산업혁명은 '神話'인가? = Was the Industrial Revolution a 'Myth'?

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This paper is purposed examine new interpretations on British industrial revolution since the 1970s.
Britain was the first nation to achieve industrialization, which had transformed it into the workshop of the world in the mid-nineteenth century. The traditional historians has stressed discontinuities in British industrial revolution. They thought that the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries represented a significant watershed in historical development. Until the 1960s, most of historians accepted that British industrial revolution was a period of important mixture of technological innovation, industrial development, population growth, urbanization and proletarianization which involved marked changes in living standards and in socio-political relations.
However, current interpretations are dominated by the view that the industrial revolution was unspectacular, incomplete and modest. Nowadays, gradualist historians tend to reduce the ‘first industrial revolution’to a ‘myth’or a ‘misnomer’. According to their interpretation, the ‘first industrial revolution’no longer serves as the paradigm of modernization and the historical guide to economic development. The rise of gradualist perspective is much concerned with the failure of British economic growth since the 1970s. To understand current interpretations we must be aware of the impact of contemporary economy and political circumstances. We can divide these gradualist interpretations into two categories as follow.
First, there are some revisionist studies about the factors of British industrial revolution. These studies are intended to reinterpret the factors that traditional historians regarded as important. Revisionist historians underestimate technological innovation and factory system in the industrial revolution. They also reduced demand, oversea trade, capital accumulation, population growth, enclosure and agricultural improvement in the late eighteenth century to unimporatant factors.
Second, some econometric historians have prodeuced new macroeconomic indicators such as industrial output, national income, GDP growth and productivity change. These new estimates indicate a more minimal picture of economic change in the industrial revolution than has ever emerged before. Productivity and industrial output were slow to grow, and fixed capital proportions changed only gradually. Therefore, the existence of any sort of industrial revolution is placed in doubt. It is no exaggeration to say that this macroeconomic interpretation is now a new orthodoxy.
What shall we think about these new perspectives? These interprertations appear to make the achievements of the industrial revolution insignificant. The revisionist perpective of the factors of the industrial revolution and the macroeconomic approach to British industrialization seem to prove not so much discontinuities as modest changes in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
But we can not accept the view that fundamental economic discontinuities were absent in the industrial revolution. By the 1830s, Britain exhibited a number of features characteristic of a developed rather than a pre-industrial economy. The industrial revolution radically affected British economy and the lives of various working-classes. It involved radical changes not only in the labour process but in the mentality of these classes. The industrial revolution is not a myth, not a misnomer. It is actually a historical experience.

목차 (Table of Contents)

• Ⅰ. 머리말
• Ⅱ. 산업혁명 원인론
• Ⅲ. 18세기 농업 - 선행적 변화?
• Ⅳ. 거시경제적 해석
• Ⅴ. 맺음말
• 참고문헌