1856" (London, 1928), p. 8.63 T. Tooke and W. Newmarch, A Historyof Prices andof theStateof the Circulationduringthe YearsI793-I856, 6 vols. (London, I838-57).

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PRESENT AND PAST IN THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 145approach, was Thorp's BusinessAnnals, which included a survey ofthe British business cycle from the 1790s to the present.64At aboutthe same time, Silberling's calculations illustrated the historian'sapproach, providing detailed statistics for commodity prices, bank-ruptcies and note issues.65 But it was not until 1933 that W. O.Henderson made a plea for the systematic study of the trade cyclefrom a historical standpoint. "The work that has been done on thesubject", he lamented, "has been mainly from the point of view ofthe economist not of the historian". But, he argued, because thedifferences between cycles were at least as great as the similarities,the time had come when a historical approachwas required.66

In fact, the first sustained study of the Industrial Revolution as acyclical phenomenon was more applied than historical. In the 90oos,the young William Beveridge had begun to collect data on suchmatters as climate, wages, prices and births, with a view to taking"the pulse of the nation".67 More particularly, he was anxious toestablish the impact which cyclical fluctuations made on unemploy-ment. Accordingly, the first edition of Unemployment: ProblemofIndustry I909) had contained a survey of business cycles from I860to 90o8, and in the second edition (1930), he extended his analysisto incorporate prevailing monetary theory. But he made no attemptto see the Industrial Revolution in the same terms. "The contrast",he noted:

between the times before and after 1858 is striking. It is not possible before thento find a cyclical fluctuation of trade in the sense in which such fluctuation is foundlater, as an influence dominant alike over finance and trade in the narrow sense,and over industry and the whole economic life of the nation.68Since these business fluctuations were a monetary phenomenon,largelydetermined by the credit cycle, by definition they "could notbecome regular till the country has a central bank adopting anautomatic credit control".In the late I930s, Beveridge turned to this matter again, andexamined the I929-37 cycle where, he noticed, textile and metalindustries (both largely dependent on foreign markets) led the wayinto and out of depression.69Sinceby this time he hadalsoabandonedthe monetary view that the trade cycle was primarilya credit cycle,he now turned back to examine the Industrial Revolution itself.Contrary to his earlier views, the indexes of industrial production

64 Thorp, Business Annals, pp. 150-62.65 N. J. Silberling, "British Prices and Business Cycles, I779-I850", Rev. Econ.Statistics, v (1923), supplement, pp. 219-62.66 W. 0. Henderson, "Trade Cycles in the Nineteenth Century", History, xviii(I933), pp. 147-9, I53.67 J. Harris, WilliamBeveridge:A Biography(Oxford, I977), pp. 116-19.68 W. Beveridge, Unemployment:A Problemof Industry,2nd edn. (London, 1930),pp. 341-2.69 W. Beveridge, "Unemployment and the Trade Cycle", Econ. Jl., xlix (I939),PP. 54, 57, 61-2.


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which he constructed for the years 1785-1849 showed "generalagreement ... in respect of the main fluctuations", thus obliginghim publicly to retracthis earlier assertion that there were no cyclesin the Industrial Revolution. "The fluctuations of economicactivity",he concluded, ". .. reproduceso many of the features of the moderntrade cycle that we are bound to regard the trade cycle as havingbeen in operation, in essentials, at least from 1785".70 In a laterpaper, he showed that therewas the same connection in the IndustrialRevolution as in lateryears between cyclical fluctuationsand export-oriented industries, thereby demonstrating "the essential unity ofthe phenomenon" from the I78os to the I930s.71 Finally, in FullEmployment n a Free Society, he brought these findings together:". .. the cyclical movement from 1929 to 1938", he concluded, "isa lineal descendant of the successive fluctuationswhich have broughtinsecurity to all advanced industrial countries with an unplannedmarket economy ever since industry took its modern form".72As these words suggest, Beveridge's interest in the cyclicalaspectsof the IndustrialRevolution was as much motivatedby contemporaryconcerns as had been the interest of the Webbs and Hammonds inits social consequences. They sought a historical perspective onpoverty; he sought the same perspective on unemployment. As headmitted, his work was "an inductive study of the facts of fluctua-tion", and as such was as alien to Keynes, the prime theoreticianofBeveridge's generation, as the work of the Webbs had been toMarshall. Not surprisingly, the Webbs had appointed Beveridgedirector of the London School of Economics in 1919. UltimatelyBeveridge was prepared to concede that his "survey of facts offluctuation . . . leads to the same practicalconclusion as theoreticalanalysis . . .", namely that such cycles were an integral part of afree market economy.73 But, as a writer who had turned to theIndustrial Revolution in search of evidence to supporthis prescriptiveideas, he urged the theoreticians to take account in their abstractmodels of the link between cycles and export industries which he,by the inductive study of the facts, had been the first to discover.For Beveridge and the Industrial Revolution, present problemsdirected past research in the hope of finding future solutions.As such, Beveridge's cyclical picture of the IndustrialRevolutionwas the almost incidental by-product of his contemporaryconcerns.But the second, and larger study of cyclical fluctuations in the70 W. Beveridge, "The Trade Cycle in Britain before 1850", OxfordEcon. Papers,iii (I940), pp. 79, 102.71 W. Beveridge, "The Trade Cycle in Britain before I850: A Postscript", OxfordEcon. Papers, iv (1940), p. 75.72 W. Beveridge, Full Employment n a Free Society (London, I944), p. 27.73Ibid., pp. I02-3. For the background to Beveridge's thoughts, see Harris,William Beveridge, pp. 267, 285-6, 363-7, 390-I.



