Davis Kedrofsky writes,

There was an Industrial Revolution, and it was slow.

The debate’s been over for two decades. The gradualists, armed with new growth accounting techniques, have won, exorcising forever the Ashtonian vision of an eighteenth-century leap into exponential growth. Where historians once thought the spinning jenny, steam engine, and factory system the immediate preconditions of England’s dramatic transformation, they now accept that these advances emerged in a trickle in a few tiny sectors.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

I believe that that the gradualists may have it wrong. Here is a clue, from later in Kedrofsky’s essay.

And a growing share of the population moved out of agriculture and into that increasingly-recognizable branch of manufacturing—from 33.9 percent in 1759 to 45.6 percent in 1851.

How did these manufacturing workers eat? There had to be a significant increase in agricultural productivity. But I am guessing that a lot of the increase did not take place on farms. Here is Wikipedia.

The British Agricultural Revolution, or Second Agricultural Revolution, was an unprecedented increase in agricultural production in Britain arising from increases in labour and land productivity between the mid-17th and late 19th centuries. Agricultural output grew faster than the population over the century to 1770, and thereafter productivity remained among the highest in the world. This increase in the food supply contributed to the rapid growth of population in England and Wales, from 5.5 million in 1700 to over 9 million by 1801, though domestic production gave way increasingly to food imports in the nineteenth century as the population more than tripled to over 35 million

I want to focus on the last point, about food imports. Borrowing a trope from David Friedman, I would say that British manufacturing workers were very productive at growing foodstuffs. They produced manufactured goods, put them on ships, and the ships came back with foodstuffs.

Suppose that productivity did not change in either agriculture or manufacturing between 1800 and 1850. A worker could produce a bushel of grain per day either year, and a worker could produce a bolt of cloth per day either year. But if you can trade a bolt of cloth for two bushels of grain, and you move some workers out of agriculture and into manufacturing, that worker now produces twice as much grain.

Adam Smith and David Ricardo knew more about how living standards improve than do modern productivity historians. And my guess is that the transformation that people who were alive around 1800 were seeing with their own eyes was real, today’s gradualists notwithstanding.

UPDATE: A commenter points to Anton Howes.

The push thesis implies agricultural productivity was an original cause of England’s structural transformation; the pull thesis that it was a result. The evidence, I think, is in favour of a pull — specifically one caused by the dramatic growth of London’s trade.

On the larger question, Howes is a gradualist.