Industrial Revolution In England Research Articles

The Silent Revolution: The Industrial Revolution in England as a Source of Cultural Change. By John W. Osborne. New York, Scribners, 1970. Pp. xi + 232. $7.95.

The Silent Revolution: The Industrial Revolution in England as a Source of Cultural Change. By John W. Osborne. New York, Scribners, 1970. Pp. xi + 232. $7.95.

Victorian Revolutionaries: Speculations on Some Heroes of a Culture Crisis

The Victorian era is rightly associated with the industrial revolution in Britain and the ascendancy of a materialist, commercially-oriented middle class. The threat to spiritual values was felt strongly in the realm of religion but also in the secular realm of the arts and literature. This volume analyzes the drive toward cultural transcendence in the lives and works of such eminent Victorians as Tennyson, Carlyle, Browning, the aesthetics of the Pre-Raphaelites, and the romantic origins of anthropology. The various modes of escape from the Victorian era helps illuminate present concerns about culture and society.First published in 1970, Victorian Revolutionaries represents a major effort in the intellectual rehabilitation of Victorian art and thought. Peckham's readings of In Memoriam and Idylls of the King show Tennyson at odds with Christianity except with the notion of the immortality of the soul. The terror of meaninglessness that he discerns here is echoed in the chapter on Carlyle who views human life as issuing from mystery and proceeding in chaos, protected only by self-deception. For Browning, the perceived lack of meaning or purpose results in an existential poetics of the world as theater and the individual as actor. Peckham's chapter on the Pre-Raphaelites anticipates their later rehabilitation by arguing that their work properly understood constitutes a challenge to the institutional modernism of the late twentieth century just as they had, in turn, challenged the academic values of the Royal Academy.The West is once more living in a culturally critical period today. Any help we can get in understanding how to deal with it is bound to be of value. Not the particular strategies of these men, but the general pattern of their search in social and anthropological theory is probably the most useful thing they have to offer.

Lectures on the Industrial Revolution in England.

Widely credited as having established the term 'industrial revolution' as a historical concept, Arnold Toynbee (1852–83) was among the most outspoken political economists of the nineteenth century. This volume is a collection of his Balliol lectures and other public addresses, originally published posthumously in 1884. The lectures, often humorous, discuss developments in contemporary political economy, the views of other commentators, and the impact on society of this new discipline; viewed as a collection, they represent one of the first calls for economic history as an academic subject to be studied separately from political history. Given during the early 1880s, the popular addresses treat some of the most important economic topics of the day, from the role of trade unions to the relationship between wages and production. Also included in this book are a preface by the author's wife, and a memoir by his friend and colleague, Benjamin Jowett.

Carting in the Hispanic World: An Example of Divergent Development

HERE IS AN OBVIOUS ASSOCIATION between economic growth and the appearance of increasingly specialized transport, and much of the research into the economic history of medieval and early modern Europe has dealt with this parallel development. The medievalists have studied both water and land transport, showing that the latter was often highly specialized and able to compete successfully with water-borne carriers.' Historians of the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, however, have tended to accept Fernand Braudel's dictum that by 1600 land transport was overshadowed by improving shipbuilding and navigational techniques.2 As a result, they have concentrated their energies on the latter and given little attention tp land transport, except as associated with the beginnings of the industrial revolution in England. This tendency has obscured the fact that until the introduction of railroads, Europe went through repeated episodes of regional economic growth which depended almost entirely on overland transport consisting of professionalized carters and muleteers. Spain and her American empire witnessed at least three such episodes: in Mexico, 1540-1600, in Castile, 1750-1800, and in Argentina, from about 1770 to the middle of the nineteenth century. The interior of the Iberian peninsula, the Mexican plateau, and the pampas of the Argentine were all large inland areas restricted to the use of land transportation. The transport of these regions developed from the technology of late medieval Spain and supported significant economic growth for considerable periods. Obviously one must avoid implicit comparisons with the headlong growth of industrialization.

