Book Description
The Industrial Revolution has sometimes been regarded as a catastrophe which desecrated the English landscape and brought social opporession and appalling physical hardship to the workers. In this book, however, it is presented as an important and beneficial mark of progress. In spite of destructive wars and a rapid growth of population, the material living standards of most of the British people improved, and the technical innovations not only brought economic rewards but also provoked greater intellectual ingenuity. Innovation is therefore seen by Ashton not just as an economic course but as a social and cultural process influenced by factors such as war and peace and the framework of law and institutions. Lucidly argued and authoritative, this bookplaces the phenomenon of the Industrial Revolution in a stimulating perpsective. A new Preface by Professor Pat Hudson outlines the results of recent research precipitated by Ashton's themes: the true causes of population growth in the eighteenth century, the nature of the supply of capital, and the new approaches to labour studies amongst others. This Preface places The Industrial Revolution in its contemporary context, and a new thoroughly updated bibliography means that fifty years on, Ashton's work can continue to be of value to modern readers.
Customer Reviews:
A solid, no-nonsense book about an important subject.......1999-10-12
First published in 1948, this book has gone through many editions, the latest, as we can see here, put out in 1998. I recently read the 1964 edition, picked up long ago at a booksale in Melbourne, Australia. Ashton's work is probably timeless. It is a down-to-earth, very well reasoned history of the various historical tendencies and phenomena that together are called "the industrial revolution". I cannot vouch for this volume being absolutely correct. The author does not have much time for those who dwell on the evils of industrialization, or who want to include class struggle in their analysis. Though I was not fully convinced of this, still I was willing to listen. Not being an expert in the field, I was looking for a decent explanation or summary of the whole process. I definitely got my money's worth in Ashton's book. It is well-written, without jargon and without presumption of vast historical knowledge on the part of the reader. It gives you an overview of such various fields as population growth, early forms of industry in England, the technical innovations, capital, banking, labor unions, conditions of workers, industrialists' clubs, and relation of agriculture to industry. Though I found the part about banks and interest rather rough going, it was entirely due to my own poor understanding of the field. My edition could have used a map. The shires, the rivers, and the many towns of England are not all imprinted firmly in the brains of North Americans. Other than that, I would heartily recommend this book to anyone who wants to improve their understanding of the Industrial Revolution.
simply delightful to read as well as a thorough resource.......1998-12-04
I can't believe I'm the first to write about this. I bought this a few years back while a graduate student in modern European history. My focus was primarily industrialization. This book is a joy. Ashton provides a thorough picture of the Revolution from several perspectives. He describes how events and developments built upon each other and how the innovators fed each others efforts. Most importantly, Ashton is a terrific writer. Other books on this and like topics can be as dry as the Sahara. Ashton is engaging and witty. This is not a book that requires a terrifically large committment. Even if you are not a student but simply interested in the topic, please read this.
Book Description
Studies social and economic issues through the writings of great thinkers of the age
Book Description
This book defines what the industrial revolution was and is, how it developed in several major societies around the world, and how it varied in each case. Stearns stresses the massive impact of the industrial revolution on the course of world history since the early 19th century, examining both the larger power relationships and the very human experiences of work and family life. The second edition features fully revised sections on postindustrialization, causation, and non-Western societies, further strengthening Stearns' discussion of complex industrial and international trends.
Customer Reviews:
Some do, some don't.......2004-11-15
Stearns has written here a very broad description of how the industrial revolution evolved, or failed to evolve, in many countries over the last two centuries. This is a very big task, and has no well defined beginning or end, nor even very many milestones. Moreover, there are, according to Stearns, nearly as many paths to development as there are countries that develop. No tipping points, no critical inventions and no heroic personalities either. While I suppose there is a certain truth to this point of view, and may even be historically accurate, it makes for a somewhat dull read. I prefer to have my history laced with a few gee-whizes accomplished by some impossibly heroic figures. But that's just me.
