INDUSTRY AND BOURGEOISIE

Although Joseph Wright of Derby (1734–1797) began his career as a portrait painter, he is most famous for paintings which express his interest in science and technology. His participation in the Lunar Society, a group of enlightened industrialists and scientists whose meetings were held when there was sufficient moonlight for making one's way along dark country roads, inspired his interior scenes illuminated by moonlight or artificial light. The family setting of the "Experiment with the Air Pump (1768)," emphasizes the egalitarian attitude that scientific concepts and discoveries could be presented to those outside the laboratory such as women and children.

The tale grows with the telling. —Eric Kerridge

We are accustomed to organizing our knowledge around central concepts which take the form of elementary truisms. The rise of industry and the rise of the bourgeoisie or middle classes are two such concepts, bequeathed to us by nineteenth-century historiography and social science to explain the modern world. The dominant view has been that a qualitative historical change took place at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries. This was an age of revolutions when both the "first" industrial revolution in Great Britain and the "exemplary" bourgeois revolution in France occurred. No doubt there have been voices to challenge this consensus. And there has been incessant quibbling about the details. Nonetheless, the imagery of these two revolutions remains deeply anchored in both popular culture and scholarly thought. These concepts are in fact the lodestars by which we usually navigate the misty and turbulent waters of modern historical reality. Indeed, as I shall indicate, the two lodestars are but a single one.

The term "revolution" connotes for us sudden, dramatic, and extensive change. It emphasizes discontinuity. There is no doubt that this is the sense that most of those who use the concept of "industrial revolution" intend.' Coleman speaks of a "comparatively sudden and violent change which launched the industrialized society," and Landes of "a far more drastic break with the past than anything since the invention of the wheel." Hobsbawm similarly insists: "If the sudden, qualitative, and fundamental transformation, which happened in or about the 1780's, was not a revolution, then the word has no common-sense meaning."

Of what is this revolution supposed to consist? Toynbee (to whom we owe the classic analysis of the industrial revolution as such), writing in 1884, finds its "essence" in the "substitution of competition for medieval regulations." Hartwell, writing 80 years later, defines its "essential character" somewhat differently: "the sustained increase in the rate of growth of total and per capita output at a rate which was revolutionary compared with what went before."

The two emphases—freedom from "medieval" constraints (or social revolution) arid the rate of growth (or economic revolution)—are, to be sure, not incompatible. Indeed, the heart of the traditional argument has been that the former led to the latter. But in recent years it has been the rate of growth that has been the focus of attention, with one after another factor invoked to explain it. Xor is this surprising. The continued development of the capitalist world-economy has involved the unceasing ascension of the ideology of national economic development as the primordial collective task, the definition of such development in terms of national economic growth, and the corresponding virtual "axiom ... that the route to affluence lies by way of an industrial revolution."

The two "essential" elements—growth and freedom—remain too vague. Each must be translated into more specific concepts. Growth seems very closely linked conceptually to the "application of mechanical principles ... to manufacturing," what the French often call "machinisme," and the "revolution" of mechanization has usually been attributed to "a cluster of innovations in Schumpeter's sense of the term."

The analysis of mechanization places the development of the forces of production in the foreground. The increase of "freedom" (or social revolution) refers, on the other hand, primarily to the relations of production: who may produce what, who may work for whom, and on what terms. Two phenomena are central to this part of the discussion: the factory (locus of concentration of the machines) and the proletarian or wage laborer (employee of the factory). The modern factory is said to have "originated in England in the last third of the eighteenth century." For many authors, it is the factory, and all that it implies in terms of the organization of the work force, that is thought to be the crucial innovation in the organization of work, requiring a salaried work force. Hobsbawm insists that the industrial revolution "is not merely an acceleration of economic growth, but an acceleration of growth because of, and through, economic and social transformation." The transformation refers, above all, to the rise of an urban proletariat, itself the consequence of a "total transformation of the rural social structure."

Much of the discussion on the industrial revolution, however, assumes both the processes of mechanization and the process of "liberation"/ proletarianization and concentrates instead on the question: what made these processes occur "for the first time" in Great Britain, what made Britain "take off"? Take off is, in fact, an image which aptly reflects the basic model of the industrial revolution, however much Rostow's detailed hypotheses or periodization may have been the subject of sharp debate. To this question, a series of answers, which are not by any means mutually exclusive, have been given, although various authors have insisted on the centrality of a given factor (which other authors have in turn duly contested). Placing them in an order of chronological immediacy, and working backward, these are the factors of increased demand (which is said to make mechanization and proletarianization profitable), the availability of capital (which in turn makes the mechanization possible), demographic growth (which makes the proletarianization possible), an agricultural "revolution" (which makes the demographic growth possible), arid a preexisting development of land-tenure patterns (which makes the demographic growth possible). Furthest in the rear, and most difficult to pin down, is a presumed attitude of mind (which ensures that there will be entrepreneurs who will take advantage of all the many opportunities this revolutionary process offers at its many junctures, such that the cumulative effect is "revolutionary"). Obviously, this chronology of factors is a bit abstract, and various authors have argued a different sequence.

Demand, as the...