On the "Genesis of Modern Management"

recipient of the Newcomen Society Prize in 1967 for his Genesis of Modern Management (Cambridge, Mass., 1965), Sidney Pollard is without question deserving of the honor. His study represents a major contribution to the history of the British Industrial Revolution and therefore at the same time to industrial and economic history in general. It is a compendium of scholarly work that has been completed; it also draws heavily on unpublished materials. Hardly a name of prominence among the entrepreneurs of the English Industrial Revolution is omitted. As a summation of published work this book holds a position somewhat similar to the much shorter, excellent methodological essay of R. M. Hartwell, The Causes of the Industrial Revolution... (Economic History Review, 2d ser. 18 [1965], recently reprinted in a paperback, Causes of the Industrial Revolution in England [London, 1967]). To Pollard's and Hartwell's contribution should be added Phyllis Deane's First Industrial Revolution (Cambridge, 1965) as the necessary preliminary work that any student of industrial revolutions must undertake today. These studies all concentrate on the phenomenon as it existed in England and tend to ignore the Continental experience, leading to the possible and unjustified, oversimplified conclusion that industrial progress outside of England did not exist or at best was a derivative of the English. While it is not to be denied that nowhere in Continental Europe did there occur such a broad, revolutionary change as that which took place in England, nevertheless advanced industrial plants and technology were to be found there and may possibly have had some effect on Britain. Pollard categorically asserts that the Continental experience was irrelevant for British organizational development in industry. And well it may have been-but a simple assertion even when only a repetition of what numerous other authors have said is still not conclusive proof. Merely recalling the great interest with which the British engineer, John

The Causes of the Industrial Revolution in England.

The Causes of the Industrial Revolution in England.

Capitalism and Slavery: a Critique

HE unweary, unostentatious, and inglorious crusade of England against slavery may probably be regarded as among the three or four perfectly virtuous pages comprised in the history of nations.2 Whilst the mass of Englishmen probably continue to believe that Wilberforce and his Evangelical brethren secured the abolition of the slave trade and slavery in a manner wholly creditable to themselves and only a little less to their country, it would also seem that, at the scholarly level, the dictum of Lecky was only a slightly extreme form of the view commonly held until about the midway point of the present century. Prof. Coupland, in particular, had in the inter-war years substantially endorsed Lecky.3 Admittedly the West Indian writer, C. L. R. James, had argued in I 938 that Pitt's humanitarianism in the I 790's was, at best, subordinate to a global strategy aimed at breaking the monopoly of the continental market enjoyed by San Domingo sugar, and replacing it with British sugar.4 But this was an incidental theme in a work of Marxist historical interpretation, and it is doubtful if this minor strand attracted much attention. When in I944 Dr Eric Williams launched a frontal attack on the traditional view, it was the first major onslaught to be made in the English-speaking world. For the author of Capitalism and Slavery5 the perspectives of men like Coupland, C. M. MacInnes,6 and F. J. Klingberg7 were all wrong. The role of the humanitarians, the key figures in what amounted to a parade of virtue, had been seriously misunderstood and grossly exaggerated by men who have sacrificed scholarship to sentimentality and, like the scholastics of old, placed faith before reason and evidence.8 Positively, and in Williams's own words, Capitalism and Slavery was strictly an economic study of the role of Negro slavery and the slave trade in providing the capital which financed the Industrial Revolution in England and of mature industrial capitalism in destroying the slave system.9 The immediate formal reception of the book was muted, doubtless because of the distractions of war time: no more than summary reviews appear to have been published. But in the following years the book came to gain considerable favour amongst historians, and also amongst many English-speaking West African intellectuals who saw it as a bed-rock statement of Afro-European relations before the colonial period. In the former case a sympathy with the growing cause of

The Cause of the Industrial Revolution in England

The Cause of the Industrial Revolution in England

Human Documents of the Industrial Revolution in Britain.

Human Documents of the Industrial Revolution in Britain.

The industrial revolution in England.

The industrial revolution in England.

Human Documents of the Industrial Revolution in Britain.

Human Documents of the Industrial Revolution in Britain.

