An easier-to-read current language version of the 1884 classic – with a new extended editorial foreword.

Arnold Toynbee’s 1884 book is the pioneering general study of the Industrial Revolution. The author combines history and economics to examine its key features, causes and effects.

Toynbee rejects the notion that economic development is subject to any immutable “iron laws”. For him, there are no fixed limits to cultivatable land, food supplies, population increase or general economic growth and performance. Improvements in real wages, rents, profits and interest rates can continue indefinitely. In addition, no class has a predetermined place in the economy and society. Toynbee speculates about the future of the working classes and possibilities for improving their material conditions. However, he finds the Marxist doctrine of state Socialism inevitably replacing free market enterprise without basis in economic or historical fact.

This modernized version translates the book into current English to improve its readability and understandability.

CONTENTS

Editorial foreword

1. Introduction


2. England in 1760: population


3. England in 1760: agriculture


4. England in 1760: manufacturing and trade


5. England in 1760: the decline of the yeomanry


6. England in 1760: the condition of the wage earners


7. The mercantilist system and Adam Smith


8. The chief features of the Revolution


9. The growth of pauperism


10. Malthus and the law of population


11. The wage-fund theory


12. Ricardo and the growth of rent


13. Two theories of economic progress


14. The future of the working classes