7 ms·

Was the Industrial Revolution the Industrial Revolution?

63 points by diodorus 5y ago

chmod600 5y ago
How quickly did the agricultural revolution happen? Probably much more slowly and we still call that a revolution.
- WJW 5y ago
  I think that schoolbooks from the year 3500 will categorize the industrial revolution as basically anywhere between 1700 and 2200 or so. There are still parts of the worlds rapidly industrializing (China is almost done, rest of Asia is in the middle of it, Africa will pick up the pace soon) and I think that eventually the rise of computers and software will be seen as just another growth spurt of the wider industrial revolution. Depending on how soon we develop practical fusion energy and/or nanotech, the industrial revolution could last for a few centuries more. It just feels less "revolutionary" because we're in the middle of it and we live it day by day.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
mikewarot 5y ago
Economists can argue over the numbers all they want. It was a huge positive feedback loop that lead to the hockey stick growth. The rapid change in productivity is exemplified by the making of the humble machine screw. Prior to Maudsley, screws were made by hand, and numbered because they weren't interchangeable. Craftsmanship was required to make a good screw thread. Within a decade, an apprentice could make them with almost no training. Soon thereafter, machines turned them out in quantity. The quality of material required to be suitable stock for use in a lathe was the result of other similar improvements in quantity and quality of production. You can follow the causal chain down a million rabbit holes.
- DubiousPusher 5y ago
  You should check out, "The Rise and Fall of American Growth". That book does a very good job of explaining how the growth we consider part of the industrial revolution actually came after. Specifically, the book focuses on the eras 1870-1940 and 1940-1970. It's about the U.S. but a lot of the book also shows how many of the statistics from the U.S. are shadowed by the U.K.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago
  > It was a huge positive feedback loop that lead to the hockey stick growth. In nature, every "hockey stick" graph is merely the first half of an S-curve.
  - simonh 5y ago
    Firstly that's mind numbingly pedantic. But also the industrial revolution kicked off a massive cycle of overlapping growth curves, which germinated new technologies with their own growth curves, some of which are still only just getting started and are still in the hockey stick phase.
  - baq 5y ago
    in the long run, we're all dead. ergo, timing matters.
  - imtringued 5y ago
    When you are half way to perfection you aren't even mad even if perfection is not worth achieving.
gumby 5y ago
I love the historiography alluded to in the paper (and the meta-historiographic discussion of the arguments and counter arguments). The argument always seemed political to me: just look at Orwell’s Wigan Pier (~1920s) or Wylie’s Village in the Vaucluse, or hell, the 1939 German invasion of Poland with horse drawn cannon to see the flatness of the curve. Zhou Enlai’s quip about the significance of the French Revolution is instructive here: “Too soon to tell”. For a “revolution” — a true turn of the wheel — is usually a slow motion and almost invisible affair, like swimming through a huge wave. Unless you’re close to the shore where it breaks, it’s hard to see and its implication unclear. You don’t need a huge first derivative when you are collecting the AUC and that’s why you often don’t see it. Remember the computer “revolution” that was “visible everywhere but in the productivity statistics” (that was Solow in 87). The ARPANET had already transitioned to TCP by then but the consequences were still decades away. So there was an industrial revolution, but trying to describe it as a kind of Big Bang is a parallel relic of the “great man” school of history.
- detritus 5y ago
  Sadly, it appears that quip was a 'too delicious' a misinterpretation to correct. https://www.scmp.com/article/970657/not-letting-facts-ruin-good-story https://www.scmp.com/article/970657/not-letting-facts-ruin-g... But sssh! Don't tell anyone else.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- Wildgoose 5y ago
  The Zhou Enlai quip was actually the result of a mistranslation - he thought he was being asked about the 1968 student demonstrations.
nickik 5y ago
The reason it sticks around in the popular mind has almost nothing to do with all of this great economic work. For 1000s of years overall global population and economic output was more or less flat, and then, something happened, and in the blink of an eye, historically speaking, you literally have a guy standing on the moon. Not just flying, literally standing on the fucking moon. There is no other way to explain how this can happen, then industrial revolution. No other term captures the spirit of that change. That why it will always stick around popularly. And in world historic political terms, it also lead in to essentially control of the world by 6 small West European nations. Overall very interesting article. Reading about that time is really fascinating and something I want to do more of. Not just the statistical, but lives of the people that lived during that change.
lucioperca 5y ago
But no matter how small the exponential growth is the result will be still revolutionary eventually.
Animats 5y ago
My general comment on this is that 1830 was when the industrial revolution got out of beta. That was the year the first serious railroad started operating, the Liverpool and Manchester Railway. Steam locomotives, reasonably good speeds, no horses or cable hauling, double track, tickets, and schedules. Before that, outside of the textile industry, technology was mostly one-offs. Before 1840 or so, most people never got more than 50 miles from home. By 1890, in Europe or the US, there were trains to all major cities. In major cities, you could then take an electric street car from the train station by the 1890s. Here's a railroad map of the US from 1890.[1] That was the era when the world changed in one lifetime. [1] https://www.loc.gov/resource/g3701p.rr000640/?r=-0.171,-0.012,1.334,0.683,0 https://www.loc.gov/resource/g3701p.rr000640/?r=-0.171,-0.01...
- WJW 5y ago
