<P> GDP per capita was broadly stable before the Industrial Revolution and the emergence of the modern capitalist economy, while the Industrial Revolution began an era of per - capita economic growth in capitalist economies . Economic historians are in agreement that the onset of the Industrial Revolution is the most important event in the history of humanity since the domestication of animals and plants . </P> <P> The precise start and end of the Industrial Revolution is still debated among historians, as is the pace of economic and social changes . Eric Hobsbawm held that the Industrial Revolution began in Britain in the 1780s and was not fully felt until the 1830s or 1840s, while T.S. Ashton held that it occurred roughly between 1760 and 1830 . Rapid industrialization first began in Britain, starting with mechanized spinning in the 1780s, with high rates of growth in steam power and iron production occurring after 1800 . Mechanized textile production spread from Great Britain to continental Europe and the United States in the early 19th century, with important centres of textiles, iron and coal emerging in Belgium and the United States and later textiles in France . </P> <P> An economic recession occurred from the late 1830s to the early 1840s when the adoption of the original innovations of the Industrial Revolution, such as mechanized spinning and weaving, slowed and their markets matured . Innovations developed late in the period, such as the increasing adoption of locomotives, steamboats and steamships, hot blast iron smelting and new technologies technologies, such as the electrical telegraph, widely introduced in the 1840s and 1850s, were not powerful enough to drive high rates of growth . Rapid economic growth began to occur after 1870, springing from a new group of innovations in what has been called the Second Industrial Revolution . These new innovations included new steel making processes, the large - scale manufacture of machine tools and the use of increasingly advanced machinery in steam - powered factories . </P> <P> The earliest recorded use of the term "Industrial Revolution" seems to have been in a letter from 6 July 1799 written by French envoy Louis - Guillaume Otto, announcing that France had entered the race to industrialise . In his 1976 book Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, Raymond Williams states in the entry for "Industry": "The idea of a new social order based on major industrial change was clear in Southey and Owen, between 1811 and 1818, and was implicit as early as Blake in the early 1790s and Wordsworth at the turn of the (19th) century ." The term Industrial Revolution applied to technological change was becoming more common by the late 1830s, as in Jérôme - Adolphe Blanqui's description in 1837 of la révolution industrielle . Friedrich Engels in The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 spoke of "an industrial revolution, a revolution which at the same time changed the whole of civil society". However, although Engels wrote in the 1840s, his book was not translated into English until the late 1800s, and his expression did not enter everyday language until then . Credit for popularising the term may be given to Arnold Toynbee, whose 1881 lectures gave a detailed account of the term . </P>

Where did the industrial revolution begin in the mid-1700s