14 - Urban growth and economic change: from the late seventeenth century to 1841

Summary

every schoolchild knows that an Industrial Revolution in late eighteenth-century Britain was followed by massive, rapid, urbanisation; that technological change created a world in which people interacted with nature and each other through work in new ways, and therefore lived different kinds of lives in places of a sort previously unknown; that the innovation of powered machinery sucked the British population into factory towns at hitherto remote locations. These novitiate certainties are a stark contrast to the disagreements of expert historians about the nature of economic development and urban growth, and the ways in which they were related, in Britain during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

There has been vigorous argument about what, exactly, the Industrial Revolution was ever since the term was first used. Recently, econometric analysis has even brought its very existence into question: whether the structure or growth trend of the British economy changed significantly before the 1840s is now hotly disputed. The high rates of urbanisation standing proudly in the statistical rubble created by this demolition job are not as incongruous as they might once have seemed. Complementary attacks on the idea that there was an Industrial Revolution in late eighteenth-century Britain, based on hypotheses about the processes of change rather than on trends in economic series, stress the continuing overweening significance of London through the eighteenth century, and are replacing Thomas Gradgrind’s Coketown with Samuel Pickwick’s Eatanswill as the fictional exemplar of provincial urban life.