  The world has changed rather drastically since 1990, both politically and technologically. If you told someone from ~1980 that not only would the Soviet Union not be a meaningful player in 40 years but also that everyone would be carrying a supercomputer in their pocket that could tell them the latest news in an instant and would let them send video messages to their friends and family (not to mention give instant, accurate directions anywhere on the planet), they would think you were crazy. I don't know how you measure "one lifetime" but the world has changed plenty in my 35 years of existing and I don't think it'll slow down soon.
  - treeman79 5y ago
    As a kid in the 80s video phones were promised as coming soon. I was hugely disappointed for a long time.
    - simonh 5y ago
      I got my first iPad in 2011 and went to see my grandmother up in Durham, North East England, who was in her 90s. My wife is Chinese and was in China with my daughters at the time, and we did a Skype call. At first she literally could not believe what she was seeing. It took me several times to explain that this was actually them, right now in China, and they could talk back to her and it wasn't just a recording or some sort of trick.
Robotbeat 5y ago
Might take away on this is that there’s a really long delay from when technology becomes available to when it becomes widespread, and this can mean slower growth than you might expect. Which means there’s a pretty enormous opportunity for accelerating growth by utilizing things that already exist technologically but haven’t permeated through society. We have pretty amazing electric cars but they’re only like 1% of the global fleet. Solar powers also only 2% of US electricity, and even less than that globally on average. Same for battery storage or even IT innovation. I think in some ways we still haven’t fully absorbed computer technology from 50 years ago. Electric aircraft is similar. A lot of people aren’t even aware that we really have electric aircraft as a technological possibility. We have probably 80 years of growth just to fully utilize lithium battery chemistries, IMHO. Things like mRNA tech are even more important. I also wonder how events like pandemics and wars facilitate growth (in the form of increasing technology permeation through society) as compensation for the destructive effects of pandemics and wars. In the last year or so we experienced an explosion of infusion of work from home technology and online ordering/home-delivery that probably would’ve taken a decade or 2 to happen otherwise. The trick is to get the advantage of these events without the destructiveness. I don’t think we figured that one out yet.
megameter 5y ago
Like a lot of questions historical, the more one studies the Industrial Revolution, the more questions one has. I have often wondered about exactly this kind of thing so it's nice to see a researched take on it. The thing in my mind was always that culturally, an image of "big city industry" arose at some point - but that point clearly wasn't the late 1700's, or even into the first decades of the 1800's. So then, when was it? There are a few reference markers that suggest when that image could have coalesced, though: * The first railroads of the 1830's * The gold rushes and immigration waves of the mid-19th (precipitated by faster communication and rising sea traffic) * The Crimean and US Civil Wars, both "industrial" in their making. * The completion of transcontinental railroads * The creation of modern urban sanitation * The organization of wage labor as a movement, including revolutionary forms These markers seem to align well with the 1850's-1870's growth figure assessment. The world by 1880 had experienced a vast reallocation of physical resources and human capital, and fell into a new political context premised around those reallocations. In the emerging cities, by day, immigrants toiled in sweatshops; by night, those with the means came out to party underneath the gaslamps. More and more goods were available imported. If you travelled, you bumped shoulders with the vast crowds at hub train stations. And there was always news of something more being invented. All of that made the revolution a visible thing reorganizing everyday life, even if it only tangentially affected you. Before that period, while you might have heard of new developments from afar, most of them did not carry such sudden impact.
- photojosh 5y ago
  Circa 1850 one branch of my family, who had been bootmakers for at least 4 generations in a small town in Scotland, in the course of a few years had all their children leave for the big city, with my ancestor running a coffee shop. This lines up with what I've read about mechanisation hitting the shoe industry. In the early 1900s, my great-great-grandfather's orange sorting machine was the talk of the town: there was an article in the local paper welcoming anyone interested to visit for a look.
jjk166 5y ago
It seems folly to try to estimate the timing of the industrial revolution based on measured output. It takes time to build a factory, especially one that's unlike any that has ever been built before. Then after you get it working, it takes time for people to learn all the little idiosyncrasies necessary to get the most out of it. Indeed, adopting radically new technologies might in the short term lead to substantial losses in productivity. But substantially, the way things were made changed. Some industries associated with the revolution saw enormous growth of course, but everything changed. Wooden tools were replaced by metal, labor was concentrated and mechanized, backwater towns became bustling cities while old centers of commerce declined. Normalizing growth rate per capita is dumb when part of the revolution is the change in population. It also seems silly to hold the growth of that period against the standard of today. Innovation builds upon innovation, and the modern growth rate is the product of billions of people educated in modern sciences and technical disciplines. China can achieve 8% growth rates today because it can utilize the advances of others. If on the other hand you compare growth rates to pre-industrial societies, 2% is really impressive. Prior to the industrial revolution, growth was barely existent, GDP per capita was as likely to go down as up. In the first world from 1750 to 1850, GDP per capita nearly doubled, during the same period in the third world it decreased by 10%. The UK specifically saw a 61% GDP per capita increase from 1830 to 1860, compared to an average for western Europe of 29%. The industrial revolution marks the beginning of consistently positive growth, a major qualitative shift. We observe in reality exactly what we'd expect to see: a major change in how things are done in the late 1700s followed by rapid economic growth compared to neighbors who did not make those changes over the subsequent decades.