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PRESENT AND PAST IN THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 147Industrial Revolution undertaken in the I930s approximated moreclosely to the type of investigation Henderson had called for. In1940, W. W. Rostow completed his doctoralthesis on the fluctuationsof the British economy during the second half of the nineteenthcentury. It was, as he explained, "a conscious attempt ... to employmodern economic theory" and was especially indebted to Keynes,Harrod, Marshall and Pigou. It was both more historical and moretheoretical than Beveridge's work and so, "as current trade cycletheory would lead one to expect, the amount and characterof newinvestment was found to be the most important force in fluctuationsin output and employment".74 These conclusions were repeated inBritishEconomyof the NineteenthCentury,which offered this cyclicalpicture of the Industrial Revolution:

On the whole, the impression one receives is that the Industrial Revolution,regarded as a process of plant expansion and the installation of new industrialmethods and techniques, lurched forward in a highly discontinuous way, with ahigh concentration of decisions to expand, or to improve technique, occurring inthe later stages of the major cycles.75These findings were a spin-off from a largerprojectwhich Rostowhad joined in I939. It had been begun three years earlierunder the

direction of A. D. Gayer, it was funded by the ColumbiaUniversityCouncilfor Researchin the Social Sciences, andit wasmuch indebtedintellectually to Mitchell, Burns and the National Bureau. On a fargreaterscale than Beveridge, it assembled statistics on prices, trade,investment, industry, agriculture, finance and labour; it analysedand processed them in accordancewith the most sophisticated tech-niques of the National Bureau; and it interpreted them on "theassumption that theoretical concepts developed in modern businesscycle theory are relevant to an analysis of the course of events in ourperiod".76Not surprisingly, given the scale of operation, the figuressuperseded the earlier compilations of Silberling, Beveridge andThorp. By 1941, the project was completed; but the Second WorldWar delayed publication until 1953 when it finally appearedas thetwo-volume Growth and Fluctuationsof the British Economy, I790-i850.As one reviewer noted, "despite its title, the book is much moreconcerned with fluctuations than with growth": it was, in the wordsof the authors, "a general economic history of Great Britain from

74 W. W. Rostow, "British Trade Fluctuations, 1868-1896: A Chronicle and aCommentary" (Yale University Ph.D. thesis, 1940), summary, pp. 454-60, 488-93,569.75 W. W. Rostow, BritishEconomyof theNineteenthCentury Oxford, 1948), p. 54.76 A. D. Gayer, W. W. Rostow and A. J. Schwartz, Growthand Fluctuationsof theBritishEconomy,1790-1850: An Historical,Statistical and Theoretical tudy of Britain'sEconomicDevelopment,2 vols. (Oxford, I953), i, p. xxx.


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1790to I850 written from the perspectiveof business fluctuations".77Their interest in the "recurrent characteristics of ebb and flow"meant that they were making a "different line of inquiry" into theIndustrial Revolution from the economic historians of the previousgeneration. "This study", they rightlynoted, "asks a set of questionsquite different from those addressed to the data, for example, byProfessorClapham".78Moreover, it was, in its theory, aquintessenti-ally post-Keynes book. The credit cycle was dismissed: "monetaryphenomena", the authorsconcluded, "can be most usefully regarded... as a reflection of more deep-seated movements".79 And thefundamental force underlying the cycles was not so much harvestsor exports (except with the minor cycles) but fluctuations in invest-ment. As T. S. Ashton noted, "we can almost see the multiplier atwork".80Ashton himself, in his Ford Lectures given at Oxford in 1953-4,directed his later endeavours along similar channels, as he studiedeighteenth-century fluctuations. Although he disclaimed any exten-sive use of trade cycle theory on the grounds that the data wereinadequate, and although he found political crises, trade, harvestsand the elements to be more important than investment, the bookwas as much a work of its time as the volumes of Gayer et al. Itsindebtedness to trade cycle theoreticians was, in fact, considerable,and the publishermarketedit as a work of appliedeconomics, hopingthat "economists may find interest in the demonstration that whatwas later to be known as the trade cycle has an ancestry longer thansome had supposed".81At almost the same time as Ashton lecturedand Gayer et al. appeared, R. C. O. Matthews published his moredetailed study of the I830s which, by "subjecting a single briefperiod to close study", sought to make clear "the complexity of thefluctuations experienced". Again, it was concerned with cyclical,rather than developmental, aspects of the Industrial Revolution: "aninquiry along the present lines does not by itself permit us to assessthe place of the fluctuations studied in the longer run evolution ofthe national economy". And, unsurprisingly, it concluded that "themainstay of the British cycle was domestic investment".82Like Toynbee, the Webbs and the Hammonds in theirgeneration,

