Social and Political Preconditions of the British Industrial Revolution.
This paper will argue that the Industrial Revolution came about in England, and not in other countries, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This paper will also argue that the British Industrial Revolution was not due to any particular virtue or inventive genius on the part of the British, but rather as the result of a combination of interweaving social factors. Individual agency is, of course, essential to any social or political change; but the combination of factors which contributed to the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain were so diverse that they could only have come together by chance. In large part, as will be argued, this is the reason why Britain, and not France or Germany, or China, experienced an Industrial Revolution at this time. All other Industrial Revolutions, it may be said, derived from this one. 9 pgs. 14 f/c. 2b.
