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8 - An overview and an assessment
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 May 2010
Summary
It is a very difficult country to move, Mr. Hyndman, a very difficult country indeed, and one in which there is more disappointment to be looked for than success.
—Disraeli to H. M. Hyndman (1881)Now we ask ourselves more and more if the so-called progress we see going on about us at breakneck speed is what we really want. This is the age of the international companies – the commercial dinosaurs that stride from continent to continent. It is the age of supertankers, superstores, supersonic flight. The only thing which for many is not super is life itself.
—Folkestone Herald (31 July 1971)The cultural domestication of the industrial revolution
At the time of the Great Exhibition of 1851, Britain was the home of the industrial revolution, a symbol of material progress to the world. It was also the home of an apparently triumphant bourgeoisie. Observers like Carlyle and Marx agreed in pointing to the industrialist as the new aristocrat, a figure that was ushering in a radically new order and a new culture. Yet they were misled. From the time of their assertions, social and psychological currents in Britain began to flow in a different direction.
By the nineteen-seventies, falling levels of capital investment raised the specter of outright “de-industrialization” – a decline in industrial production outpacing any corresponding growth in the “production” of services. Whether or not such a specter had substance, it is true that this period of recognized economic crisis in Britain was preceded by a century of psychological and intellectual de-industrialization.
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- Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004