ABSTRACT
When the Industrial Revolution began in the second half of the eighteenth century, the organisation of English industry was better prepared for an advance than that of any other European state. It is only now that in all countries, including England, a new form of monopoly is beginning to arise in industry, that attention is directed to the monopolies which saw the birth of early capitalism, and whose fall was the necessary preliminary of that epoch of free competition, which in its turn appears to be inevitably coming to an end through the action of cartels and trusts. Salt mining and the glass industry were also organised from the beginning on a capitalist basis. The important factor in the early English industrial capitalism was, however, the development of North of England coal. Thus the general expansion of the trade, commerce, and shipping of England in the seventeenth century brought a new organisation in the most diverse branches of industrial production.
