Detailed study of the role of overseas trade and Africans in the Industrial Revolution.

Why did the industrial revolution take place in 18th century Britain and not elsewhere in Europe or Asia? Robert Allen argues that the British industrial revolution was a successful response to the global economy of the 17th and 18th centuries.

Retrospective: 9.

This is a unique account of working-class childhood during the British industrial revolution, first published in 2010. Using more than 600 autobiographies written by working men of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Jane Humphries illuminates working-class childhood in contexts untouched by conventional sources and facilitates estimates of age at starting work, social mobility, the extent of apprenticeship and the duration of schooling. The classic era of industrialisation, 1790–1850, apparently saw an upsurge in child labour. While the memoirs implicate mechanisation and the division of labour in this increase, they also show that fatherlessness and large subsets, common in these turbulent, high-mortality and high-fertility times, often cast children as partners and supports for mothers struggling to hold families together. The book offers unprecedented insights into child labour, family life, careers and schooling. Its images of suffering, stoicism and occasional childish pleasures put the humanity back into economic history and the trauma back into the industrial revolution.

This book seeks to enrich our understanding of middle-class life in England during the Industrial Revolution. For many years, questions about how the middle classes earned (and failed to earn) money, conducted their public and private lives, carried out what they took to be their civic and religious duties, and viewed themselves in relation to the rest of society have been largely neglected questions. These topics have been marginalized by the rise of social history, with its predominant focus on the political formation of the working classes, and by continuing interest in government and high politics, with its focus on the upper classes and landed aristocracy. This book forms part of the recent attempt, influenced by contemporary ideas of political culture, to reassess the role, composition, and outlook of the middle classes. It compares and contrasts three Lancashire milltowns and surrounding parishes in the early phase of textile industrialization—when the urbanizing process was at its most rapid and dysfunctional, and class relations were most fraught. The book’s range extends from the French Revolution to 1851, the year of the Great Exhibition, which symbolized mid-century stability and prosperity. The author argues that members of the middle class were pivotal in the creation of this stability. He shows them creating themselves as a class while being created as a class, putting themselves in order while being ordered from above. The book shifts attention from the search for a single elusive “class consciousness” to demonstrate instead how the ideological leaders of the three milltowns negotiated their power within the powerful forces of capitalism and state-building. It argues that, at a time of intense labor-capital conflict, it was precisely because of their diversity, and their efforts to build bridges to the lower orders and upper class, that the stability of the liberal-capitalist system was maintained.

This text is a wide-ranging survey of the principal economic and social aspects of the first Industrial Revolution.