题目内容

The question of the antecedent causes of the Industrial Revolution in nineteenth-century Europe has been of much concern to historians during the last four decades. According to W. W. Rostow's deceptively simple but once widely accepted model of an economic process of "takeoff' led by the textile mills, rates of investment and output increased so dramatically in the period preceding the Industrial Revolution that new production techniques became inevitable and sustained economic growth became automatic. Having rejected Rostow's model, historians were still at a loss for an explanation of how the stage was set for the massive shift from an agricultural-based to a manufacturing-based economy.

In the early 1970s, such German historians as Peter Kriedte and Hans Medick stepped in with a new hypothesis and a new word: "proto-industrialization," by which they meant the eighteenth-century development of small, rural-based industries--usually the manufacture of textiles by rural laborers in their homes-that they saw as a precursor to urban factory-based mass production. In this model, other laborers were drawn from subsistence farming into commercial agriculture in order to feed those workers engaged in manufacturing; nearby towns supplied the market for the manufactured goods produced and furnished a population of capitalist entrepreneurs who financed the whole enterprise; and the products themselves were exported, as well as sold locally. The results, these historians argue, effectively set the stage for an industrial revolution: increased population growth due to the need for more laborers in home-based businesses; an eventual shift from home labor to workshops organized for greater efficiency and cost reduction; the development of a cadre of export- oriented merchants; and a commercial agricultural sector. However, research focusing on England leads to the conclusion that proto-industrialization flourished here and there at various times from the thirteenth to the eighteenth century, but in most cases it eventually just petered out. Proto- industrialization, at least in England, seems not to have been a sufficient, or even a necessary, cause of industrial revolution. The suggestion has even been made that the Industrial Revolution in England was more closely related to locale than to the general economic, psychological, and social modernizing processes that were admittedly going on in eighteenth-century England. For example, there appears to have been an inverse correlation between literacy, the key indicator of modernization, and industrialization, the former actually at its maximum in remote and barren Westmorland and declining in the areas of high industrial growth from 1760 to 1840. On the other hand, the geographical accidents of a plentiful water supply or the close proximity of underground iron and coal do seem to be necessary causes, although certainly not sufficient causes, of the development of such symbols of the Industrial Revolution as mills and mines.