77R. C. O. Matthews, "The Trade Cycle in Britain, I790-I850", OxfordEcon.Papers, vi (1954), p. 98; Gayer, Rostow and Schwartz, Growthand Fluctuationsof theBritish Economy,i, p. xxxiii.78 Ibid., i, pp. xxxiv, 2.79 Ibid., ii, pp. 532-3, 559.80 T. S. Ashton, "Economic Fluctuations, 1790-1850", Econ. Hist. Rev., 2nd ser.,vii (I955), PP. 380-I.81 T. S. Ashton, Economic Fluctuations in England, I700-I800 (Oxford, 1959),publisher's blurb and pp. 29, 34, Io5, 178.82 R. C. O. Matthews, A Study in TradeCycle History: EconomicFluctuationsinGreatBritain, 1833-1842 (Cambridge, 1954), pp. xiii-xiv, 219.

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PRESENT AND PAST IN THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION I49these historians of the trade cycle were writing the history of theIndustrial Revolution as "the history of the social problems whichare agitating the world now".83 There was the same search for thehistorical origins of contemporary problems: it was just that "theproblems of the present" had changed, and the direction of enquiryinto the past had changed along with them. But, like the earlierinterpretation in its time, the cyclical view of the Industrial Revol-ution was paramount in its generation, but never all-pervasive.Lipson, for instance, in his new general survey, not only continuedto assault the Toynbee et al. interpretation, but also offered amore ample perspective on the Industrial Revolution as a whole bysuggesting that "the population of England more than trebled in thenineteenth century, yet at the end of the century, the masses werein a material sense better off than at the beginning".84But the most seminal formulationof this broader view came fromAshton who, in his small, synthetic study, turned awayfrom the upsand downs of the industrialization process to explore and proclaimthe long-termadvantageswhich it broughtwith it. As any comparisonwith nineteenth-century Ireland or with the contemporary under-developed world served to show, he argued, only the IndustrialRevolution held out the prospect of raising the standards of livingfor the majority of the people. "There are", he concluded:

today on the plains of India and China men and women, plague-riddenand hungry,living lives little better, to outward appearance, than those of the cattle that toilwith them by day and share their places of sleep by night. Such Asiatic standards,and such unmechanized horrors, are the lot of those who increase their numberswithout passing through an Industrial Revolution.85At the time of writing, when general pessimism about the economywas further darkened by the vicissitudes of post-war fluctuations,such optimistic confidence in the long-term benefits of industrializa-tion was unusual and unfashionable. But within a decade, the im-proved circumstances of the western economies, and the change ofinterest from internal anxieties to external development, meant thatthese words became, for the next generationof economic historians,almost a sacred text.

IIIBetween the mid-195os and the early 1970s, the unexpected, unprece-dented efflorescence of western capitalism transformed Ashton'swords into "one of the most influential paragraphs n the writing ofeconomic history in the present generation".86 Two decades of

83 Toynbee, Lectureson the IndustrialRevolution, pp. 3I-2.84 E. Lipson, The Growth of English Society: A Short EconomicHistory, 2 vols.(London, 1950), ii, p. 221.85 T. S. Ashton, The IndustrialRevolution, I760-1830 (London, 1948), p. I6I.86 P. Mathias, The First IndustrialNation: An EconomicHistory of Britain, I700-I914 (London, 1969), p. 6.


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sustained economic growth, resulting from increased investment,rising productivity and technological progress, combined with lim-ited inflation and full employment to create a rapidlyrising standardof living for the majorityof the people of western Europe. Of course,ratesof growth differed, both between the United Statesand Europeand within Europe itself: but all western nations benefited, andBritainwas no exception. As Postan put it, surveying Europe'spost-war development in words much more optimistic than he had usedearlier:

To the historian as well as to the ordinaryobserver, the unique feature of the post-war economy in the west is its growth. It reveals itself in various signs of ever-mounting affluence, as well as in more sophisticated statistical and economicmeasurements.87Or, as David S. Landes noted morepithily, "theEuropeaneconomiesseemed to have learned the secret of eternal growth and pros-perity".88The result was equally unprecedented optimism on the part ofcontemporary commentators. Galbraith abandoned his interest inslumps, and announced that the affluent society had arrived in thewest, that the twin problems of poverty and production had beenovercome, that economic growth was a certain solvent of inequality,and that inter-war anxieties about insecurity and unemploymenthad been eliminated. Economists, he argued, must abandon theirprofessional (and historically conditioned) predilection for misfor-tune and failure, and recognize that they must now come to termswith prosperity and success.89 In England, where the economyseemed to be growing faster than at any time since Victoria'sheyday,and where there was an unprecedented boom in consumer goods,Galbraith'spicture seemed equally applicable.90R. A. Butler, whenchancellor of the exchequer, predicted that the standard of livingwould double in twenty-five years, and Macmillan, when PrimeMinister, claimed (or warned) that "You've never had it so good".91Like many of his generationwho had lived throughthe uncertaintiesof the inter-waryears, Andrew Schonfieldcelebrated the transforma-

87 M. M. Postan, An Economic History of WesternEurope, 1945-1964 (London,1967), p. I .88 Landes, UnboundPrometheus,p. 498.89 J. K. Galbraith, The AffluentSociety (London, 1962 edn.), pp. io-I6, 30, chs.3, 7, 8, 23. For the background to this, see J. K. Galbraith, A Life in Our Times(Boston, 1981), pp. 335-7, 339-40.90T. W. Hutchinson, Economicsand EconomicPolicy in Britain, 1946-1966 (Lon-don, 1968), pp. 93-5. The three classic books which caught and articulatedthis moodwere C. A. R. Crosland, The Future of Socialism (London, 1956); R. Hoggart, TheUses of Literacy(London, 1957); M. Young, The Rise of theMeritocracy,1870-2033(London, I958).91M. Pinto-Duschinsky, "Bread and Circuses? The Conservativesin Office, I95I-1964", and P. Oppenheimer, "Muddling Through: The Economy, I95I-I964", bothin V. Bogdanor and R. Skidelsky (eds.), The Age of Affluence, I951-1964 (London,I970), pp. 55-8, 118-20.



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PRESENT AND PAST IN THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 151tion of western capitalism "from the cataclysmic failure which itappearedto be in the 1930s into the great engine of prosperityof thepost-war western world".92For economists and government officials, there were three majorconsequences of these changes: the decline of interest in the tradecycle, the pursuit of economic growth at home, and the rise ofdevelopment economics. In the two decadesfrom the early 1950s, thebusiness cycle, tamed by Keynesian government policies, assumed soattenuateda form, with growth continuing even in downswings, thatone group of economists returned a qualified but definite "yes" tothe question: is the business cycle obsolete?93 "Had the idea of thebusiness cycle not existed", observed Martin Gilbert, "it wouldhardly have been invented to describe the post-war fluctuations inEurope".94 "The European economy", agreed Postan, "was allbut depression free. Such unevenness and recessions as there werediffered from the pre-war ones not only in amplitude but also intiming and significance".95To the more optimistic commentators,indeed, emancipation from the thraldom of cyclical fluctuationsseemed complete. "There is no reason to suppose", wrote AndrewSchonfield, "that the patterns of the past, which have been ingeni-ously unravelled by the historians of trade cycles, will reassertthemselves in the future".96

So, as the cyclical model was dethroned, the growth model wasput in its place.97Going for growth became the consuming obsessionof western governments, the shared aim of ostensibly opposed politi-cal parties, and a major preoccupation of applied economists who,extending Keynes's work on investment, assigned to capitala crucialrole in the growth process.98 "In all European countries", Postanremarked, "economic growth became a universal creed, and a com-mon expectation to which governments were expected to conform.To that extent, economic growth was the product of economicgrowthmanship".99 Nations within Europe aspired to outdo eachother in growth, and all sought to catch up the United States. In sofar as government planning agencies were introduced, it was to planfor growth, as in France between 1948-65, and as in Britainwith the

92 A. Schonfield, Modem Capitalism:The ChangingBalance of Public and PrivatePower (London, I965), p. 3.93 R. A. Gordon, "The Stability of the US Economy", and R. C. O. Matthews,"Post-War Business Cycles in the UK", both in M. Bronfenbrenner (ed.), Is theBusiness Cycle Obsolete?(New York, 1969), pp. 4-5, 28, 99, 131-2; F. W. Paish,"Business Cycles in Britain", LloydsBank Rev., xcviii (1970), p. I.94 M. Gilbert, "The Post-War Business Cycle in Western Europe", Amer. Econ.Rev., Papers and Procs., lii (I962), pp. 00o-I.95 Postan, EconomicHistory of WesternEurope,pp. 18-19.96 Schonfield, Modern Capitalism, p. 62.97 Gordon, "Stability of the US Economy", p. 26.98 Bogdanor and Skidelsky (eds.), Age of Affluence,introduction, pp. Io-II.99 Postan, EconomicHistory of WesternEurope,p. 25.