His recitation of the changes that took place is almost formless, without generalities, or even much definition. While it was certainly humbling to contemplate the breadth of his scholarship, I didn't get what I was looking for out of this work--some hypotheses or possible explanations for what happened. I appreciate the difficulty of the problem and the mystery of ultimate historical causation, but the author would have been better off, I think, if he had taken a little stab at it, at least.
The book has four maps and a dozen or so illustrations, but only five graphs--and most of those are ridiculously parsimonious in the amount of data shown. Surely in a subject of this scope, tables and better graphs would have helped to organize it.
Despite these shortcomings, I think the book is a worthwhile contribution to the history of a very important part of the human story, and I'm glad to have read it.
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Poverty, Progress, and Population
E. A. Wrigley
Manufacturer: Cambridge University Press
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A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World (Princeton Economic History of the Western World)
ASIN: 0521529743 |
Book Description
E.A. Wrigley, the leading historian of industrial England, exposes the inadequacy of what was once accepted wisdom regarding England's industrial revolution and suggests what he believes should replace it. He examines the issues from three viewpoints: economic growth; the transformation of the urban-rural balance; and demographic change in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In addition, he shows why England's early modern economy and society grew faster and more dynamically than its continental neighbors.
Customer Reviews:
I have a Luddite moment..........2006-02-12
Years ago I was sitting in traffic on the South East Expressway in Boston, MA. I had just spent the better part of the day fixxing automobiles for people. That was my job. That is what I do. Trying to get home so I could "relax" was a chore. I lived maybe 30 min. away from my work but spent better than an hour just sitting in the hot July sun while the conjested traffic inched it's way along slowly, burning precious fossile fuel, spewing carbon & other noxious fumes into the air surrounding Boston. I was not happy. I called my wife on our ancient "Bag Phone". We discussed moving out of the Boston metro region so we could slow down the pace, relax a bit more and just enjoy life.
I had a Luddite moment. I realized then that I was working hard to keep all this technology together just so people could get to their own jobs to earn the money needed to keep their technology working. It dawned on me how futile all this stress and effort are... We are killing ourselves to support technology and all the time fooling ourselves with the idea that this modern life style is somehow better than in the good old days. I did not have an urge to smash any machines but I did want to stop the world and get off. Am I really any happier now than I would be if I were a village blacksmith in 1812? What do I really need to be happy? What does all this wonderful modern technology really cost me in blood, sweat and tears? I cash my paycheck, buy food and fuel, pay my bills, look at the remainder and wonder if that 1812 blacksmith was any worse off, realatively than I am today.
Sales book chronicles a moment in the history of labor struggle. Make of it what you will... He has documented a story that needs to be told if we as a society are to look at the big picture of ourselves and ask... How did We get here? Is this the right direction to be going? Can we survive and sustain this modern lifestyle?
I suggest reading at least chapters 8 and 10. I also suggest reading it along with a UE published book titled "Labors untold story" and Howard Zinns work "Peoples History"
Comfort is a realative thing.
Good history; so-so analysis........2004-06-16
Kirkpatrick Sale is a first rate historian, but as an analyst of history he tends to be blinded by his own so-called "Neo-Luddite" leanings. He does correctly identify that the Luddite movement was not about machinery, per se, but rather about social tensions arising in Europe, and that attacking machinery was simply an easy target. But his misses much in his economic analysis.
Like many neo-luddites and "left anarchists", Sale believes in small government, but his (and their) small government is not small in power; it has the power to compel decentralization and to resdistribute income. It is, like Chomsky's 1970s-variety anarchism, Socialism under a different rubric.
Sale believes that large corporations, large cities and any large scale human endevor must be artificial, created in order to exploit man and nature, which rather puts him at odds with the experiences documented through most of written history. He rejects the efficiencies people have traditionally found in both trade and scale, and prefers instead an enforced village. The are a good many inconsistencies in his rationale; he decries the large corproation, but wants to redistribute the wealth produced by such entities. One wonders where the wealth will come from once he destroys the wealth producers; I am reminded very much of the recent history of Zimbabwe.
