British Industrial Revolution

British Industrial Revolution

Outline of the Paper

Introduction

The introduction part gives a brief overview of industrial revolution in a holistic context, and then introduces the first industrial revolution in the Britain.

Discussion

This section gives a detailed account of the British Industrial Revolution along with the views of historians, economic experts from the past and present, the critiques to the industrial society, and how people perceived this change in the society.

Conclusion

The conclusion summarizes the whole paper and comments on how the British industrial revolution transformed the societies all over the world.

British Industrial Revolution

Introduction

Since the past couple of centuries the process of industrialization remained one of the main experiences in the life of human beings. Although different societies had developed almost a 50 years before the West, to a substantially large-scaled industry and this fact has been noted by the historians, but the industrial revolution of the Britain was the driving force behind the acceleration of the growing multiplication of productive strength, because of which the European society had transformed. The first industrial revolution was experienced by the United Kingdom from the year 1750 to 1850, which dared the very existence of the traditional societies in the globe. This paper aims to study the most important historical interpretation of the industrial revolution that transformed the British Empire. As this was the British Empire, which encompassed one quarter of the world's land surface, stretched across every continent of the globe, including Canada, much of the Middle East, large parts of Eastern and Southern Africa, the Indian subcontinent, and parts of southeast Asia.

Discussion and Analysis

The consumer revolution is a phenomenon of historical interpretation that has some basis in reality, but most historians now agree that its significance has been highly exaggerated. The concept of the consumer revolution came about because of failed explanations for the older debate about why the Industrial Revolution came to Britain first; the idea of consumer demand became a key explanation for the advent of the Industrial Revolution. The seminal work that identified a revolution in consumption practices originating in the eighteenth century is The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (1982). The book includes eight chapters about commercialization and the economy, politics, and society by editors Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb on topics as diverse as shaving, childhood, leisure, and Wedgewood pottery. In the book, McKendrick calls for scholars to turn away from studying changes in production and focus instead on shifts in consumption, which were a necessary complement to the Industrial Revolution. McKendrick argues that it was England's closely stratified society that led to the consumer revolution; people strove for, and could attain, vertical social mobility, which led to emulative spending (social mobility). Objects that were previously only available to the rich were now within reach of the middle class because of a rising real family income throughout the eighteenth century. This, McKendrick maintained, caused a shift in consumer patterns in the eighteenth century, which he has coined the consumer revolution (McKendrick, ...