The notion of de-industrialisation arises from the fact that industrial employment, having risen rapidly, is now in equally rapid decline. This paper presents the view that agriculture and industry together form, and have always formed, a logically seamless "primary" sector which from the beginning, because of its harnessing of direct or fossilised solar power and thus its inherent capacity for productivity gains, has progressively freed labour for non-productive or service work. The "industrial revolution" was really an accelerative phase in a millenia-old development. There is no new phenomenon of de-industrialisation, no rise and fall, merely a speeding up of a monotonic process of labour-freeing from the primary sector of agriculture/industry, whose ever decreasing work force produces ever increasing agricultural/industrial output.