In summary, then: Not his best work, but worth reading for the historical material, and for some of the social analysis. Just take the economics with a large dose of salt.
Terrible!.......2004-02-03
Don't waste your money! There are good books on this worthy subject but this one is very bad. It's poorly written, pompous in tone, yet full of lame assumptions any college student could see beyond. The few good ideas are not the author's own, though he rarely gives credit where credit is due. It's as if it was written in one sitting, by a not very intelligent person who had done little reading on the subject and didn't have much respect for ideas. I don't usually bother writing bad reviews but politically I'm on the same side as Sale on many of these issues and he makes an embarrassing, sophomoric mess of them.
A science writer reviews Kirkpatrick Sale.......2003-10-24
Kirkpatrick Sale is one of the visionary writers of our time, and deserves a much wider audience. This book rescues the reputation of the unjustly maligned workers who fought against some of history's cruelest businessmen. Contrary to myth, the "Luddites" were not knee-jerk foes of any technological change; they were workers fighting to protect their jobs and families from businessmen interested only in profit. No one who reads this book (and who cares more about people than gadgets) will ever again use the word "Luddite" as a term of opprobrium.
Sophomoric rant.......2001-10-09
This book contains an interesting, if biased, history of the Luddite movement which will interest all those who have no knowledge of that period of British history.
This book also presents a number of "arguments" suggesting that luddism is an appropriate stance vis a vis today's technology and science.
The fact is that his arguments are sloppy and his analysis is tendentious and sophomoric. There's nothing here which you wont find in the most hackneyed of anti-science rants issuing from post-modern science warriors.
An example is that nuclear technology led to the creation of the atomic bomb therefore it is inherrently evil. Anyone who knows anything about global politics and strategy should pause to laugh at this (MAD-logic doesn't even get a look in let alone a critique), anyone who's interested in the history of science will stop to laugh at this and frankly, anyone who agrees with this and uses a computer (which relies on the same QM theories) should stop to consider whether or not their belief system is hopelessly inconsistant.
We don't get any insight of any detail into what motivates the moral judgements Sale makes, we're just expected to blindly agree, so anyone who has done any moral philosophy should be scratching their heads.
Give this one a pass.
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Essays on the Industrial Revolution (Variroum Collected Studies Series)
Sidney Pollard
Manufacturer: Variorum
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Binding: Hardcover
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ASIN: 086078794X |
Book Description
To say that history's greatest economic experiment--Soviet communism--was also its greatest economic failure is to say what many consider obvious. Here, in a startling reinterpretation, Robert Allen argues that the USSR was one of the most successful developing economies of the twentieth century. He reaches this provocative conclusion by recalculating national consumption and using economic, demographic, and computer simulation models to address the "what if" questions central to Soviet history. Moreover, by comparing Soviet performance not only with advanced but with less developed countries, he provides a meaningful context for its evaluation.
Although the Russian economy began to develop in the late nineteenth century based on wheat exports, modern economic growth proved elusive. But growth was rapid from 1928 to the 1970s--due to successful Five Year Plans. Notwithstanding the horrors of Stalinism, the building of heavy industry accelerated growth during the 1930s and raised living standards, especially for the many peasants who moved to cities. A sudden drop in fertility due to the education of women and their employment outside the home also facilitated growth.
While highlighting the previously underemphasized achievements of Soviet planning, Farm to Factory also shows, through methodical analysis set in fluid prose, that Stalin's worst excesses--such as the bloody collectivization of agriculture--did little to spur growth. Economic development stagnated after 1970, as vital resources were diverted to the military and as a Soviet leadership lacking in original thought pursued wasteful investments.
Customer Reviews:
3.5 stars, interesting, but not easy to read.......2003-12-24
The Soviet Union was the perfect failure, so said no shortage of people during and especially after its lifespan. So to argue the opposite, as Robert Allen's new book does, certainly presents a provocative hypothesis. Allen's argument is that from 1928 to 1970, the Soviet Union was one of the world's fastest growing economies, with few rivals in the world. By contrast, the high rate of growth under the last tsars was not sustainable. Collectivization seems to have encouraged industrial growth, though not enough to cancel out the horrible loss of lives from the 1932-33 famine. Unfortunately, unwise investment decisions in the seventies and eighties lead to rapidly falling growth rates and the collapse of the system.
