Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Preface
- 1 Introduction: Modern conceptions of the Industrial Revolution
- 2 Women in the workforce
- 3 Reinterpretations of the Industrial Revolution
- 4 Religion and political stability in early industrial England
- 5 Sex and desire in the Industrial Revolution
- 6 Political preconditions for the Industrial Revolution
- 7 Crime, law and punishment in the Industrial Revolution
- 8 The Industrial Revolution and parliamentary reform
- 9 Margins of the Industrial Revolution
- 10 Social aspects of the Industrial Revolution
- 11 Technological and organizational change in industry during the Industrial Revolution
- Postscript: An Appreciation of Max Hartwell
- Index
1 - Introduction: Modern conceptions of the Industrial Revolution
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Preface
- 1 Introduction: Modern conceptions of the Industrial Revolution
- 2 Women in the workforce
- 3 Reinterpretations of the Industrial Revolution
- 4 Religion and political stability in early industrial England
- 5 Sex and desire in the Industrial Revolution
- 6 Political preconditions for the Industrial Revolution
- 7 Crime, law and punishment in the Industrial Revolution
- 8 The Industrial Revolution and parliamentary reform
- 9 Margins of the Industrial Revolution
- 10 Social aspects of the Industrial Revolution
- 11 Technological and organizational change in industry during the Industrial Revolution
- Postscript: An Appreciation of Max Hartwell
- Index
Summary
A first and very British Industrial Revolution
At a time when the concept of a First and British Industrial Revolution is once again under attack as a ‘misnomer’, a ‘myth’ (in both the vulgar and cultural senses of that term) and dismissed as one among a ‘spurious list of revolutions’, it might seem misleading, certainly provocative, to continue to use the term as the title for a book of essays designed for undergraduates (Cameron 1981; Fores, 1981; Coleman 1989; Clarke 1986, 37–9). Historians certainly need to defend the themes and periods they recommend for study. That task may be straightforward for clearly significant and relatively discrete events such as the defeat of the Armada. But the economic and social changes which have traditionally been encapsulated by historians under the label of Industrial Revolution are so complex that problems of dating, origins, scale, depiction and significance loom as large as they do in those never-ending discussions about the Renaissance and Reformation. Although contemporaries seldom used the term Industrial Revolution before it was made popular by Arnold Toynbee in the 1880s, the generations alive from say 1815 to 1851 were uneasily aware that their economy and society had undergone a profound transformation within living memory (Thomis 1976; Bowditch and Ramsland 1968).
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- Information
- The Industrial Revolution and British Society , pp. 1 - 30Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1993
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