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setting up of N.E.D.C. in I962. Significantly, the Labour gov-ernment's National Plan, introduced in I965, was described as "aplan to provide the basis for greatereconomic growth". As Sir RoyHarrodput it two years later, "growth . .. has priorityover all otherobjectives".100One consequence of the west's buoyancy about its own prosperityand its capacity to engineer and manage that prosperity was thegrowing belief that it might be possible to accomplish similar econ-omic miracles of development in the Third World, via technicalassistance, trade and (especially) the injectionof capital.As Kennedyproclaimed in his inaugural speech, in the high noon of westernoptimism: "To those people in the huts and villages of half the globestruggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our bestefforts to help them help themselves". In practice, this meant amassive expansion in foreign aid, to be deployed according to theprescriptions laid down by development economists, who were theburgeoningfirst cousins of growth economists.10 The success of theMarshall Plan in reviving war-weary Europe seemed to augur wellfor parallelendeavours further afield; the affinity between the prob-lems of unemployment in the west and underemployment in theThird World seemed clear; and it was but a short step from invest-ment for growth at home to investment for development abroad. Onboth fronts, it was the commitment to growth, and the belief thatthis could be brought about by "a massive injection of capital",which was of crucial significance.102All this profoundly influenced the way in which economic histori-ans addressed the Industrial Revolution. Rostow, for example, inthe I950s, shifted his interests from fluctuations to growth. In thefirst edition of his book with that title, he noted how "the issues ofeconomic development from relatively primitive beginnings haveincreasingly occupied the minds of economists and policy makers in

100 The National Plan, Parliamentary Papers, 1964-5 [Cmd. 2764], xxx, p. I;Hutchinson, Economicsand Economic Policy, pp. I25-30, 207-II; Sir R. Harrod,Towardsa New EconomicPolicy (London, 1967), p. 70.101For the background to this, see A. O. Hirschman, "The Rise and Fall ofDevelopment Economics", in his Essays in Trespassing:Economicsto Politics andBeyond (Cambridge, 198 ), pp. 7- 3. For the earlyclassics of development economics,see N. S. Buchanan and H. S. Ellis, Approaches oEconomicDevelopment New York,I955); H. Leibenstein, EconomicBackwardnessand EconomicGrowth(New York,I957); G. M. Meier and R. E. Baldwin, EconomicDevelopment: Theory, History,Policy (New York, 1957); B. Higgins, EconomicDevelopment:Prospects,Principlesand Policies (London, 1959); S. Kuznets, Economic Growth and Structure London,I965).102 R. E. Cameron, "Some Lessons of History for Developing Nations", Amer.Econ. Rev., Papers and Procs., lviii (1967), p. 3I3. Of course, there was, within thisshared set of assumptions, a majordebate about whethergrowth should be "balanced"or "uneven". For the two views, see, respectively, R. Nurkse, Problemsof CapitalFormation n UnderdevelopedCountries Oxford, 1953);A. 0. Hirschman, TheStrategyof EconomicDevelopment New Haven, Conn., 1958).



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PRESENT AND PAST IN THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION I53the west".103 And within seven years, he reported "a most remark-able surge of thought centred on the process of economic growth"."A good part", he added, "of the contemporaryeffort in economichistory is directly shaped by the concern with public policy designedto accelerate growth in the underdeveloped regions of the world,which emerged in the decade after World War Two".104 So, theIndustrial Revolution was no longer seen as something terriblebecause unregulated, or cyclical because unregulated, but as thefirst example of sustained economic growth which accomplished inEngland by private enterprise what must now be promoted in theThird World by government agency. It ceased to seem somethingbad which should have been tamed by government intervention,and became instead something good which must be replicated bygovernment aid.Accordingly, as Rostow further observed, "the major commontask and meeting place of economists and historians are to be foundin the analysisof economic growth";'05and, in his best-selling book,TheStages of EconomicGrowth,he offered his own contribution, asan economic historian, "to the formation of a wiser public policy".It was, explicitly, "a non-communist manifesto", which arguedhowand why the west could bring economic development to the ThirdWorld more efficiently and satisfactorily than Soviet Russia.106 Itwas addressed, not only to policy makers at home, but to "the menin Djakarta, Rangoon, New Delhi and Karachi;the men in Tehran,Baghdad, and Cairo; the men south of the desert too, in Accra,Lagos, and Salisbury". And its message was simple: that the studyof industrial revolutions in the past offered the best guide to thepromotion of economic development in the future. "It is useful, aswell as roughly accurate", he noted, "to regard the process ofdevelopment now going forward in Asia, the Middle East, Africa,and Latin America as analogous to the stages of preconditions andtake-off of other societies, in the late eighteenth, nineteenth, andearly twentieth centuries".107Thus were past, present and future, economic history and econ-

