IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ehl/lserod/22337.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Reconstructing the Industrial Revolution: analyses, perceptions and conceptions of Britain’s precocious transition to Europe’s first industrial society

Author

Listed:
  • Riello, Giorgio
  • O'Brien, Patrick

Abstract

The Industrial Revolution continues to be analysed by economic historians deploying the conceptual vocabularies of modern social science, particularly economics. Their approach which gives priority to the elaboration of causes and processes of evolution is far too often and superficially contrasted with post-modern forms of social and cultural history with their aspirations to recover the meanings of the Revolution for those who lived through its turmoil and for ‘witnesses’ from the mainland who visited the offshore economy between 1815-48. Our purpose is to demonstrate how three distinct reconstructions of the Revolution are only apparently in conflict and above all that a contextualised analysis of observations of travellers from the mainland and the United States provides several clear insights into Britain’s famous economic transformation.

Suggested Citation

  • Riello, Giorgio & O'Brien, Patrick, 2004. "Reconstructing the Industrial Revolution: analyses, perceptions and conceptions of Britain’s precocious transition to Europe’s first industrial society," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 22337, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
  • Handle: RePEc:ehl:lserod:22337
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/22337/
    File Function: Open access version.
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • N0 - Economic History - - General
    • F3 - International Economics - - International Finance
    • G3 - Financial Economics - - Corporate Finance and Governance
    • O14 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - Industrialization; Manufacturing and Service Industries; Choice of Technology

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ehl:lserod:22337. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: LSERO Manager (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/lsepsuk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.