ABSTRACT
In the last thirty years or so of the nineteenth century the British economy, like the world economy, became more sophisticated and its machinery more complicated. Newly industrialized nations began to emerge as serious competitors on the world market, and the steel age was born with the development, in the 1850s, of the Bessemer process, which made it possible to produce good, cheap steel in large quantities. More sophisticated and specialized machines began to out-produce the old, massive but rather simple, steampowered machines and began to threaten their survival. The system of the organization of production based on owners, manual labourers, and a few skilled workers began to evolve into a more complicated managerial system composed of shareholders, managers, office workers, and machine operatives, which in its turn helped promote the growth of a more complex social system.
