Poverty, Progress, and Population

"When Deane and Cole published their pathbreaking study of the growth of the British economy between the late seventeenth and mid-twentieth centuries, they concluded, in effect, that the term 'industrial revolution' was meaningful and that the conventional chronology was broadly correct - that over a period of half a century or so beginning in the last decades of the eighteenth century there was a marked acceleration in the rate of growth of the national product, an acceleration so marked that, in spite of the fact that population grew faster in this period than at any earlier or subsequent time, output per head also rose more quickly than previously."