A first and very British Industrial Revolution

At a time when the concept of a First and British Industrial Revolution is once again under attack as a ‘misnomer’, a ‘myth’ (in both the vulgar and cultural senses of that term) and dismissed as one among a ‘spurious list of revolutions’, it might seem misleading, certainly provocative, to continue to use the term as the title for a book of essays designed for undergraduates (Cameron 1981; Fores, 1981; Coleman 1989; Clarke 1986, 37–9). Historians certainly need to defend the themes and periods they recommend for study. That task may be straightforward for clearly significant and relatively discrete events such as the defeat of the Armada. But the economic and social changes which have traditionally been encapsulated by historians under the label of Industrial Revolution are so complex that problems of dating, origins, scale, depiction and significance loom as large as they do in those never-ending discussions about the Renaissance and Reformation. Although contemporaries seldom used the term Industrial Revolution before it was made popular by Arnold Toynbee in the 1880s, the generations alive from say 1815 to 1851 were uneasily aware that their economy and society had undergone a profound transformation within living memory (Thomis 1976; Bowditch and Ramsland 1968).