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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. Nicholas Crafts, a primary exponent of this “limited-gradualist” view, opens a recent survey on productivity growth during the Industrial Revolution on a triumphalist note: The British industrial revolution was a landmark event in world economic history. While it was once seen as a period of dramatic ‘take-off’, it is now generally accepted that it was an episode of gradual acceleration in labour productivity growth which eventually led to sustained increases in living standards ....