63 points by diodorus 5y ago

chmod600 5y ago

How quickly did the agricultural revolution happen? Probably much more slowly and we still call that a revolution.

WJW 5y ago
I think that schoolbooks from the year 3500 will categorize the industrial revolution as basically anywhere between 1700 and 2200 or so. There are still parts of the worlds rapidly industrializing (China is almost done, rest of Asia is in the middle of it, Africa will pick up the pace soon) and I think that eventually the rise of computers and software will be seen as just another growth spurt of the wider industrial revolution. Depending on how soon we develop practical fusion energy and/or nanotech, the industrial revolution could last for a few centuries more. It just feels less "revolutionary" because we're in the middle of it and we live it day by day.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

mikewarot 5y ago

Economists can argue over the numbers all they want. It was a huge positive feedback loop that lead to the hockey stick growth. The rapid change in productivity is exemplified by the making of the humble machine screw. Prior to Maudsley, screws were made by hand, and numbered because they weren't interchangeable. Craftsmanship was required to make a good screw thread. Within a decade, an apprentice could make them with almost no training. Soon thereafter, machines turned them out in quantity. The quality of material required to be suitable stock for use in a lathe was the result of other similar improvements in quantity and quality of production. You can follow the causal chain down a million rabbit holes.

DubiousPusher 5y ago
You should check out, "The Rise and Fall of American Growth". That book does a very good job of explaining how the growth we consider part of the industrial revolution actually came after. Specifically, the book focuses on the eras 1870-1940 and 1940-1970. It's about the U.S. but a lot of the book also shows how many of the statistics from the U.S. are shadowed by the U.K.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago
> It was a huge positive feedback loop that lead to the hockey stick growth. In nature, every "hockey stick" graph is merely the first half of an S-curve.
- simonh 5y ago
  Firstly that's mind numbingly pedantic. But also the industrial revolution kicked off a massive cycle of overlapping growth curves, which germinated new technologies with their own growth curves, some of which are still only just getting started and are still in the hockey stick phase.
- baq 5y ago
  in the long run, we're all dead. ergo, timing matters.
- imtringued 5y ago
  When you are half way to perfection you aren't even mad even if perfection is not worth achieving.

