The Industrial Revolution in England 1700-1914 [antikvár]

The Industrial Revolution in England I. CHARACTER AND ORIGINS If we ask ourselves what it is that constitutes an industrial revolution the answer seems to be that it is made up of a set of interrelated changes in (a) economic organisation, (b) technology and (c) industrial structure, associated with (as both cause and effect) a sustained growth of population and total output and (eventually if not immediately) of product per head. The changes in economic organisation are of two main kinds: (i) a general, if gradual, shift from a family-based self-subsistent unit of production to the impersonal capitalistic form of enterprise producing for the market, with the aid of paid labour doing specialised jobs and operating with costly capital equipment, and (ii) the evolution of a national or international market for final goods, raw materials and factors of production, in which some of the most crucial and far-reaching decisions affecting both production and consumption are taken by specialist economic institutions (e.g. banks, large corporations, trade unions etc.). These are the organisational developments that underlie the massive shifts in the scale of economic activity and enterprise necessitated [5]