Fixed Capital in the Industrial Revolution in Britain

The provision of capital is generally recognized to be one of the main problems of countries undergoing the process of industrialization. This is true also of the special case of Great Britain, the first country to experience an industrial revolution. In the British case, however, it is important to note that much capital had been accumulated even before the 1760's, the decade when industrial growth began to accelerate and to change its direction. Most of this earlier capital was invested in commerce, in finance, in farming, and in stocks of manufactured goods and raw materials, and what was noteworthy in the next two generations was, not so much the absolute (and probably also relative) growth in the quantity of capital, but a change in its composition: the emergence, for the first time, of large concentrations of fixed capital.

Structural Change in the Cotton Industry during the Industrial Revolution in England

Structural Change in the Cotton Industry during the Industrial Revolution in England

George Webb Hall and The Agricultural Association

T. S. Ashton has described the Industrial Revolution in England as a time when the “chimney stacks rose to dwarf the ancient spires.” He has also described it as a time when the voluntary association replaced state initiative in governmental affairs. These two phenomena of modern society – the urban industrial complex and the growth of public opinion – are usually paired. Perhaps it is natural to think of the growth of public opinion as something made possible by the growth of cities.Yet it is known that the Industrial Revolution profoundly affected not only the cities but the countryside as well; that the new technology prompted (among other things) an enthusiasm for agricultural improvement. This is evident in the formation of numerous societies in the last quarter of the eighteenth century which were devoted to purely agricultural pursuits. With the decline of rural prosperity after 1815, however, there arose societies of a different sort which had as their object not the improvement of farming through better techniques but the improvement of agriculture through political action. Both kinds of society revealed the stirrings of public opinion in the countryside.This essay is concerned with the second type of society, which rose and spread among what are loosely termed the tenant farmers of England. These societies were numerous enough and sufficiently of one mind to take on the character of a movement. The movement was to fail, as agrarian movements are notorious for doing.

A swiss manufacturer sees the industrial revolution in England.

I have recently come across the diaries of Johann Conrad Fischer. These diaries span six decades and cover the years of social, economic, and technological upheaval which marked the industrial revolution in England. The reader is given a picture of these years through the eyes of a Swiss manufacturer with a good perception of history, and his notes are of some value to historians.

EFFECTS OF MATERNAL EMPLOYMENT ON CHILDREN: EVIDENCE FROM RESEARCH1

Social concern for the children of mothers who work outside of their homes has had a long history. It began with the industrial revolution in England and Europe when the invention of machines outmoded home industries and forced not only men but their wives and children into factories and mills for their pittance living. The problems of the latter part of the eighteenth century and of the nineteenth century were the problems of the poor working class. Mortality statistics indicated that the babies of factory women died in alarming numbers. There was evidence too of increasing juvenile crime developing in the overcrowded new industrial centers (15, p. 4'). Mixed motives instigated the zeal of philanthropists to do something about the deplorable state of infants and children, left without care while the mother worked long hours away from home. There were those who wished to keep the working class alive because industry needed them and

Interpretations of the Industrial Revolution in England: A Methodological Inquiry

Perhaps the most important methodological problem in the writing of history is to discover why different historians, on the basis of the same or similar evidence, often have markedly different interpretations of a particular historical event. Why, for example, in a world in which there is almost unquestioned belief, even by Marxist historians, that industrialization is the grand remedy for the economic and social ills of poor and underdeveloped countries, do some historians, and especially the Marxists, still argue about the goods or ills bestowed on the worker by the first great experiment in industrialization, the industrial revolution in England? The expected economic dividend of modern industrialization is undoubtedly a higher standard of living, and the occasional opponents of such development base their opposition not on this indisputable material advance but on the “moral risk” involved in the transformation of life by industrialization.1The historians, however, while concerned also with this possible moral risk, are not all certain that the industrial revolution in England before 1850 did cause the average standard of living of the worker to rise. This uncertainty might be resolved by finding out what actually happened, but in the meantime interpretations differ, and have differed, on the basis of some evidence, of much confusion, and of differing value judgments. It is the specific aim of this article to give a history of the interpretations of the industrial revolution, and to explain them.

