Although economic historians have intensely discussed the ultimate causes of the industrial revolution for more than a century, they have found little agreement. Was it differential population growth that changed the land-labor ratio and wages? Or the modernization of traditional rural society by land enclosures? Or the growth of foreign trade through colonial expansion? Or the overthrow of absolutist regimes and the reduction of uncertainty of property rights? Or the rise in urbanization and literacy? Or the increase in a nation's economic infrastructure?

It is not my intention to deal in this chapter with the industrial revolution in its entirety but rather to focus on one small part of the issue. In the previous chapter, I touched briefly on certain aspects of the systemic change of agricultural economic systems. In this chapter, I explore at greater length a critical aspect of these dynamic systemic elements: namely, the extent to which, in past centuries, the type of agricultural economic system aided or hindered the transformation to an industrial/service economy. Thus, many of the issues raised previously – for instance, the impact of the growth of the Atlantic trade – cannot be handled. The role of intermediaries between the farmers and the urban sector – for instance, small shopkeepers, traveling merchants, and financiers – is also left undiscussed. Nevertheless, we cannot avoid facing certain problems arising from the complexity of the causal connections between agriculture and manufacturing and the difficulties in pinning down the multifaceted nature of industrialization.