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The Industrial Revolution and the Industrious Revolution

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2009

Jan de Vries
Jan de Vries
Affiliation:
Professor of History and Economics at the University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720.
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Abstract

The Industrial Revolution as a historical concept has many shortcomings. A new concept—the “industrious revolution”—is proposed to place the Industrial Revolution in a broader historical setting. The industrious revolution was a process of household-based resource reallocation that increased both the supply of marketed commodities and labor and the demand for market-supplied goods. The industrious revolution was a household-level change with important demand-side features that preceded the Industrial Revolution, a supply-side phenomenon. It has implications for nineteenth- and twentieth-century economic history.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 54 , Issue 2 , June 1994 , pp. 249 - 270
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1994

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