ABSTRACT
Economic growth was made possible in part by a reliable banking system. The British banking system played a key role in Victorian industrialization and economic growth because it was extremely efficient at providing short-term credit. Historians question the notion of an industrial "revolution" because the large factories that are said to have characterized industrialized England were unheard of in 1760 and rare in 1800; in the first decade of the nineteenth century factories were the rule only in the cotton industry, and as late as 1850 most consumer goods were still produced by hand in small workshops. With the earliest phases of the "Industrial Revolution" behind it, from 1820 the British economy expanded to become the richest country in the world. In Carlyle's view, industrialized, free-market Britain created individual poverty of both body and spirit in the midst of profit and plenty.
