ABSTRACT
This chapter centers on the question of how Britain first definitively began to pull away from the economic patterns that were characteristic of highly commercial agricultural societies. The transformation of key production sectors proved crucial. Before the eighteenth century the most advanced economies in the world featured a combination of craft manufacturing and a large labor force committed to agriculture. Changes began to combine during the eighteenth century to accelerate manufacturing and ultimately generate the world’s first industrial revolution. They affected much of western Europe, but particularly Britain, where the revolution first took shape. By the 1760s, then, several key ingredients of the industrial revolution had been assembled in England, after several decades of protoindustrial changes within the domestic manufacturing system. The early industrial revolution in Britain involved more than expansion from an earlier base. The most dramatic extension of industrialization in Britain after the initial decades occurred in the field of transportation.
