ABSTRACT
Since England was the classical home of empiricism, and the first country in which modern large-scale industry developed, it was only to be expected that individualist political economy would strike deepest root and flourish most luxuriantly on British soil. Ere long the introduction of spinning machinery (Wyatt, 1738; Lewis Paul, 1741; Arkwright, 1769), the steamengine (Watt, 1765 and 1770), and later of the power-loom (Cartwright, 1785; Jacquard, 1802), and similar transformations in the methods of industrial production, induced changes that led to an enormously accelerated growth of large-scale industry, and established that active, multifarious, and complicated life of a “free business economy” in which the numerous theoretical and practical problems of the individualist or capitalist epoch began to clamour for solution.
