Weighing the Industrial Revolution: Gains, Costs and Legacies

How should we judge the Industrial Revolution? Its gains were enormous. Over the long run it raised productivity and incomes, made goods from clothing to books cheap, enabled advances in medicine and sanitation, and supported populations far larger than before.

It also helped create new social classes, mass politics, trade unions and modern welfare states. Its costs were also great: dangerous work, child labor, crowded and unhealthy cities in its early decades, the expansion of slave-grown cotton, the decline of craft industries in other parts of the world, environmental damage and rising carbon emissions.

Different groups experienced it very differently depending on class, gender, region and nation. Historians generally agree it was one of the most important turning points in human history, comparable to the agricultural revolution, but they continue to debate its timing, causes and balance of benefits and harms.