gumby 5y ago

I love the historiography alluded to in the paper (and the meta-historiographic discussion of the arguments and counter arguments). The argument always seemed political to me: just look at Orwell’s Wigan Pier (~1920s) or Wylie’s Village in the Vaucluse, or hell, the 1939 German invasion of Poland with horse drawn cannon to see the flatness of the curve. Zhou Enlai’s quip about the significance of the French Revolution is instructive here: “Too soon to tell”. For a “revolution” — a true turn of the wheel — is usually a slow motion and almost invisible affair, like swimming through a huge wave. Unless you’re close to the shore where it breaks, it’s hard to see and its implication unclear. You don’t need a huge first derivative when you are collecting the AUC and that’s why you often don’t see it. Remember the computer “revolution” that was “visible everywhere but in the productivity statistics” (that was Solow in 87). The ARPANET had already transitioned to TCP by then but the consequences were still decades away. So there was an industrial revolution, but trying to describe it as a kind of Big Bang is a parallel relic of the “great man” school of history.

detritus 5y ago
Sadly, it appears that quip was a 'too delicious' a misinterpretation to correct. https://www.scmp.com/article/970657/not-letting-facts-ruin-good-story https://www.scmp.com/article/970657/not-letting-facts-ruin-g... But sssh! Don't tell anyone else.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
Wildgoose 5y ago
The Zhou Enlai quip was actually the result of a mistranslation - he thought he was being asked about the 1968 student demonstrations.

nickik 5y ago

The reason it sticks around in the popular mind has almost nothing to do with all of this great economic work. For 1000s of years overall global population and economic output was more or less flat, and then, something happened, and in the blink of an eye, historically speaking, you literally have a guy standing on the moon. Not just flying, literally standing on the fucking moon. There is no other way to explain how this can happen, then industrial revolution. No other term captures the spirit of that change. That why it will always stick around popularly. And in world historic political terms, it also lead in to essentially control of the world by 6 small West European nations. Overall very interesting article. Reading about that time is really fascinating and something I want to do more of. Not just the statistical, but lives of the people that lived during that change.

lucioperca 5y ago

But no matter how small the exponential growth is the result will be still revolutionary eventually.

Animats 5y ago

My general comment on this is that 1830 was when the industrial revolution got out of beta. That was the year the first serious railroad started operating, the Liverpool and Manchester Railway. Steam locomotives, reasonably good speeds, no horses or cable hauling, double track, tickets, and schedules. Before that, outside of the textile industry, technology was mostly one-offs. Before 1840 or so, most people never got more than 50 miles from home. By 1890, in Europe or the US, there were trains to all major cities. In major cities, you could then take an electric street car from the train station by the 1890s. Here's a railroad map of the US from 1890.[1] That was the era when the world changed in one lifetime. [1] https://www.loc.gov/resource/g3701p.rr000640/?r=-0.171,-0.012,1.334,0.683,0 https://www.loc.gov/resource/g3701p.rr000640/?r=-0.171,-0.01...

WJW 5y ago
The world has changed rather drastically since 1990, both politically and technologically. If you told someone from ~1980 that not only would the Soviet Union not be a meaningful player in 40 years but also that everyone would be carrying a supercomputer in their pocket that could tell them the latest news in an instant and would let them send video messages to their friends and family (not to mention give instant, accurate directions anywhere on the planet), they would think you were crazy. I don't know how you measure "one lifetime" but the world has changed plenty in my 35 years of existing and I don't think it'll slow down soon.
- treeman79 5y ago
  As a kid in the 80s video phones were promised as coming soon. I was hugely disappointed for a long time.
  - simonh 5y ago
    I got my first iPad in 2011 and went to see my grandmother up in Durham, North East England, who was in her 90s. My wife is Chinese and was in China with my daughters at the time, and we did a Skype call. At first she literally could not believe what she was seeing. It took me several times to explain that this was actually them, right now in China, and they could talk back to her and it wasn't just a recording or some sort of trick.