Allen's argument does not start off well, as he seems to separate Russian development from Europe altogether. This coincides with Marshall Poe's argument that Russia shouldn't be considered European at all. This is misleading. It is true that in terms of poverty, rural population and demographic structure, Russia was behind the rest of Europe. But this does not mean that it was radically different from it. Russia is Christian, not Muslim. Russian is a Slavic language, and Slavic languages are European ones. Serfdom and feudalism are European institutions distinct from Ottoman and Moghul ones. However Allen soon gets back on track. The essential fact of comparative economic performance is that the high-income core generally stays the same, while those outside it fall further behind (relatively). Occasionally a country is able to enter the high-core club, like Japan, and occasionally another country is expelled, like Argentina. Given this stability, the Soviet Union's success from 1928 to 1970, where it outperformed all other developing countries except Japan, looks more impressive.
But wasn't economic growth high under the tsars? Surely would it not have reached the heights held by Western Europe? Clearly not, says Allen, since that would require an average 3.3 % growth rate from 1913 to 1989, a rate only held by one country, Japan. More to the point the Tsarist economic strategy faced severe problems. Russia's literacy rates were well below Japan's. Much of the growth in agriculture was the result of the wheat boom. Had Russia continued to be a wheat exporter it would have faced the disaster of the collapse of wheat prices in the Depression. Indeed, it would have made it worse. Argentina's own wheat boom did not last, and even wealthy Australia faced relative decline. Meanwhile the bulk of the railroad boom was over by 1913, while attempts to encourage a cotton industry were muddled by misguided protectionism.
Allen then discusses the crisis of the NEP. Given the limits of Soviet soil, agricultural output could not be easily raised until the fifties, when fertilizers became readily available. On the other hand agricultural productivity could be increased by mechanization and the now surplus agricultural labour could be diverted into industry. Potentially there is no conflict by increasing the investment needed for mass industrialization and increasing consumption. Both can increase at the same time. For Allen a key element to the 1928-1939 period was the use of "soft budget" constraints. Instead of basing the number of workers on simple budgetary constraints, constantly raising targets and increasing the demand for workers could increase growth enough that it would compensate for the deviations from strict accounting. Collectivization's contribution to this process was not the increasing of agricultural production; indeed, it dropped dramatically. Instead it encouraged, or more accurately forced, rural-urban migration and the growth of industry. Rather ironically the mass slaughter of horses to protest collectivization was not an unmitigated disaster, since it diverted grain from a rather "inefficient" animal. At the same time the Soviet Union benefiting from slower population growth. Much of this, of course, was the result of Stalinist terror, though nearly three times more important was the result of the Second World War. But even more important was the relatively quick fertility transition. Had it more resembled India the former Soviet Union would have had a 1989 population of 825 million. Allen then goes on to discuss standards of living from 1928 to 1939. They did seem to increase during this period. Previous studies suggested that they fell or stagnated, but Allen makes the reasonable argument that the index numbers they used miscalculated inflation and the effect of rural-urban migration.
So far, so good. But there are some problems. Allen's book is based on secondary literature and all Soviet statistics have a provisional nature. Allen then goes on to argue that Stalin's industrial strategy was more effective than a possible continuation of the NEP, but not so more effective to justify the loss of lives in the famine. This is not an unreasonable or inhumane argument. On the other hand, it would have been far more effective than a simple capitalist standard. This argument is based on complex computer simulations, which are difficult to read, and even more difficult to verify. Given that the Soviet Union would have been radically different if it had not followed Stalin's strategy in 1929, Allen's simulation models seem too simple. The last chapter deals with the decline of the Soviet economy after 1970. Allen delineates several crucial flaws: attempts to upgrade old factories when it would have been more productive to create new ones; increasing energy production with illusory success at prohibitive cost, when it would have been wiser to increase conservation; the harmfulness of soft budget constraints in a period of labour scarcity, and finally diversion of research and development into the military. These are interesting suggestions; we will have to see how they play out.
