World Industrialization

1The Notion of Industrialization and Other Related Notions

1.1. The notion of industrialization

A near-perfect “portmanteau word” (to use Lewis Carroll’s expression: “two meanings packed into one word”), the notion of industrialization has remained widely used but incomplete, as it has never been defined in an indisputable way. This notion is almost impossible to relate to a specific period of time or to specific places where it was born and developed.

1.1.1. The birth of the notion of industrialization

Responsibility for the birth of the notion of industrialization has almost never been claimed, or at least so rarely that it has never been possible to identify its inventor(s). Meanwhile, those who have used this notion have done so spontaneously, without basing their use of the term on any real elements and often reducing this notion to variable dimensions, far from a scientific and effective approach. Was it in England, France or the Netherlands that this notion was born, and on what date, in the 18th or 19th Century? References to articles in the Moniteur Universel (the pre-1868 version of France’s Journal officiel) are often seen, such as the issue of April 8, 1820 dealing with “machinism” and “financing of industries”, the issue of April 26, 1838 dealing with the railway industry, and the issue of November 25, 1849 and the “excesses of industry”.

Since the publication of Jean-Baptiste Say’s works on https://gallica.bnf.fr, we can see references to his work, works that ...