Robotbeat 5y ago

Might take away on this is that there’s a really long delay from when technology becomes available to when it becomes widespread, and this can mean slower growth than you might expect. Which means there’s a pretty enormous opportunity for accelerating growth by utilizing things that already exist technologically but haven’t permeated through society. We have pretty amazing electric cars but they’re only like 1% of the global fleet. Solar powers also only 2% of US electricity, and even less than that globally on average. Same for battery storage or even IT innovation. I think in some ways we still haven’t fully absorbed computer technology from 50 years ago. Electric aircraft is similar. A lot of people aren’t even aware that we really have electric aircraft as a technological possibility. We have probably 80 years of growth just to fully utilize lithium battery chemistries, IMHO. Things like mRNA tech are even more important. I also wonder how events like pandemics and wars facilitate growth (in the form of increasing technology permeation through society) as compensation for the destructive effects of pandemics and wars. In the last year or so we experienced an explosion of infusion of work from home technology and online ordering/home-delivery that probably would’ve taken a decade or 2 to happen otherwise. The trick is to get the advantage of these events without the destructiveness. I don’t think we figured that one out yet.

megameter 5y ago

Like a lot of questions historical, the more one studies the Industrial Revolution, the more questions one has. I have often wondered about exactly this kind of thing so it's nice to see a researched take on it. The thing in my mind was always that culturally, an image of "big city industry" arose at some point - but that point clearly wasn't the late 1700's, or even into the first decades of the 1800's. So then, when was it? There are a few reference markers that suggest when that image could have coalesced, though: * The first railroads of the 1830's * The gold rushes and immigration waves of the mid-19th (precipitated by faster communication and rising sea traffic) * The Crimean and US Civil Wars, both "industrial" in their making. * The completion of transcontinental railroads * The creation of modern urban sanitation * The organization of wage labor as a movement, including revolutionary forms These markers seem to align well with the 1850's-1870's growth figure assessment. The world by 1880 had experienced a vast reallocation of physical resources and human capital, and fell into a new political context premised around those reallocations. In the emerging cities, by day, immigrants toiled in sweatshops; by night, those with the means came out to party underneath the gaslamps. More and more goods were available imported. If you travelled, you bumped shoulders with the vast crowds at hub train stations. And there was always news of something more being invented. All of that made the revolution a visible thing reorganizing everyday life, even if it only tangentially affected you. Before that period, while you might have heard of new developments from afar, most of them did not carry such sudden impact.

photojosh 5y ago
Circa 1850 one branch of my family, who had been bootmakers for at least 4 generations in a small town in Scotland, in the course of a few years had all their children leave for the big city, with my ancestor running a coffee shop. This lines up with what I've read about mechanisation hitting the shoe industry. In the early 1900s, my great-great-grandfather's orange sorting machine was the talk of the town: there was an article in the local paper welcoming anyone interested to visit for a look.

jjk166 5y ago

It seems folly to try to estimate the timing of the industrial revolution based on measured output. It takes time to build a factory, especially one that's unlike any that has ever been built before. Then after you get it working, it takes time for people to learn all the little idiosyncrasies necessary to get the most out of it. Indeed, adopting radically new technologies might in the short term lead to substantial losses in productivity. But substantially, the way things were made changed. Some industries associated with the revolution saw enormous growth of course, but everything changed. Wooden tools were replaced by metal, labor was concentrated and mechanized, backwater towns became bustling cities while old centers of commerce declined. Normalizing growth rate per capita is dumb when part of the revolution is the change in population. It also seems silly to hold the growth of that period against the standard of today. Innovation builds upon innovation, and the modern growth rate is the product of billions of people educated in modern sciences and technical disciplines. China can achieve 8% growth rates today because it can utilize the advances of others. If on the other hand you compare growth rates to pre-industrial societies, 2% is really impressive. Prior to the industrial revolution, growth was barely existent, GDP per capita was as likely to go down as up. In the first world from 1750 to 1850, GDP per capita nearly doubled, during the same period in the third world it decreased by 10%. The UK specifically saw a 61% GDP per capita increase from 1830 to 1860, compared to an average for western Europe of 29%. The industrial revolution marks the beginning of consistently positive growth, a major qualitative shift. We observe in reality exactly what we'd expect to see: a major change in how things are done in the late 1700s followed by rapid economic growth compared to neighbors who did not make those changes over the subsequent decades.