Davis Kedrosky

There was an Industrial Revolution, and it was slow. The debate’s been over for two decades. The gradualists, armed with new growth accounting techniques, have won, exorcising forever the Ashtonian vision of an eighteenth-century leap into exponential growth. Where historians once thought the spinning jenny, steam engine, and factory system the immediate preconditions of England’s dramatic transformation, they now accept that these advances emerged in a trickle in a few tiny sectors. Nicholas Crafts, a primary exponent of this “limited-gradualist” view, opens a recent survey on productivity growth during the Industrial Revolution on a triumphalist note: > The British industrial revolution was a landmark event in world economic history. While it was once seen as a period of dramatic ‘take-off’, it is now generally accepted that it was an episode of gradual acceleration in labour productivity growth which eventually led to sustained increases in living standards (Crafts 2021, p. 1). Crafts suggests that the research frontier on the 1750-1850 expansion has shifted. Economic historians should now be asking the following questions: “why did productivity growth accelerate?”, “how soon did workers benefit from faster productivity growth?”, and “why did productivity growth experience a major slowdown as soon as the 1870s?” Having exorcised the ghost of Rostow and established the empirical facts of Britain’s output trajectory, causality and distribution necessarily become the chief problems for the field. We can move on. The macroeconomic figures are largely settled, for the moment; a substantial revision by Broadberry et al (2013) points to faster growth, but not much. That said, Crafts still tries to justify the low numbers—re-revised substantially since his 1985 “revision”—in light of qualitatively obvious increase in productivity-enhancing inventive activity. But what are the consequences for the history of English economic development in the eighteenth century if th