Read more
The familiar industrialisation of northern England and less familiar de-industrialisation of the south are shown to have depended on a common process. Neither rise nor decline resulted from differences in natural resource endowments, since they began before the use of coal and steam in manufacturing. Instead, political certainty, competitive ideology and Enlightenment optimism encouraged investment in transport and communications. This integrated the national market, intensifying competition between regions and altering economic distributions. Despite a dysfunctional landed system, agricultural innovation meant that the south's comparative advantage shifted towards the farm sector. Meanwhile its manufactures slowly declined. Once industry clustered in the less-benign northern environment, technological changes in manufacturing accumulated there. This book portrays the Industrial Revolution as deriving from economic competition within unique political arrangements.
List of contents
Introduction:The View from Little England;; Deindustrialisation: Southern England:The Anomaly of the South;Scarce Resources?;Possible Explanations;Further Possibilities;Prosperity, Poverty & Bourgeois Values;Deindustrialisation and the Landed System;; Economic Change:Politics and Ideas;Transport and Marketing;The Pace of Change;; Industrialisation:North & South;; Guide to Further Reading;
