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- Title
Rehabilitating the industrial revolution.
- Authors
Berg, Maxine; Hudson, Pat
- Abstract
The article discusses the radical change to contemporaries which has been obscured in recent historiography, and industrial performance in particular, which has been viewed as an extension of pre-industrial traditional past. The historiography of the industrial revolution in England has moved away from viewing the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as a unique turning point in economic and social development. Several points about these growth rates could be made. Perhaps the most important is that, although productivity growth appears gradual, it was high enough to sustain a much increased population which under earlier economic circumstances would have perished. The problems involved in measuring economy-wide productivity growth, and in regarding it as a reflection of the extent of fundamental economic change, are compounded when one considers the nature both of industrial capital and of industrial labor in the period. Redeployment of labor from agrarian-based and domestic sectors to urban and more centralized manufacturing activity may well have been accompanied by diminishing labor productivity in the short run. It is time to move on from the macro accounting framework and to rebuild the national picture of economic and social change from new research at regional and local level.
- Subjects
INDUSTRIAL revolution; INDUSTRIAL productivity; GROWTH rate; LABOR productivity; CAPITAL productivity; PRODUCTION (Economic theory); ECONOMICS
- Publication
Economic History Review, 1992, Vol 45, Issue 1, p24
- ISSN
0013-0117
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.2307/2598327