103 W. W. Rostow, The Processof EconomicGrowth(Oxford, 1953), p. 227.104 W. W. Rostow, TheProcessof EconomicGrowth,2nd edn. (Oxford, 1960), pp.v-vi, 335. For Rostow's other "programmatic"books, see W. W. Rostow, AnAmericanPolicy in Asia (London, 1955), pp. viii, 12-15, ch. 7; W. W. Rostow, The UnitedStates in the World Arena: An Essay in Recent History (New York, 1960), pp. 432,444-6, 464; W. W. Rostow, Viewfrom theSeventhFloor (London, 1964), pp. I-2, 14,26, 29.105 Rostow, Processof Economic Growth(2nd edn.), p. 343.106 W. W. Rostow, The Stages of EconomicGrowth:A Non-CommunistManifesto(Cambridge, 1960), p. I37. Between 1960 and 1972, The Stages sold 260,000 copiesin the original English version alone. See J. D. Heyl, "Kuhn, Rostow and Palmer:The Problem of Purposeful Change in the 'Sixties", TheHistorian, liv (1982), p. 300n. 4.107 Rostow, Stages of EconomicGrowth, pp. i66, I39.


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omic development, brought together. For the policy maker, TheStages of Economic Growth was a prescriptive essay, which drewsupport from historical examples; for the economic historian, it wasa reinterpretationof the industrializationprocess in general(and thatof Britain in particular)which drew on contemporary developmenttheory. By assigning to capitalaccumulationand investment a crucialrole in the take-off, it gave historical validation to the "massiveinjection of capital" theory. And by its stress on leading sectors, itoffered historical support to the proponents of unbalanced growth.But by citing Britain as the paradigmcase of industrialization,withcapital accumulation, take-off and leading sectors as the initiatorsofeconomic growth and, hence, the modern world, it produced apicture of the Industrial Revolution fundamentally different fromthat which had prevailed in the two earliergenerationsof interpret-ation.108 Instead of being the historical tap-root of contemporaryproblems, it was the past guide to present endeavours, the historicalgoal of future aspirations. "What ProfessorRostow has tried to do",noted Phyllis Deane, "is to interpret British economic history in away that has immediate policy implications for those concernedwiththe problems of today's pre-industrial economies".109

Nor was Rostow alone in this as, in the expansive days of theI96os,110 a variety of economic historians portrayed the IndustrialRevolution in terms - if not always in precise details - indebtedto Rostow and the growth and development approach. "The focusof the economic history of the I950's and I960's", noted M. W.Flinn, "reflecting the switch of theoretical studies from short-termto long-run movements, has shifted sharply towards the study ofeconomic development in its historicalcontext".111Deane describedher book as "a product of the current interest in economic develop-ment", as "an attempt to apply the concepts and techniques ofdevelopment economics to a vital section of the historical record".112Peter Mathiaswrote "from the standpointof the economist interestedin development", who noted at the outset that, "in many senses, allnations concerned with economic growth at the present time aretreading the path Britain first set foot on in the eighteenth cen-tury".113 E. J. Hobsbawm admitted that his book reflected "theinterests of the present . . . the problems of economic development

108Ibid., pp. IO-II, 34-6. The central idea of the book was acknowledged to beindebted to W. A. Lewis, The Theoryof EconomicGrowth(London, I955), esp. pp.208, 225-6, 235.109 P. Deane, The First IndustrialRevolution (Cambridge, 1965), p. 116.o0Harte, "Trends in Publications", pp. 23-8." Flinn, Origins of the IndustrialRevolution, p. 2.12 Deane, First IndustrialRevolution, p. vii.113 Mathias, First IndustrialNation, p. 5. See also the review by W. H. B. Courtin Econ. Hist. Rev., 2nd ser., xxii (1969), p. 563.

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PRESENT AND PAST IN THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION I55and industrialization".114 And R. M. Hartwell summarized theconsequential shift in perspective thus: "today, in a world in whichtwo-thirds of mankind are still desperately poor, and are finding itdifficult to improve their lot, the English industrial revolution isseen more as a spectacularand successful example of growth than asa catastrophe".115So, in economic history as in economic theory, the cyclical modelwas dethroned and the growth model substituted. "There is nodoubt", noted Hartwell, "that the economists' preoccupation withgrowthhas jolted the historianinto a more careful and moreexplicitlytheoretical analysis of the causes of English growth".116 Explicitlyand regardless of ideological approach, the Industrial Revolutionwas rewritten in this way, as "a fundamental discontinuity in worldeconomic development", in which there was "a radical shift in thestructure of the economy, in the composition of total output, and inthe distribution of employment, which gives concrete meaning tothe idea of an Industrial Revolution".117 As a result, this newgeneration of textbooks in the I960s spoke little of social conse-quences or of the trade cycle.118Their bibliographies included theworks of development economists. They made extended referencesto contemporary underdeveloped countries (especially Nigeria andIndia) when describing pre-industrial England. They all adoptedsectoral analysis, and spoke of a shift of productive resources awayfrom agriculture and towards industry and services.119They sawBritain as blazing the trail which the Continent, the United Statesand the rest of the world were ultimately to follow.120More precisely, the study of particular aspects of the growthprocess was illuminated by these present-day concerns. Hartwell,for instance, felt encouraged to take an "optimistic" view of thestandard of living in the Industrial Revolution because there was

