Interpretations of the Industrial Revolution in England: A Methodological Inquiry

Perhaps the most important methodological problem in the writing of history is to discover why different historians, on the basis of the same or similar evidence, often have markedly different interpretations of a particular historical event. Why, for example, in a world in which there is almost unquestioned belief, even by Marxist historians, that industrialization is the grand remedy for the economic and social ills of poor and underdeveloped countries, do some historians, and especially the Marxists, still argue about the goods or ills bestowed on the worker by the first great experiment in industrialization, the industrial revolution in England? The expected economic dividend of modern industrialization is undoubtedly a higher standard of living, and the occasional opponents of such development base their opposition not on this indisputable material advance but on the “moral risk” involved in the transformation of life by industrialization.1The historians, however, while concerned also with this possible moral risk, are not all certain that the industrial revolution in England before 1850 did cause the average standard of living of the worker to rise. This uncertainty might be resolved by finding out what actually happened, but in the meantime interpretations differ, and have differed, on the basis of some evidence, of much confusion, and of differing value judgments. It is the specific aim of this article to give a history of the interpretations of the industrial revolution, and to explain them.