ABSTRACT
MODERN society in Britain, as in all the ‘developed’ societies of East and West, stems directly from that ‘vast increase of natural resources, labour, capital and enterprise’1 which began in Britain in the late eighteenth century and, spreading outwards from there like the ripples on a pond, is still in process of transforming the whole world. The effects of the Industrial Revolution, as it is inadequately called, are still working themselves out, not only on the global stage, but in Britain itself, the first country affected by it and, with the exception of the United States, the one which it has most completely transformed. Much of what we recognize around us as most contemporary, most characteristic of the mid-twentieth century, not merely in the achievements of science and technology but in the most recently recognized trends in social and political organization, is the direct, logistic development of forces set in motion in the Britain of George III. Modern society, no less than its immediate predecessor, the half-way house of Victorian industrial capitalism, has its roots in the Industrial Revolution, and so it is with the Industrial Revolution that we must begin.
