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Arnold Toynbee's lectures on the Industrial Revolution (published in 1884) were the first-and the most influential-attempt to historicize Britain's radical transition to a machine-based economy. This article locates the lectures in the context of the increasing disciplinary specialization of late-nineteenth-century Britain. Toynbee's intellectual character and political commitments shaped an approach to the machinery question which was holist and thus placed him at odds with emerging specialists in history and economics. Despite various shortcomings, the lectures suggest the generative potential of the machinery question for an integrated economic and historical science, at which Toynbee's unfinished work only hinted.
We have not, here and now, to deal with the history of this revolution, nor with its vast importance for the present and the future. Such a delineation must be reserved for a future, more comprehensive work.
Friedrich Engels, 1845
Finally he would say to those great manufacturers who had studied inventions and machines that if they would turn away a little from the dead mechanism of the factory to the contemplation of the living mechanism of the social system, if they would give their attention to the evils of the industrial system ... England might lead the nations in solving the greatest industrial problem the world had ever seen.
Arnold Toynbee, 18801
It would be an exaggeration to suggest that Arnold Toynbee's Lectures on the Industrial Revolution could have satisfied Engels's call in 1845 for a "future, more comprehensive work" which would explain the history of this event, whose "vast importance for the present" continues to be debated. Nonetheless, Toynbee's unfinished lecture series-published posthumously in 1884 and which first popularized the phrase in its title-was the most influential account of the Industrial Revolution produced in English during the nineteenth century. In particular, Toynbee's lectures helped to establish the framework through which the story of industrialization has been told; a framework that is of interest less for understanding the dynamic of industrial change in itself than for considering the formation of historical myth and memory around this so-called "revolution."
The question of the Industrial Revolution remains a fraught issue with an exceptionally complex historiography, in which many thinkers have a political and intellectual investment. Historical claims about the origins of industrialization have often stemmed from an aspiration...