The Industrial Revolution was imperial-scale and built on centuries of prior development

Evidence

One might begin by noting that the large-scale [technical] economic and social changes of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which are now most frequently referred to as the Industrial Revolution, affected the whole of Britain’s Empire as well as parts of western Europe. This suggests that to comprehend the scale on which this “revolution” operated requires a sense that it involved more than the introduction of new techniques of production. The recruitment, training, and disciplining of labor, the transportation of goods and raw materials, the political and legal structures of regulation and trade, the physical and commercial apparatus of markets, the organization and instrumentation of communication, the techniques of banking and finance, these too would have already had to be of a character that could accommodate increased commodity production. Their appearance was hardly instantaneous. On the contrary, their formation was organically determined by the economic developments of previous centuries. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 218

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: The counter-revolution in development economics began well before the late 1970s. — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 1754; American territorial expansion, slavery, and cotton drove the Industrial Revolution symbiotically — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 199; The growth-and-development coalition has been continuous from the 1500s to today — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 714