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I’m a sucker for any ebook concerning the Industrial Revolution, having grown up in its heartland in Lancashire cotton nation, and have simply learn two. One was a re-read, of Joel Mokyr’s traditional The Lever of Riches, as I needed to check with some features as I draft my new ebook. Specifically, the various examples of time saving – as an illustration, “Though the paper trade just isn’t typically regarded as a typical trade of the Industrial Revolution, the Fourdrinier machine was in actual fact a revolutionary system. It decreased the time concerned in making a given piece of paper from three weeks to 3 minutes.” The ebook focuses on the connection between technological progress and financial progress to discover the perennial questions: why Britain? Why then?
The opposite is Maxine Berg and Pat Hudson’s new ebook Slavery, Capitalism and The Industrial Revolution. It’s a synthesis of quite a lot of latest analysis on Britain’s function within the slave commerce and the economies of the Caribbean, and the interplay between slavery and empire and the best way the Industrial Revolution in Britain took form. I’ve learn sufficient concerning the Industrial Revolution that I’d come throughout numerous the fabric earlier than – such because the hyperlinks between compensation paid to slave-owners after abolition and the expansion of monetary companies and funding of funding and consumption in Britain. The Financial institution of England has a fascinating working paper on compensation funds, and the UCL undertaking is magisterial. The authors repeat the declare that the debt the federal government issued to pay compensation wasn’t paid off till 2015 – understandably, because the Treasury tweeted to that impact – though it’s extra correct to say that low rates of interest then enabled the redemption of some consols.
However in any case the ebook does a terrific job of presenting a synoptic view of the function of slavery in answering the Why Britain? Why then? questions. Historical past is over-determined, on reflection. Looking for ‘a’ trigger is doomed to fail. This ebook doesn’t make that declare, acknowledging different explanations within the combine. It presents, although, an vital perspective on a side of the Industrial Revolution that has solely comparatively lately come into focus.
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