If you boil down Lefever’s substantive point in the second half of that single sentence (“[The Kenedy administration was] Unduly critical of the European colonists, they seemed unaware that the British, for example, had ended slavery 79 years before Lincoln signed the Emaciation Proclamation.”) to “the British ended slavery first” then he is certainly correct. The years, however would either be 90, with the necessary caveat “for the 10-14,000 slaves in England, and in that they did not act to recreate slaveholding rights after the justices found that they had no standing in English Common Law,” or they would more reasonably be 29 years, with the recognition that graduated emancipation meant that some were still enslaved for years afterwards. This sentence, however, is part of a set of drunkenly stumbling paragraphs whose overall points are that a) the colonial powers in Africa were generally doing good things, and b) independence failed because Africans are historically shown to be barbarous and corrupt in their natures. Fact-checking pales beside this, but it does help to show what a sloppy writer Lefever is, as well as a sloppy thinker.

Well, you know, I may not be an important fact-checking academic like you, with your… very fine hat. But I suspect he thinks he’s talking about the emancipation of slaves in England in 1772 (Somersett’s Case) which decided that slavery was not permitted by English law. Look it up. It’s one of the most important dates in the history of the abolition movement.

Not to defend Lefever here, but on this point he is right and you are wrong.

I’m not sure it has to be a question of Marxist versus non/anti- (though I generally fall in the neo- camp myself). I think it’s more a question of how ones defines these things as global processes: whether one sees them as formal developments in technology and organization in which particular individuals or classes are given authorship of those developments (and one could see either a classical History of Science or a classical Marxist approach fitting in here) or as systemic processes with more complex authorship (the Braudelian thing). Even so, as long as one includes labor practices it’s difficult to see how Africa or Latin America was secondary to the industrial revolution. While plantation and industrial labor was certainly something that happened to the sugar producing slave populations of the Americas, it was not something that they, or the society around was separate from. And while you could conceivable refer labor the system of labor organization in the Witwatersrand to the BSAC, you couldn’t do the same for the vegetable oil revolution in West Africa, which greased industrial wheels before the petroleum revolution.

On a more persnickety point, if the IR happened to the working class (or those that became the working classes) then it can’t make any sense to say “England initiated the Industrial Revolution,” since the vast majority of England was in the “happened to”

“the non-identity of the nature of work”, huh! Sorry, but I have to laugh a little. I’m going to guess that E. P. Thompson never actually worked in the sense discussed in the postings above. Such work teaches a bit about the “nature of class consciousness”.

I’ll certainly say that the IR happened to the working class, and eventually, patchily, reached Africa and South America. As for forming it? … I feel a wave of Burkean complexity coming over me, and the name E. P. Thompson glows in my mind’s eye–vague thoughts about the non-identity of the nature of work and the nature of class consciousness. I think when I’m teaching class, the IR formed the working class; when I’m writing professionally, I append a page of footnotes qualifying the statement.

You’re definitely not a Marxist. If you like, we can probably agree that the Industrial Revolution happened TO the working class. Can we say that, in fact, the IR formed the working class?

Given that, plus the suppression of worker movements in the various third world sites mentioned by the other writers above, I think that we can say that the Industrial Revolution reached Africa and South America.

This does, of course, lead to interesting questions as to whether, say, English coal mines were particularly part of the Industrial Revolution. I do think their participation in the Revolution is traditionally held to depend 1) upon the series of technological advances (engines, other machines, rails, lanterns, etc.) that very substantially increased productivity; and 2) the associated agricultural revolution that allowed for the feeding of both an enlarged coal mining workforce and of the urban consumers of coal. There was already a quite substantial English coal industry by the 17th century, and a great deal of mining labor; the definition of the Industrial Revolution in England, if it is to have any analytic force, has to center on the technology and human capital rather than the labor force.

The labor in South Africa didn’t make its mines part of the Industrial Revolution?! Who’s changing the “traditional” definition of the Industrial Revolution now?

I also think you are conflating subject and object: to say “the Industrial Revolution happened to Africa” matters much less than saying “England initiated the Industrial Revolution.”