Editor's Introduction: the New Economic History and the Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution-a Useful Abstraction In the past years, there have been more and more voices that claim, to rephrase Coleman (1983), that the Industrial Revolution is "a concept too many." 2 The feeling is that the term is either too vague to be of any use at all or that it produces false connotations of abrupt change comparable in its suddenness to the French Revolution. The main intellectual motive for this revision has been the growing (though not universally shared) consensus that economic growth in the early stages of the British Industrial Revolution was slower than had hitherto been supposed. The idea of the Industrial Revolution, however, predates its identification with economic growth by many decades. The revision of national income statistics should therefore not, in itself, be enough to abandon the concept. Yet revisionist social historians have found in those revisions the support to state categorically that "English society before 1832 did not experience an industrial revolution let alone an Industrial Revolution.. .. [Its] causes have been so difficult to agree on because there was no 'Industrial Revolution,' historians have been chasing a shadow" phrases it even more vituperatively: "Was there an industrial revolution? The absurdity of the question is not that it is taken seriously but that the term is taken seriously. .. by scholars who should know better." The important point to keep in mind is, of course, that from a purely ontological point of view, the British Industrial Revolution did not "happen." What took place was a series of events, in a certain span of time, in known localities, which subsequent historians found convenient to bless with a name. The argument whether the Industrial Revolution is a useful concept is therefore merely one about the efficiency of discourse: Does the term communicate? Do most people with whom we want to converse (colleagues, students, book purchasers) know by approximation what we mean when we use the term? And can we suggest a better term to replace it in our conversations? T. S. Ashton wrote in 1948 that the term was so widely used that it would be pedantic to offer a substitute (1948, p. 4; see also Crafts, 1985a, p. 68). Nothing has been learned since then to warrant changing that conclusion. Continuity or discontinuity, as McCloskey (1987) notes, are rhetorical devices. There is no "test" that we can apply: National income and aggregate consumption grew …