ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the debates and ask what happened to both working people's incomes and their quality of life when Britain transitioned from an agrarian to an industrial economy. When industry began to burn coal rather than wood, the age-old constraints that had placed a ceiling on the development of industry were at a stroke removed, and new and previously unimaginable rates of growth were now attainable. The Industrial Revolution, therefore, was a watermark in the history of Britain. It refers to the moment when the nation stopped trying to make all its goods by hand and by organic energy forms, and started to use coal and machinery to do the work instead. In the early twentieth century, the popular historians Sidney and Beatrice Webb and J. L and Barbara Hammond echoed Toynbee's view of the Industrial Revolution as social disaster, bringing no immediate gains for the labouring poor.
