Who among the following used the term Industrial Revolution for the first time in English to describe the changes that occurred in the British industrial development between 1760 and 1820 ?
- (a)Friedrich Engels
- (b)Eric Hobsbawm
- (c)Arnold Toynbee
- (d)Georges Michelet
Correct — C, Arnold Toynbee. The stem is lifted almost word for word from the NCERT Class XI history textbook Themes in World History, whose chapter on the Industrial Revolution says the term was used by European scholars — Georges Michelet in France and Friedrich Engels in Germany — but was used for the first time in English by the philosopher and economist Arnold Toynbee, to describe the changes in British industrial development between 1760 and 1820. This is Arnold Toynbee the economic historian, who lived from 1852 to 1883 and lectured at Oxford; the lectures were published after his early death as Lectures on the Industrial Revolution in England. Note that he is not the same man as his nephew Arnold J. Toynbee, the twentieth-century author of A Study of History.
- (a)Friedrich Engels — Engels did use the term, and used it before Toynbee, but he wrote in German — his 1845 study of the English working class describes an industrielle Revolution. The stem asks specifically for the first use in English, which is not his.
- (b)Eric Hobsbawm — Hobsbawm was a twentieth-century British historian whose Industry and Empire is a standard modern account of the same period. He is far too late to have coined anything — he was writing more than eighty years after Toynbee's lectures.
- (d)Georges Michelet — The textbook names him as the French user of the phrase, so he belongs to the same story, but in French rather than English. He is the wrong half of the very sentence the question is testing.
The phrase 'Industrial Revolution' was not used by the people who lived through the change; it was invented later by scholars looking back. Continental writers reached for it first — the French economist Jerome-Adolphe Blanqui is usually credited with the earliest use, in the 1830s, and Engels used its German equivalent in 1845. Its passage into ordinary English is credited to Arnold Toynbee's Oxford lectures of the early 1880s, which fixed both the label and the rough dates of 1760 to 1820 in the language.
The trap here is that three of the four names genuinely belong to the history of the term, so a student who knows only that 'somebody European used it first' can talk himself into Engels or Michelet. The word that decides the answer is 'English'. Read the stem for a qualifier of that kind before choosing. It is also worth carrying the earlier layer of the story: NDA has separately asked who used the phrase first of all, and the answer there is J. A. Blanqui in French, not Toynbee — the two questions are consistent because Toynbee's claim is only to the first use in English.
- Arnold Toynbee, the English economic historian who lived from 1852 to 1883, brought the term Industrial Revolution into English in his Oxford lectures.
- His lectures were published after his death as Lectures on the Industrial Revolution in England.
- The NCERT Class XI textbook credits the earlier continental use to Georges Michelet in France and Friedrich Engels in Germany.
- Toynbee applied the term to British industrial change between 1760 and 1820.
- The economic historian Arnold Toynbee is a different person from his nephew Arnold J. Toynbee, who wrote A Study of History.
- Missing the word 'English' in the stem and answering with the first user of the phrase in any language.
- Confusing Arnold Toynbee the economic historian with his nephew Arnold J. Toynbee.
- Assuming a term must have been coined by someone who lived through the events it names.
NDA repeats this almost verbatim across papers, sometimes asking for the first use in English and sometimes for the first use of all, so the qualifier in the stem is the whole question.
Which of the following statements correctly explains the impact of Industrial Revolution on India during the first half of the nineteenth century?
- (a) Indian handicrafts were ruined.
- (b) Machines were introduced in the Indian textile industry in large numbers.
- (c) Railway lines were laid in many parts of the country.
- (d) Heavy duties were imposed on the imports of British manufactures.
Answer(a) Indian handicrafts were ruined.
Takes the same episode Toynbee named and asks what it did at the receiving end — cheap machine-made British cloth flooding India in exactly the decades after his 1760-1820 window.
Although used earlier by French and German writers, the term ‘Industrial Revolution’ in English was first popularized by
- (a) Adam Smith
- (b) Arnold Toynbee
- (c) James Mill
- (d) Bertrand Russell
Answer(b) Arnold Toynbee
The same fact one year earlier, with the qualifier spelled out in the stem — proof that the examiner cares about the language, not about who thought of the phrase first.
The term ‘Industrial Revolution’ was first used by
- (a) J. A. Blanqui
- (b) T. S. Ashton
- (c) Arnold Toynbee
- (d) R. H. Tawney
Answer(a) J. A. Blanqui
The other half of the story, and a warning worth having: drop the words 'in English' and Toynbee stops being the answer, because the phrase was in French decades before his lectures.
- practice — not a real PYQ
Arnold Toynbee, who brought the term Industrial Revolution into English, applied it to British industrial change over the years
- (a)1660 to 1720
- (b)1760 to 1820
- (c)1820 to 1880
- (d)1880 to 1940
Answer(b) 1760 to 1820 — the span used in Toynbee's Oxford lectures and repeated in the NCERT account of the term.
- practice — not a real PYQ
Which of these historians wrote Industry and Empire, a twentieth-century study of British industrialisation?
- (a)Eric Hobsbawm
- (b)Arnold Toynbee
- (c)Friedrich Engels
- (d)Adam Smith
Answer(a) Eric Hobsbawm — a modern British historian of the period, writing long after the phrase itself had entered English.