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The History of England (A Study in Political Evolution)
The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution Author:A. F. Pollard M.A. Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: destinies under Latin and not Teutonic influence. Most of the West Indian islands, however, with British Honduras and British Guiana on the mainland, had been ac... more »quired for the empire, which had now secured footholds in all the continents of the world. The development of those footholds into great self-governing communities, the unique and real achievement of the British Empire, was the work of the nineteenth century; and its accomplishment depended upon the effects of the changes known to us as the Industrial Revolution. CHAPTER VII THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION The Industrial.Revolution is a phrase invented by Arnold Toynbee, and now generally usedjtfijndicate those economic changes which turned England from an agricultural into,jaj0LJndustrial community. The period during which these changes took place cannot from the nature of things be definitely fixed;but usually it is taken to extend from about the middle of the eighteenth centucy,tothe close of the reign of George III. Two points, however, must be remembered: first, that there was a commercial as well as an agricultural and an industrial stage of development; and secondly, that this period contains merely the central and crucial years of a process of specialization and expansion which occupied centuries of English economic history. There was also before the agricultural stage a pastoral stage; but that lies beyond the scope of English history, because both the English people and the Celts they conquered had passed out of the pastoral stage before recorded English history begins. Each of these stages corresponds to a different social organization: the pastoral stage was patriarchal, the agricultural stage was feudal, the commercial stage was plutocratic, and the industrial stage leads towards democracy. The stages, of c...« less