114 E. J. Hobsbawm, IndustryandEmpire:From1750 tothe PresentDay (Harmonds-worth, 1969), p. Io.15 Hartwell, IndustrialRevolution and EconomicGrowth, p. 58.116Ibid., pp. I6I-4.117 R. M. Hartwell, "The Causes of the Industrial Revolution: An Essay inMethodology", in R. M. Hartwell (ed.), The Causes of the Industrial RevolutioninEngland (London, 1967), pp. 54, 79.118 Dean and Mathias each gave it a (brief) chapter; Hartwell and Hobsbawmhardly touched on it at all.119The key work here, to which all the late I96os textbooks were indebted, wasP. Deane and W. A. Cole, British EconomicGrowth,1688-1959, 2nd edn. (Cambridge,I967), esp. pp. xix, 3. The statistics they provided, on the basis of eight-sectordisaggregation, made it possible to outline the main quantitative features of long-term economic change in Britain, especially the rate of growth and the shifts instructure. It is also noteworthy that the authors thanked Simon Kuznets "who initiatedthe inquiry as one of a series of similar studies in different countries". The book waspublished under the auspices of the University of Cambridge Department of AppliedEconomics.120 For example, Landes, UnboundPrometheus,ch. 3, "Continental Emulation".


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PRESENT AND PAST IN THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 157literacy, and with a well-developed market system.126 By I85I, asMathias, Deane and Landes all admitted, the overall picture of thecountryandeconomy was verydifferentfrom thatsuggestedby a lookat the most advanced sectors: agriculturewas still (if diminishingly)dominant, and the textile and metal industries employed a relativelysmall proportion of the labour force.127 Indeed, Hartwell went evenfurther, not only suggesting that the facts of British industrializationin many ways did not accord to the theories of growth, but also that,if they showed anything, it was that "any simple theory of, or policyfor, growth is absurd".128Otherssaw this even more explicitly. B. L. Anderson examined thesmall-scale, face-to-face world of Lancashirefinance, and concludedthat banking was more a response to industrialization than a causeof it.129 G. R. Hawke argued that the importance of railways hadbeen overrated, and that they only contributed about io per cent ofnational income in I865.130 And, for the earlierphase of the Indus-trial Revolution, S. D. Chapman began to chip away at the conven-tionally supposed importanceof the steamengine.131Moregenerally,E. A. Wrigley launched a twofold attack, partly against the stresson national, aggregate statistics, which concealed important localvariations, and partly against the teleological treatment of the Indus-trial Revolution which resulted from piling up more and more factorsto explain why it happened in England first. Perhaps, he suggested,it was all an accident anyway.132Criticism also came from other quarters. As an economist, D.Whitehead assailed the idea of "treating the English IndustrialRevolution as closely comparablewith the transitionto self-sustainedgrowth in contemporaryunderdeveloped countries", on the groundsthat "precisely because it is the first - and therefore the mostcompletely evolutionary case - it is probably the least helpful of

126 Deane, First IndustrialRevolution, pp. 7, I5, I7. See also Landes, UnboundPrometheus, p. 13; Hartwell, Industrial Revolution and Economic Growth, p. 179;Mathias, First IndustrialNation, pp. 27, 30, I45.127 Landes, Unbound rometheus, pp. I05, II8, 120-2; Deane, FirstIndustrialRevolution,pp. 150, 255, 263, 270-4; Mathias, First IndustrialNation, ch. 9, esp. pp.259, 263, 271-2.128 Hartwell, IndustrialRevolutionand EconomicGrowth,pp. 8, II, 20. Cf. Elton,Practice of History, p. 48: "When some writers can treat pre-industrial England, theeconomically most advanced society in the Europe of its day, as though it were liketribal Africa or nineteenth-century India, understanding is destroyed, not assisted".

129 B. L. Anderson, "Provincial Aspects of the Financial Revolution in the Eight-eenth Century", BusinessHist., xi (1969); B. L. Anderson, "Money and the Structureof Credit in the Eighteenth Century", BusinessHist., xii (I970).130 G. R. Hawke, Railways and Economic Growth in England and Wales, I840-1870 (Oxford, 1970), esp. p. 405.131 S. D. Chapman, "The Cost of Power in the Industrial Revolution in Britain:The Case of the Textile Industry", Midland Hist., i (197i), esp. pp. I, 6, i6, 19.132 E. A. Wrigley, "The Process of Modernization and the Industrial Revolutionin England", Jl. InterdisciplinaryHist., iii (1972-3), p. 259.


