Was the Industrial Revolution helped or hindered by the significant increase in population which occurred in the 18th and 19th century?

We can also analyse the effects of population changes in other countries who did not really see the same amount of rapid economic change as Britain did in the Industrial Revolution. Ireland is particularly a case in point. With its proximity to Britain, the two economies are linked quite strongly in the modern era, but this was not quite the same in this period. They saw a massive population expansion in the middle of the 18th century, where the population growth rates almost doubled when the period 1700 to 1750 is compared to the period 1750 to 1800 (Tranter, 1973, p43). However, this population growth slowed down in the early 19th century, but abruptly stopped in the middle of the century, when the Great Famine occurred between 1845 and 1851. Throughout this period, there was very little economic change or industrial revolution, even though Ireland saw its population boom a lot earlier. They continued to be a mostly agricultural society throughout the whole period. This is similar to the modern-day LEDC, where a common consensus is that population growth is bad for economic development, mainly because of the refocus on providing for their own industry, so they cannot grow through export to richer countries (The comparison does fall apart somewhat, as there would be very little places to trade with – and little ability to do so). Surprisingly, the isolated areas which did see some industrialisation (such as Northern Ireland) had much lower population growth than in the countryside, which is the opposite situation to what was found in Britain, where population growth was much more pronounced in the cities than in the countryside (Brown, 1996, p35).

Overall, I think that population growth was neither a help nor a hindrance to the Industrial Revolution, as I have not seen enough evidence to persuade either way. At the moment, it seems that they were two factors that may have been interconnected, but the relationship implied in the question is more than just a connection – the population growth is directly affecting the progress of the Industrial Revolution. However, I think that it may work the other way around: as Mokyr believes, without the Industrial and Agricultural Revolutions, population growth would not be able to be sustained and the growth would hit a “Malthusian Wall”, where food starts to run out and more and more resources are turned away from developing industries like manufacturing towards food production.