ABSTRACT
Successive industrial revolutions, harnessing the forces of steam, electricity and combustion engine located the early industrial Britain in the centre of economic globalization. The historical conditions of the new era were forged by intensive collaboration between science and technology, whereas two broader societal processes conditioned the international division of labour: early colonialism strengthening the maritime supremacy of Occidental Europe and political confidence and technical innovativeness in Britain. Braudel (1993, p. 380), while discussing the origins of industrialism, elegantly paints the central features of the British society opening toward capitalism and benefiting from numerous investments in infrastructure projects of general utility: '...owing to its "Glorious" or "bourgeois" Revolution in 1688, Britain had acquired political stability. Its society was open to capitalism: The Bank of England had been founded already in 1694 [...] The industrial Revolution in Britain began, too, as part of a general economic boom in the eighteenth century which then affected the whole world'.
