"The historiography of the Industrial Revolution has long been hostage to a tacit periodization. Scholars who locate the decisive break in the 1780s, with the mechanization of cotton, tend also to treat the preceding two centuries as a long preface—an era of 'proto-industry' whose significance lies wholly in what it foreshadowed. Yet this teleology smuggles in its own conclusion. If we cease to read the eighteenth century backward from the steam engine and instead read it forward from the seventeenth, we find not a runway but a plateau: regions of dense rural manufacturing that had reached a stable, even self-limiting, equilibrium. What dissolved that equilibrium was not, as the standard account insists, an internal technical momentum, but an exogenous shock—the collapse of the constraints that had held the plateau in place. The mechanization that followed was less a cause than a symptom of a constraint already broken."