The concept of the industrial revolution: from appearance to the present day

The article analyzes the development of scientific concepts of the industrial revolution in Great Britain in the second half of the 18th and the first half of the 19th centuries. The main aspects, which the authors paid attention to, are noted. The sources of research are the work of historians, sociologists and economists devoted to the industrial revolution and, to a large extent, affecting this historical phenomenon. In the last two centuries, the industrial revolution is one of the most important objects of research in historiography. The author of the article notes that already in the works of the beginning of the 19th century technical, economic and social effects of mass introduction of machines are singled out. In addition to English authors, this was seen by researchers from the continent. A. Saint-Simon and J. Fazy sought the answers to the social and economic questions France faced in that era in the events on the other side of the English Channel. It was the French who proposed the term "industrial revolution". The author of the article distinguishes three main approaches to the definition of the industrial revolution in historiography: evolutionary, cyclical, systemic. The evolutionary approach appeared at the end of the 19th century. Researchers of that era based their concepts on positivism and evolutionism. The industrial revolution was defined as a relatively short period of "great" inventions in industry and the emergence of modern factory capitalism. Among the historians of the supporters of this approach, the author singles out I. Kulisher, P. Mantou, W. Cunningham, W. Rostow, D. Landis, A. Maddison. The cyclical approach appears in the interwar period and from the very beginning was under the great influence of economic science. The main feature of these concepts is the idea of an industrial revolution as one of the cycles of the development of the capitalist economy. Each of these ascents in the framework of this approach was fully consistent with the definition of the industrial revolution. Supporters of the cyclical approach were J. Schumpeter, S. Kuznets, R. Cameron. The third systemic approach was the result of the synthesis of the first two directions. The author of the article considers it correct to define it as a system one. Great influence on it was the development of macrosociology in the second half of the 20th century and the school of world-system analysis. Representatives of the system approach turned to statistical sources on demography and economic history. At the same time, they presented their views in the form of extensive macrohistorical concepts, to which, to a certain extent, evolutionism is inherent. Among the representatives of the system direction, the author of the article singles out A.G. Frank, A.V. Korotaev, L.E. Grinin. The author comes to a conclusion that the system direction reflects the current level of development of the problem.

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