The Encyclopedia of the Age of the Industrial Revolution, 1700–1920 (review)

Coined by the nineteenth-century French radical Auguste Blanqui, the phrase “Industrial Revolution” has been widely invoked by historians and social scientists despite, or perhaps due to, its elusiveness. Beyond question, fundamental economic and social changes occurred during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in many parts of the world, though scholars still ponder when and how they came into being. At the same time, however, there is a fair degree of agreement on many aspects of early industrialization, rendering them suitable for encyclopedic coverage. Primarily intended for undergraduate college and advanced high school students, The Encyclopedia of the Age of the Industrial Revolution contains more than 150 entries covering the early eighteenth century to the second decade of the twentieth, although some entries extend their purview beyond 1920 and a few center entirely on the years after that.

A brief introductory section summarizes the key features of the Industrial Revolution and then considers two key issues: causation and whether the term “revolution” is justified. It also makes the debatable claim that “rising income levels and living standards made possible by industrialization are not compatible with [political] repression.” Next comes a list of the entries, and then another section that groups the entries into topical headings such as “Individuals of Note,” “Labor,” and “Society and Social Issues.” Much of the material is oriented to the United States, but separate entries also cover the major countries of western Europe, with the notable exceptions of Italy, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Other entries cover Russia and Japan, while a single entry covers the other countries of East Asia along with India. Most entries deal with issues immediately relevant to industrial production, but significant if somewhat peripheral topics like “Muckraking Journalism,” “Methodism,” and “Gin Palaces” also get their own entries.

The encyclopedia concludes with a collection of twenty-eight primary documents. These include frequently reprinted documents, such as an excerpt from The Communist Manifesto, along with less commonly cited but important sources like Friedrich List’s argument for protectionist trade policies in Germany. Complementing the individual entries is a nine-page chronology that briefly notes some key events associated with the Industrial Revolution and its historical era.

All encyclopedias are doomed to have errors of fact and interpretation, and this one is no different. There is little point in playing “gotcha!” here, but moderately well-informed readers will be taken aback by the assertions that Thomas Savery’s steam engine employed a piston (p. 394) and that Ernest Rutherford succeeded in splitting the atom in 1920 (p. xxxv). On a conceptual level, issue may be taken with the uncritical use of the term “feudalism” in several articles.

Along with a few sins of commission come the inevitable sins of omission. Although some topics appear in several entries, a fair number of important topics are almost completely ignored. There is no entry on mass production, and only brief mentions of the Enclosure Acts or of demographic change. Curiously, Heinrich Hertz’s name is absent in the entry on radio, and there is only scant coverage of the electric motor, except for the misleading claim that Moritz Jacobi invented it in 1835 (p. xxxi). References to the role of the military in industrial advance are almost completely absent. Hardly anything is said about waterpower, leaving readers with the impression that coal was the primary if not the sole source of power during the early Industrial Revolution. Particularly troubling is the limited coverage of slavery and its significance for the financing of industrial development.

Centuries after its initiation, the Industrial Revolution remains an elusive phenomenon. Although encyclopedias, like textbooks, enshrine facts and interpretations as definitive, as with all other complex and multifaceted phenomena, the causes, consequences, and processes underlying the Industrial Revolution defy easy analysis. Even so, a great deal of factual information remains, much of which resides in these two volumes, and they will serve as a useful, generally reliable reference for...