Ideas about the Industrial Revolution

Debating historians

Read these statements:

• "Whoever says Industrial Revolution says cotton" wrote the famous economic historian EJ Hobsbawm.
• "It is little wonder that the Victorian period is sometimes called the Age of Iron" wrote the children’s writer Peter Moss.
• The economic historian JU Nef always argued that it was the move to coal as a fuel that kicked off the technological changes, which created the Industrial Revolution - "the Nef thesis".
• "The steam engine was one of the most important of man’s inventions for without it the Industrial Revolution could never have taken place" said the textbook writer DP Titley.

These statements can’t all be true! There is clear confusion about the nature of the Industrial Revolution, and where the revolution in the British economy started.

Recently, certain economic historians have claimed that there was ‘revolutionary’ change only in the cotton and iron industries, and that change in other areas of the economy was much slower – so much so, that one economic historian has argued that the period as a whole no longer deserves the title "Industrial Revolution".