Literacy underwent revolutionary growth in northwestern Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This revolution coincided with other dramatic changes in European society, such as the industrial, demographic, agricultural, political, and religious revolutions (Deane 1969: 20–84). While the relationships between literacy and these other revolutions are not fully understood, their association is apparent and many potential influences exist (Cipolla 1969; Cremin 1970; Graff 1981: 232–60; 1987a, 1987b; Jensen 1986: 114–28; Maynes 1985: 117–31; Mitch 1984, 1988; Sanderson 1983; West 1978). The transplantation of European society across the Atlantic brought the literacy revolution to the American periphery. While numerous studies have shown that colonial America participated in this expansion of literacy, the common longitudinal patterns of literacy growth across the various regions and populations of colonial America have received less attention.

Kinship ranks second only to economic factors in social-scientific attempts to explain who migrates, when they move, and where they go. A person’s household circumstances are commonly thought to influence his or her propensity to move, as is the presence of other kin in the same community. Furthermore, the existence and location of kin in other communities are commonly thought to affect both the propensity to move and the choice of destination. Much of the international migration literature, accordingly, focuses on kin chains of migration, while much of the contemporary internal migration literature focuses on rural-urban kinship ties and on the continuing importance of extended kinship ties in societies experiencing high rates of urban-bound migration.

Within the last 15 years historians, political scientists, and sociologists have played major roles as expert witnesses in southern voting-rights cases. In most of these lawsuits, black plaintiffs challenged the racially discriminatory effects of at-large elections, contests in which candidates must run citywide or countywide rather than from single-member districts. Unless a white majority casts its votes as a bloc against minority candidates, at-large elections do not have a discriminatory impact. For this reason, the court’s decision frequently turns on its assessment of the degree to which electoral patterns in the jurisdiction are polarized along racial lines. Although the expert witnesses on whom the court must rely have employed a variety of statistical methods, they increasingly have preferred a technique known as ecological regression analysis to measure the degree of racial bloc voting (Loewen 1982: 179–94; Grofman et al. 1985; Engstrom and McDonald 1985; Jacobs and O’Rourke 1986).

To the western visitor around the turn of the century, Korean women seemed the most secluded on earth. Isabella Bishop, the adventurous English traveler who visited Korea in the last years of the nineteenth century, reported that women there experienced a unique confinement: from the closing of the city gates of Seoul at dusk, all men except for the blind and officials were banished from the streets; then, and only then, in the safety of a male-free darkness, were the women at liberty to stroll and make social calls. And the higher the woman’s status, the more severe her seclusion. The queen herself conceded that she knew little of her country, having never seen the streets of Seoul by daylight. This deprivation stemmed from the peculiar practice of rigidly segregating and secluding girls when they reached the age of six (Allen 1908; Bishop 1898; Glünicke 1904; Jones 1896). The custom was observed so faithfully that Bishop, during her extensive Korean travels, never saw a girl who looked above six. The traditional Korean society therefore lacked the “brightness which girl life contributes to social existence” (Bishop 1898: 342).

My concern in this article is not with the process of industrialization in England or Great Britain, with its causes, or (with one exception) with its supposed consequences. Therefore I will not attempt to comment except in passing on the abundant and still-burgeoning literature devoted to it. Instead, my focus is on the name by which that process (or its putative beginnings) is generally but incorrectly known. As I have argued elsewhere, the term industrial revolution is a misnomer without scientific basis (Cameron 1981, 1982). It was a catchphrase popularized by a youthful, naive social reformer, not a scholar, who wanted to draw attention to the causes of what he regarded as the moral degradation of the British working classes (Toynbee 1884; on his naïveté see Kadish 1986).

The question is absurd—of course there was an industrial revolution, as obviously as there was a French Revolution—but let me take it seriously. It is absurd because it is counterintuitive—intuition based on the obvious differences between developed and underdeveloped economies, between industrial and agricultural areas, between cities and villages, between factories and farms, between industrial workers and peasants, differences which point unambiguously to the revolutionary nature of industrialization—and because it can be asked only with a heroic disregard of the massive historical evidence for the existence of the industrial revolution. Other phrases used to describe it—“the great transformation” (Polanyi 1985), “the great divide” (Tawney 1982), and “the great discontinuity” (Hartwell 1971)—also underline its revolutionary character, in terms of the break with the past, the changing of the economy, and the making of a new society quite different from that which preceded it.