The Industrial Revolutions

Britain in the sixteenth century appeared little different from its European neighbors, and shared their renewed Malthusian pressures, as population growth threatened the resource base of the economy. Yet, by the later seventeenth century, Britain had broken the limits imposed by food production. With the development of its trade, transport and industry, and the effective integration of its economy as a whole, the country was becoming by the later eighteenth century more urban and industrial than its neighbors, and was rapidly overtaking the Netherlands as the least rural country in Europe. This volume of key readings sets British development in its broad context and, in presenting the strong evidence of the extent and nature of its economic advance in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, provides the critical background for the understanding of the late process of British industrialization.