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any as an example of how to grow".133 H. J. Habakkuk asssailedthe notion historically, by comparing Britain and America in theearlynineteenth century, often to the former'sdisadvantage.Insteadof taking British growth as given, and merely explaining how ithappened, Habakkuk stood this notion on its head wondering, in amannerreminiscent of Clapham, not why therewas so muchgrowth,but why so little. Finance, he suggested, was limited, entrepreneurswere traditionalist, the market was constrained, and innovationsspread slowly, so that steam power was not massively applied untilthe I870s.134 "Attention", he suggested:is normally concentrated on explaining why British economic progress during theIndustrial Revolution was so rapid, compared with that in other countries. Butperhaps the more interesting problem is why English progress in the first half ofthe nineteenth century, though very rapid, was not morerapid than it was.135And at the most general level, B. E. Supple entered a protestagainst the all-pervasive appeal of the economic-growth view of theIndustrial Revolution. He pointed out that by becoming part of the"forced draft" into the development economics paradigm,economichistorians were ignoring other types of economic change, and werenot even analysingthe historical process of growth with the diversityof approaches that it merited.136Such general warnings against the dominance of the "growth"approach to the Industrial Revolution in the I960s were no morewidely heeded than were the results of such detailed researches asalso pointed to the same conclusion. For even if the authors oftextbooks were careful to build in reservations, they still approachedthe Industrial Revolution from the standpoint of development econ-omics, hoped that their findings might be of use to those planninggrowth in the Third World, and (albeit unintentionally) left manygenerations of undergraduates with the sense that it was sudden,successful and largely connected with investment. As long as "theproblems of the present" remained those of growth at home anddevelopment abroad, this unprecedentedly optimistic picture of theIndustrial Revolution, so very different from that given in the twopreceding generations, prevailed. Only when contemporarycircum-stances altered again would the reservations made in the growthgeneration, which themselves harked back to Clapham's earlierwork, become enthroned in their own right, and in their entirety, asthe new interpretation.

133 D. Whitehead, "The Industrial Revolution as an Example of Growth", inR. M. Hartwell (ed.), The Industrial Revolution (Oxford, 1970), pp. 24-7.134 H. J. Habakkuk, AmericanandBritish Technologyn the NineteenthCentury:TheSearchfor LabourSaving Inventions(Cambridge, 1962), pp. 112-14, 142-7, 151, I75-89.135 Ibid., p. I74.136 B. E. Supple, "Economic History and Economic Growth",Jl. Econ. Hist., xx(1960), pp. 554-5.



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PRESENT AND PAST IN THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION I59IV

Since the mid-I970s, the economic climate has again altered pro-foundly. The two decades of unprecedented post-war prosperitycame to an abrupt end with the energy crisis of 1973-4, and werefollowed by a new menace, stagflation, to which Keynesian econom-ics appeared to offer no antidote. And, at the very time when thecertainty of growth was undermined, the appropriatenessof it wasalso brought into question. One view, the environmental, mostfamously articulated by Schumacher, said that growth should nothappen: "one of the most fateful errors of our age", he wrote, inexplicit attack on Galbraith, "is the belief that 'the problem ofproduction' has been solved".137And the other, the ecological, asexemplified by the Club of Rome report, argued that, in any case,continued economic growth could not happen because the world'sresources would give out: "for the first time, it has become vital toinquire into the cost of unrestricted materialgrowth, and to considerthe alternatives to its continuation".138As Rostow aptly summarizedit: "suddenly, in the I970's, the inevitability, even the legitimacy,of economic growth was questioned".139The result was a return of pre-growth economics gloom. "Themost remarkable two decades of economic growth in modern his-tory", Rostow explained, had been superseded by "the greatestchallenge to industrial civilisation since it began to take shape twocenturiesago".140 Once againhis interest has shifted in consequence,from writing historically grounded development manifestos to evolv-ing "specific lines of policy which might permit the world communityto transit with reasonable success the next quartercentury". For himas for others, the change in circumstances has been remarkable:An important turning point occurred in the world economy and, indeed, in

industrial civilisation during the first half of the 1970's. A pattern of economic andsocial progress which had persisted for almost a quarter century was broken.Politicians, economists and citizens found themselves in a somewhat new anduncomfortable world. Familiar modes of thought and action were challenged asthey no longer seemed to grip the course of events. Expectations of the futurebecame uncertain.141Galbraith expressed similar sentiments in similar words, recording

137 E. E. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if PeopleMattered (London, 1974), pp. 10-II, 46-7. Since publication, the book has beenthrough 17 reprints and sold 750,000 copies in English alone.138 D. H. Meadows et al., The Limits to Growth(New York, 1972), p. 191. Forsimilar anti-growth views, see D. Bell, The Cultural Contradictionsof Capitalism(New York, 1976), p. 237; R. Theobald and S. Mills (eds.), The Failure of Success:Ecological Values vs EconomicMyths (Indianapolis, 1973), p. xii. For a (much

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