ABSTRACT
The Industrial Revolution is described by economists Robert L. Heilbroner and William Milberg as "a great turning period in history, during which manufacturing and industrial activity became primary forms of social production". Britain had comparatively stable and effective government institutions, a growing economy aided by a system of banking and credit, and a developing market economy. Britain had large deposits of both iron ore and coal, two of the key ingredients in the mechanization of production. After a tumultuous seventeenth century, Great Britain enjoyed relative stability and prosperity in the eighteenth century, when the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution took hold. During the period roughly corresponding with the Second Industrial Revolution, Europeans sent not only their people but their investments abroad as well. Just as industrialization transformed production, transportation, the class system, and the nature of work, it profoundly altered our natural and human-made environments. As industrialization grew, it brought with it a great wave of urbanization.
