The Industrious Revolution was a period in early modern Europe lasting from approximately 1600 to 1800 in which household productivity and consumer demand increased despite the absence of major technological innovations that would mark the later Industrial Revolution. Proponents of the Industrious Revolution theory argue that the increase in working hours and individual consumption traditionally associated with the Industrial Revolution actually began several centuries earlier, and were largely a result of choice rather than coercion. The term was originally coined by the Japanese demographic historian Akira Hayami to describe Japan during the Tokugawa era. The theory of a pre-industrial Industrious Revolution is contested by some historians.
Origin
Hayami introduced the concept of Industrious Revolution in a Japanese-language work published in 1967. It was coined to compare the labour-intensive technologies of Tokugawa Japan (1603-1868) with the capital-intensive technologies of Britain's Industrial Revolution. Hayami observed that the two countries took different paths due to the different mix of factor endowments (capital for Britain and labour for Japan). He introduced the idea of an "Industrious Revolution" to describe the Japanese developmental trajectory, which exploited the benefits of increasing labour absorption due to the lack of capital that made the Industrial Revolution in Britain possible.
Industrious vs. Industrial Revolution
The basic picture painted of the pre-Industrial Revolution is that the Industrial Revolution was the result of a surplus of money and crops, which led to the development of new technology. The 1500s (16th century) saw the revolution of print, which boosted education and knowledge sharing among locations, and which was an automation-revolution, based on transmissions, albeit not-yet motorized. This new technology eventually developed into factories. The Industrious Revolution addresses this belief, saying instead, that the overwhelming desire for more goods directly preceded the Industrial Revolution. The theory states that during the Industrious Revolution there was an increase in demand for goods, but that supply did not rise as quickly.
Eventually, some achievements of industry and agriculture, as well as the decisions made by households, helped to increase the supply, as well as the demand for goods. These behaviours, when combined constitute an Industrious Revolution. A quick summation of the differences between the Industrious Revolution and the Industrial Revolution is that the former is concerned with demand, and the latter is supply based. The right mindset to a productional economy and world may have increased the supply of technology, but they would have had little impact on invention without a demand for new techniques.
The theory of an Industrious Revolution, as put forward by historian Jan de Vries, claims that there were two parts to the Industrious Revolution. First, there was a reduction of leisure time as the utility of monetary income rose. Second, the focus of labour shifted from goods and services to marketable goods.
In a later work, Hayami cited that de Vries and other theorists' interpretations did not use the term in the same way he does. Hayami noted that these saw Industrious Revolution and Industrial Revolution as a continuum while the original idea considers the two revolutions as opposing concepts. Hayami also stressed that the term explained how the Japanese became industrious for some reason at one point and that eventually they will no longer be.
The length of the historical working year
One of the suggested hallmarks of an Industrious Revolution is that of increased work days. However, according to historians Gregory Clark and Ysbrand Van Der Werf, there has been no information found to suggest an increase in work days, in the time period between the Middle Ages and the nineteenth century. These records even indicate that before 1750, some people were working 300 days per year. Even in the period preceding the Industrial Revolution people were working at least 290 days in a year. In contrast, other estimates found an average of 250-260 working days a year for labourers in fifteenth-century Europe, lower than at any subsequent point until the second half of the twentieth century.