Is there any historian that analyzes the Industrial Revolution from a positive point of view?

by ortodoxMassism

So, im used to read analysis of the Industrial Revolution made by marxist authors, and im honestly kinda tired. I wanted to know if there are any "Pro-Industrial Revolution" authors or books that make an explicit defense of the Industrial Revolution.

AlviseFalier

I don't really know of any authors who take stances pro or against the industrial revolution, and please don't think I'm being snarky but I can't help but ask, do these authors instead argue that they would prefer to live in an agricultural economy?

Indeed, I'd be interested to ask (and I will get on with answering below) if you mean Marxian, meaning the academic framework focusing on the relationship between capital and labor, or explicitly Marxist, where an industrial economy would be a necessary step in achieving dictatorship of the proletariat? In both approaches, the industrial revolution is always going to be just "a thing that happened," which had an enormous impact on people's way of life.

More so than mount a defense or an attack on industrialization, what can instead be done is ask questions of the consequences of the industrial revolution. I think these can be organized along three broad lines:

  • Did the Industrial Revolution lead to an increase in economic growth?

  • Did the industrial revolution lead to an increase in standard of living? (and how did this very across social categories)

  • What alternative paths to achieving a modern economy does history show us are possible?

The answer to the first question is unquestionably "Yes, industrialization does cause overall economic growth." Indeed, until fairly recently (we're talking the 1980s) almost all modern economic growth was fundamentally industrial growth. There simply is no comparison between the ability of an industrial economy to produce goods and an a non-industrial economy's ability to produce goods. Additionally, contrary to popular belief, places which industrialized actually increased overall wages in the long run, allows for easier economic diversification, and is pretty much pivotal to create a society featuring a lot of the things we take for granted. You can read about that process in Sylla and Toniolo's Patterns of European Industrialization: the Nineteenth Century.

But now we have the second question: What about quality of life? We are all familiar with the popular image of the industrial revolution as a time when industrialists exploited workers. Were these workers worse off than the previous generation, which had been largely employed in agriculture?

We can't be entirely sure. Life on a farm isn't as easy as you might think, especially without modern machinery. And pre-industrial everyday household items are expensive (if they're not made at-home) which means that most industrial workers probably had more material possessions than their rural grandparents (of course, we can reject the "fetishization of commodities" as Marx instructs us, but unfortunately we have little else to measure material prosperity with). The industrial revolution also allowed for the emergence of a middle class made up of specialized workers, from engineers to accountants, who would constitute the upper middle class of "service sector" workers. For these individuals, the industrial revolution greatly increased their standard of living. Literacy and life expectancy also generally increased during the industrial revolution, so in spite of the popular image of squalid life and social strife, some overall improvements did occur.

What we can say with certainty is that the electric light and the factory clock probably meant that workers in the industrial revolution did toil longer hours than their parents did on the farm. u/PartyMoses is more prepared on the topic than I am, and wrote an extensive answer here which might interest you.

Which brings up to out last point: are there economies which have become materially prosperous without going through a phase of industrialization phase? Fact is, there are actually very few economies which made the jump from a primarily agricultural economy to a service-sector economy without passing through industrialization. These exceptions rely on some fairly unique caveats, as they are typically very small countries with a large neighbor that did industrialize and to which they can provide services to: some examples include the Bahamas, which "provide" tourism, or Singapore, which provides financial services. You could conversely argue that some particularly isolated economies like Cuba managed to fulfill societal goals like achieving income, literacy, or healthcare milestones without mimicking the Industrial Revolution, but that's not entirely true either: industrial production does exist in Cuba, only it is collectively owned (by whatever formula) rather than privately owned (industrialization in Cuba was also underway prior to the revolution, but this is a cursory example, not an in-depth dive on Cuban economic history).

So that's my best answer to your question. I know I only suggested one book, but maybe if you have follow-up questions I can clarify a bit more and can suggest a few more.

teabeforetherain

Would recommend taking a look at the work of Emma Griffin, especially her book Liberty’s Dawn: A People’s History of the Industrial Revolution.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16073191-liberty-s-dawn