ABSTRACT
During the last thirty or forty years of the eighteenth century, the pace of economic growth, already appreciable, quickened markedly. Industrial societies have larger rates of economic growth than non-industrial ones and are necessarily geared to dependence on growth as non-industrial ones are not. By the standards of the eighteenth century, Britain was already a heavily urbanised country. Nearly all production in nineteenth-century Britain was for the market rather than for that domestic consumption characterising agrarian and non-commercial societies. Any explanation for Britain's early Industrial Revolution must stress factors peculiar to the eighteenth century, but Britain possessed timeless advantages of immense significance when other conditions were right. The capitalist organisation and market orientation of British farming is important not only for itself but in enabling Britain to surmount the challenge of rapid population growth without a decline in living standards. The British market was both highly developed and diverse in the 1780s.
