NDA (II) 2016 General Ability Test · Question 120 of 150

Correct — B, Arnold Toynbee. The stem is carefully worded and rewards reading it closely: it concedes that French and German writers used the expression earlier, and asks only who made it current in English. That was Arnold Toynbee, the Oxford economic historian, whose lectures of 1880-81 on the industrial changes in Britain between about 1760 and 1820 were published after his death as Lectures on the Industrial Revolution in England in 1884. Those lectures fixed both the phrase and the periodisation in English-language scholarship. Note that this is the younger Arnold Toynbee, who lived from 1852 to 1883 and after whom Toynbee Hall in east London is named — not his nephew Arnold J. Toynbee, the twentieth-century author of A Study of History.

• (a)Adam Smith — Wrong by a century. Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations in 1776 and died in 1790, before the changes the phrase names had been recognised as an epoch at all. He is the founder of classical political economy, not the coiner of a historical label.
• (c)James Mill — The utilitarian philosopher and author of The History of British India, who died in 1836. His son John Stuart Mill is the better-known economist of the family. Neither is associated with naming or popularising the Industrial Revolution.
• (d)Bertrand Russell — A twentieth-century philosopher and mathematician, born in 1872 and active long after the phrase was in ordinary use. He is out by both discipline and date.

The expression 'Industrial Revolution' was in circulation in continental Europe well before it settled into English. The French economist Jerome-Adolphe Blanqui is generally credited with its early use in the 1830s, and Friedrich Engels used the German equivalent in his study of the English working class in 1845. What Arnold Toynbee did was different in kind — his Oxford lectures gave the English-speaking academic world both the term and a definite period for it, and later historians have argued with his dates ever since precisely because he set them.

This question is worth studying as a piece of examination craft, because the same topic has been set repeatedly with slightly different wording and two different correct answers. When the NDA asks who used the term FIRST, without qualification, the expected answer is Blanqui, and that is how the 2022 first-session paper keyed it. When it asks who used or popularised it first IN ENGLISH, the answer is Toynbee, and that is how this paper, the 2017 second-session paper and the 2018 first-session paper all keyed it. So the phrase 'in English' is not decoration — it is the whole question. Read the stem to the end before choosing between the two names.

• Arnold Toynbee delivered his Oxford lectures on the subject in 1880-81; they were published in 1884 as Lectures on the Industrial Revolution in England.
• He treated the period from about 1760 to 1820 as the span of the transformation, a periodisation later historians have debated.
• The French economist J. A. Blanqui is generally credited with the earlier use of the term, in the 1830s.
• This Arnold Toynbee, 1852-1883, is the uncle of Arnold J. Toynbee, 1889-1975, the author of A Study of History — a name clash the exam has never yet exploited but easily could.

• Answering Blanqui when the stem says 'in English', or Toynbee when it does not — the exam has keyed both, on different papers.
• Confusing Arnold Toynbee the economic historian with his nephew Arnold J. Toynbee the philosopher of history.
• Reaching for Adam Smith because he is the most famous economist on the list.

This exact fact has appeared in at least four NDA papers with varied wording, which makes it one of the highest-yield single facts in the world-history section — learn both names and the qualifier that selects between them.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Arnold Toynbee's lectures that popularised the term 'Industrial Revolution' in English were published in

  • (a)1776
  • (b)1845
  • (c)1884
  • (d)1914

  Answer(c) 1884 — the lectures were delivered at Oxford in 1880-81 and published after his death.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Wealth of Nations, the founding work of classical political economy, was published in 1776 by

  • (a)David Ricardo
  • (b)Adam Smith
  • (c)John Stuart Mill
  • (d)Thomas Malthus

  Answer(b) Adam Smith — he died in 1790, long before the phrase 'Industrial Revolution' entered English.