I think this narrative of the industrial revolution being the ‘hinge that changed history’ is wrong. It looks that way in graphs (like the one used in this post) because humans are bad at visualizing exponential growth.

But what happens when we depict these graphs using a log scale instead? Instead of the industrial revolution being a sudden explosion in productivity it starts to look more like a normal continuation of processes that were already happening. Maybe it accelerated things a little bit (plausible, but hard to tell at a glance), but it certainly wasn’t an explosion with everything being “flat” before that.