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"In the past years, there have been more and more voices that claim, to rephrase Coleman (1983), that
the Industrial Revolution is "a concept too many."
The feeling is that the term is either too vague to be of any
use at all or that it produces false connotations of abrupt change comparable in its suddenness to the French
Revolution. The main intellectual motive for this revision has been the growing (though not universally shared)
consensus that economic growth in the early stages of the British Industrial Revolution was slower than had
hitherto been supposed. The idea of the Industrial Revolution, however, predates its identification with economic
growth by many decades. The revision of national income statistics should therefore not, in itself, be enough to
abandon the concept. Yet revisionist social historians have found in those revisions the support to state
categorically that "English society before 1832 did not experience an industrial revolution let alone an Industrial
Revolution. . . . [Its] causes have been so difficult to agree on because there was no 'Industrial Revolution,'
historians have been chasing a shadow" (Jonathan Clark, 1986, pp. 39, 66). Wallerstein (1989, p. 30) suggests
amazingly that "technological revolutions occurred in the period 1550-1750, and after 1850, but precisely not in
the period 1750-1850." Cameron (1990, p. 563) phrases it even more vituperatively: "Was there an industrial
revolution? The absurdity of the question is not that it is taken seriously but that the term is taken seriously . .
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