The Structure of Modern Society and Bureaucracy

From a historical and stractural point of view, we may safely say that modern society on its economic basis is characterized by capitalism. From another view-point it may be classed as mass society. Further, from a third aspect it may also be described as class society. As for the modern capitalist structure, it has been thoroughly investigated chiefly in connection with its economic basis, by Max Weber (Wirtschaft und Ges-ellschaft, 1922), Werner Sombart (Der Moderne Kapitalisinus. 1902), and John A. Hobson (The Evolution of Modern Capitalism, 1894). As is described in their researches, it is obvious that mordern society is closely related with capitalism or, to be more precisely, the capitalist economic structure. It is a well-known fact that the capitalist structure was started with rapid increase in production through the Industrial Revolution in England in the latter half of the 18th century. Groham Wallas warned of the great difficulty of adaptation that the individual was destined to experience in the huge-scale society called into being by steam and electricity (The Great Society, 1914). In the enterprise structure supported by grand-scale mass production through machinery, man has set himself free from feudalistic structure under which he suffered for centuries, and reforming the mass structure on the principle of socio-economic freedom, has managed to build mass society. But on the other hand, modern society has established itself as a sort of class society with the fundamental relations between labour and capital as the nucleus. (Erich Fromm : The sane Society, 1955). In his book “Man and Society”, Karl Mannheim observer, “Every step in the concentration of the control of the material apparatus of society, as described by Karl Max and Max Weber--the concentration of the means of production, as well as that of political and military weapons is a growing threat to the dynamic principles of democratization and brings about the dominance of small minorities under capitalism as well as under communism.......in the latter the intellectual and executive function trend to become bureaucratic to the last degree.” 'By das eherne Gesetz der Origarchie'-the iron rule of oligarchy (Zur Soziologie des Parteiwesens in der Modernen Deinokratie, 1952), Robert Michels seems to mean the command-and obedience relations brought about as a result of the concentration of power among the upper small minorities. In other words, the result took the form of industrialization and urbanization through monopolistic capital in the economic fields, mass democracy in politics, and mass culture by means of mass communication in the field of civilization. The more highly capitalism advances the more intensified are the organization, rationalization, , and mechanization of social groups. The trend of massification breeds, among the masses, alienation, privatization or a phenomenon technically called anomie, bringing : about political apathy. In the huge modern capitalist society has modern bureaucracy made its first appearance as a mechanism of control over the structure. Max Weber and Robert Michels were the first to make clear the significance of bureaucracy. While the latter chiefly treats of bureaucratization of political and executive organizations, the former, showing detailed historical evidences, describes it as a phenomenon peculiar to modern society. In his opinion, it is observed as a universal tendency not only in public offices but in the army and navy forces, and joint-stock companies as well (Max Weber : Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, 1922).

SOME NOTES ON THE LUDDITES

The Industrial Revolution in England was tinged with cases of acts of destroying machines, the climax, so to speak, of which was the Luddite movement. This, however, does not mean that all those responsible for destruction of industrial machines making appearance in the days of the Industrial Revolution were the Luddites. It is haydly thinkable that those responsible for the destruction of the spinning-jenny of Hargreaves at Blackburn in 1768, for instance, are referred to as the Luddites. That the Luddite movement marks a page of the Industrial Revolution nobody would deny. There are, however, divergences of opinion as to the exact extent and scope of the particular movement. Marx apparently thought that the movement should be confined to the first fifteen years of the nineteenth century,0 while W. Cunningham defined it as an occurrence seen in 1816.2) William Cobbett wrote in 1816, A Letter to the Luddites 3) which denotes that he understood the Luddite movement referred to the case

Capitalism and the Historians: A Contribution to the Discussion on the Industrial Revolution in England

The topic of “Capitalism and the Historians” is a subject far exceeding the limitations normally imposed by historical discipline. In fact, in a still wider context, this subject has much to do with the great ideological division of the modern world into the two vast camps of capitalist and communist countries, a most somber spectacle facing us today. The aim here is not to trace the steps by which we have reached the tragic facts of contemporary affairs, but rather to show how our beliefs concerning these matters (such as the view taken of capitalism) are influenced largely by our impression of the past.