Symposium

Before and After Toynbee:
conceiving the Industrial Revolution during the long nineteenth century.

A one-day symposium to be held in Cambridge on September 23 2010.

Registration is now closed.


The concept of the Industrial Revolution is widely seen to have been recognised and then solidified, in Britain, in the years after 1884 and the publication of Arnold Toynbee's “Lectures on the Industrial Revolution”. Although undeniably a linguistic watershed, it is unclear what impact Toynbee's work had in shaping the existing conceptions of industrialization into those which followed and persisted into the twentieth century.

This symposium aims to ask questions of the way industrialization was conceived both before and after Toynbee's "Lectures" in 1884. By way of a keynote talk - delivered by Professor Donald Winch (Sussex) - and three panels of short papers, the symposium will address the evolving idea of industrialism in the course of the long nineteenth century:

To what extent did a concept of the Industrial Revolution exist in Britain prior to 1884? How did such a concept relate to the characteristically ambivalent images of political reform, urbanization and economic growth; to class conflict and international trade; to the ongoing questions of machinery and the division of labour; to changing notions of time and history, and the sense of irreversible transition? How might contemporaries have negotiated the association of the Industrial Revolution with inevitable or providential changes, and the controversies around possible alternatives to perpetual industrial growth?

Turning to the concept of the Industrial Revolution which coalesced after 1884, to what extent can it be seen as a response to poverty, or purely through the lens of what has been called 'catastrophism'? Should the historicization of the idea of the 'Industrial Revolution' be put into a more polyvalent context, within a broader constellation of concerns which include worries about resource depletion, pollution and the massification of culture and production; the intolerable pressure and pace of modern life, and the 'subservience' of humans to machines?

Whether oriented primarily around the problem of poverty or not, did any of the issues relating to the idea of the Industrial Revolution alter significantly because of the public introduction of Toynbee’s conceptualization after 1884? Or were they more seamlessly joined to the ambivalences about the same processes which had existed earlier in the nineteenth century? Which alternative explanatory models competed with the idea of a revolution, if any?

In the periods both before and after 1884, therefore, three related questions emerge: how far did contemporaries see the issues associated with the idea of the Industrial Revolution as part of a single process? How inevitable did they consider such a process? And, unavoidably, what was its value?

In exploring these questions a number of fields immediately suggest themselves including, but not limited to, the following:

- the investigations made of Britain on the part of foreign writers, from JB Say to Engels, Paul Mantoux and - of course - Karl Marx.

- the parallel between the French Revolution and industrial change in British thought, from Carlyle to Hobsbawm.

- the tension between industrial and romantic visions of production: one not only of antagonism but of complicity and shared assumptions, from the Lake Poets to John Stuart Mill and William Morris. 

- representations of scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs in the industrialization process, from Arkwright, Watt, and Wedgwood to Babbage, Brunel and Siemens.

- historical argument in debates over free trade, cooperation, and the franchise,

- the relationship between urbanization and industrialization in nineteenth-century thought, from the 'Manchesterism' of 1800 to the East End sweatshop of 1900.

- providential or anti-providential visions of industrialization, in arguments about both the divine favour bestowed on Britain in the form of resources (and genius), and about the necessity of industrialization to a divine plan for global human history.

- utopian alternatives to or modifications of industrialization, from Owenite schemes of work to the reformist factories of Cadbury.

- the perceived, necessary connection between industrialism and Empire, as in the works of JA Hobson and Lenin.

- the ongoing legacy of nineteenth-century ideas of the Industrial Revolution in the twentieth century and beyond, as in debates about modern policy and economics (from the cold war to development studies) which have employed particular versions of the Industrial Revolution story.

The aim of the symposium is to examine some of these legacies, their origins, their advocates and the ways in which they were contested.

The symposium will be held over the course of a single day and hosted by the Cambridge Victorian Studies Group with the generous support of the Leverhulme Trust. Registration will be free with lunch and refreshments for all participants. To register your interest in attending, please write to industrialrevolution2010@gmail.com.

Jocelyn Betts
Daniel CS Wilson

To download a poster and a programme, click below.