Introduction

Writers of all sorts have recognized the importance of work to economic life and growth—indeed, to all life and growth. From the fifteenth century forward, as the economy of the West began to grow, the thinking about labor began to change. Labor had ceased to be the source of value; it had lost agency and become something to be acted upon. In studies of capitalism, attention has tended to focus quite understandably on capital, its protean quality and seminal force. According to this interpretation, capitalism is also relentlessly monolithic. In both its narrow and its broad sense, as an economic and socio-economic system, capitalism changes only when capital changes. This characterization applies not only to the historiography of capitalism, but also to the historiography of the Industrial Revolution. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.