Book Description
An updated edition of the classic study of the Industrial Revolution by "one of the few genuinely great historians of our century" (The New Republic). Premier historian Eric Hobsbawm's brilliant study of the Industrial Revolution, which sold more than a quarter of a million copies in its original edition, is now back in print, updated for a new generation. In Industry and Empire, Hobsbawm explores the origin and dramatic course of the Industrial Revolution over two-hundred-and-fifty years and its influence on social and political institutions. He describes and accounts for Britain's rise as the first industrial power, its decline from domination, its special relation with the rest of the world, and the effects of this trajectory on the lives of its ordinary citizens. This new edition includes a fascinating summary of events of the last twenty years, and an illuminating new conclusion.
Customer Reviews:
Good introduction to the econonomic history of Great Britain.......2006-06-21
Industry and Empire is a rare book that incorporates both a economic historical perspective and a political perspective, both on the English scene and on the world scene. What you'll find in this book is a combination of a narrative of how exactly the industrial revolution started in Britain, how it effected the people involved, the social structures of society, how the political structure of Britain changed in response to the economic changes and how Britain's colonial ventures shaped this and were shaped by the changes that were taking place.
The book is good even if you're not particularly interested in the specific history of the emergence of the industrial revolution in Great Britain because it's a wonderful introduction to economic reasoning from a left perspective, real materialist economic history, and going through the book, which is not as easy as Howard Zinn, for instance, will give you an introduction to what's possible in analyzing how society works.
The Cause of Progress.......2004-03-13
So, why did the industrial revolution first happened in Britain, and not somewhere else? This is a hotly debated topic among a subset of historians, and has puzzled me for a long time. Is it due to the geography and natural resources of the Isles, the character of its people, or was it just one of those accidents of history? More than that, how do you properly formulate such a question, and what methods can be used to arrive at a sensible answer?
Hobsbawm is probably as well equipped as anyone to try to answer this question, and does a pretty good job of it, I think. At least his method, to concentrate on the antecedent macro-economic setting, and to compare its more or less unique features with other competing regions, rather than such vague and elusive possibilities of a superior political system or a certain theological proclivity toward work or something, appears to be sound. His focus seldom refers to personalities, nor, surprisingly, the technological inventions that were so important--he seems to assumes that they were made as a matter of course, given the business climate of the times.
The book covers much more than the industrial revolution-- it carries the narrative into the last half of the twentieth century, and covers the same ground in Wales and Scotland, too. His writing style is a pleasure to read and the book is accompanied by 52 graphs in an appendix that brings some additional meat to the table. This is quite possibly the best book around for understanding this critical period in the progress of man, and rewards time well spent.
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Revolution in the Factory: The Birth of the Soviet Textile Industry, 1917-1920
William B. Husband
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
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ASIN: 0195064356 |
Book Description
Drawing on archival materials previously unavailable to Western scholars, Husband here presents the first detailed local perspective on political, economic, and social relations during the critical years of the Soviet state. Taking into account local loyalties, family and gender
identifications, and impulses toward self-preservation--in addition to class frictions--this study of the textile industry shows how unskilled workers shaped their expectations and perceptions of the revolutionary process on their experiences in society and in the workplace, not on ideology or
effective political mobilization. Scholars and students of the Soviet Union will find in this lucid analysis a wealth of material that provides a compelling new answer to the much-debated question: To what degree and for what reasons did industrial workers support the Russian Revolution?
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The First Industrial Revolution
The Birth of Industrial Britain: Social Change, 1750-1850 (Seminar Studies in History Series)
The Industrial Revolution and British Society
The Age of Manufactures, 1700-1820: Industry, Innovation and Work in Britain
The Industrial Revolution in World History
