The Industrial Revolution In Britain: Triumph or Disaster?

USED BOOK. MAY CONTAIN MARK-UP

Edited with an Introduction by Philip A. M. Taylor

FROM THE INTRODUCTION: “While the phrase "…Industrial Revolution," or something like it, can be found very early in the nineteenth century, it was given its wide currency by the lectures de¬livered at Oxford by Arnold ToynSefc and published in 1884, after his early death. It was in the eighth of these lectures that Toynbee summed up his views about the period 1750-1850. He pointed out the rapid growth of population; the moderniza¬tion both of the techniques and of the or¬ganization of farming, especially the trans¬forming, by the process of enclosure, of medieval open fields into modern compact farms; the rapidity of invention in industry, above all in textiles; the development of powerful machines and their grouping into factories. To him, these changes seemed emphatically revolutionary. But he thought he saw, in addition to these material changes, a change of outlook, from the medieval desire to regulate economic life to a modem acceptance of free competition. He considered that for the lower classes in town and country the total result was distastrous, "Production on a vast scale,” he said at the end of Lecture VII, "the result of free competition, led to a rapid alienation of classes and to the degradation of a large body of producers.”-

Boston. D. C. Heath Co. Problems In European Civilization.. 1958. 108p.