what caused the industrial revolution
As part of an overview of the Industrial Revolution, the class worked in small groups to produce a wallchart summarising economic and social change 1750-1900. They identified change and then discussed the factors that caused these changes. Following discussion, pupils worked in their groups to arrange a set of cards in a diagram to show the possible relationship between causes. The groups then explained their diagram to the teacher and identified what they considered the three most important causes of the Industrial Revolution. This led to the pupils each producing a piece of extended writing on the causes of the Industrial Revolution. They were provided with a framework to help their planning. Some were given partially completed sentences to help begin each paragraph; others wrote their own. All pupils selected content to develop the paragraph.
Kids, a graph in a review article in the New York Review of Books by Nobel Prize winner Robert Solow is very important to me. The review is of A FAREWELL TO ALMS: A Brief Economic History of the World by Gregory Clark. (I posted here on an earlier review of Clark’s book.) The graph shows real income per capita in England from 1200 to 2000. The line on the graph basically stays level until it begins to curve upwards in the late 1700’s (the “Industrial Revolution”) and finally becomes almost a straight vertical line in the last part of the twentieth century. What caused the Industrial Revolution to take place at that time in England? After so many years of study of economic development, the evidence is not conclusive. Solow discusses how hard it is to explain a “truly unique event”, and he poses the “null hypothesis” which the competing explanations have to beat: that an industrial revolution was a random event. “It was bound to happen somewhere in some century; heads just happened to co
