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INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY IN ENGLAND

TOWARDS THE END OF THE

EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY IN ENGLAND TOWARD THE END OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

CHAPTER I

THE AGE OF INVENTION

1. Historical perspective THE rapid rise, since the latter part of the eighteenth century, of classes connected primarily with industry rather than with agriculture or commerce is a phenomenon familiar to all who are acquainted with economic history. But this great social transformation was in its earlier stages silent, lacking in the dramatic and the spectacular, overshadowed in contemporary imagination by politics and war. Records of the social forces of the time are meager and often remote from the main highways of historical study, and their meaning is in many cases obscure. Because of the consequent neglect, there is ample reason for further exploration of the field, and particularly of the obscure but decisive generation preceding England's engulfment in the wars of the French Revolution. It was during this earlier period that modern industrial society began to assume the distinctive forms and to acquire the peculiar significance that it has since retained.

Economic society in England, viewed in historical perspective, begins (after the obscure and primitive village and tribal economy) with the age of the great landlords.

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