I stumbled across this 2013 BBC documentary (Amazon Prime) on the Industrial Revolution and found it quite good and refreshingly free of any “anti-industrial” views. The host and narrator is the British intellectual Jeremy Black, who is evidently a prolific historian.
Though it’s a huge subject and only 50 minutes, he manages to get the big pieces in here — the intellectual climate (“a society that is confident in its understanding of the world”), the business climate (where “men of action and men of ideas came together”), and the political climate (Liberalism vs European statism). He even touches on the birth of the idea of “wealth creation” vs the “fixed pie” misconception. I would recommend this especially at the classroom level as a way of introducing the subject.
And instead of closing with the usual postscript on “climate change,” he says:
There was one important change that is still with us today. The conviction that the future will never again be the same as the past. For most of the past people were essentially defined by their history, they looked back for their values. Most people did what their parents had done. This situation changed radically in the 18th century. New ideas and new machines made it possible to create the wealth — thanks to which, people could conceive of a new environment, a world in which people lived in cities. It’s no wonder we called this transformation the Industrial Revolution. It set the world in which we now live. We’re in the shadow of the achievements of those people.
/sb
