2. Until well into the nineteenth century, large regions of England remained untouched by factories or mines and therefore the term industrial revoltuion was regarded as inaccurate : England had changed in a regional manner, prominently around the cities of London, Manchester, Brimingham or Newcastle, rather than throughout the country.
3.Could the growth in the cotton or iron industries or in foreign trade from the 1780s to the 1820s be called revolutionary. The impressive growth of cotton textiles, based on new machinery, was in an industry that relied on a non-British raw material, on sales abroad (especially India), on non-metallic machinery, and with few links to other branches of industry. Metallic machinery and steam power was rare until much later in the nineteenth century.
The rapid growth in British imports and exports from the 1780s occurred because of the resumption of trade with North America that the War of American Independence had interrupted. This growth was recorded as being sharp only because it started from a low point.
4. Indicators of economic change occurring before and after 1815-20 suggest that sustained industrialisation was to be seen after rather than before these dates. The decades after 1793 had experienced the disruptive effects of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Industrilisation is associated with a growing investment of the country's wealth in capital formation, or building infrastructure and installing new machines, and with raising productivity.
Productive investment, in these senses, grew steadily only after 1820, as did levels of productivity. The cotton, iron and engineering industries had accounted for less than half of the industrial output until the 1840s. Technical progress was not limited to these branches, but was visible in other branches too, like agricultural processing and pottery.
5. The word industrial used with the word revolution is too limited. The transformation extended beyond the economic or industrial sphere and into society and gave prominence to two classes : the bourgeoisie and the new class of proletarian labourers in towns and in the countryside.
6. In 1851, visitors thronged the Great Exhibition at the specially constructed Crystal Palace in London to view the achievements of British industry. At that time, half the population was living in towns, but of the workers in towns as many were in handicraft units as in factories.
From the 1850s, the proportion of people living in urban areas went up dramatically, and most of these were workers in industry - the working class. Only 20 per cent of Britains workforce now lived in rural areas. This was a far more rapid rate of industrilisation than had been witnessed in other European countries.
For whom the term Old Corruption was used?
