Modern Britain, 1750 to the Present

Introduction

The economic and social transformation of Britain between 1750 and 1819 was profound. Changes in the financial, agricultural, commercial and manufacturing sectors led to the dramatic growth and integration of the British economy and consolidated its expanding imperial and global reach. As Britain's population grew at unprecedented speeds, and settled as never before in towns and cities, British society was transformed. All of this seemed to set Britain apart from the rest of the world. In 1750 other countries, especially the Netherlands and early Qing China, could boast equally vibrant economies and urbanizing populations. Yet by 1819 Britain had begun to sustain levels of economic and population growth that made it slowly diverge from its rivals and become arguably the first industrial and urban society in the world. These changes generated an intense debate among contemporaries about how they should be understood and managed. From the late seventeenth century, rival theories of what would later be called ‘political economy’ developed, positing that wealth was generated either by monopolizing and protecting markets or by setting them free. The mercantilist view of political economy – which animated imperial acquisition of territory, the practice of slavery, monopoly trading practices and protectionist policies – was still dominant in 1750. Yet by 1819 it was under sustained pressure from critics like Adam Smith who believed that free trade in open markets was the basis of the wealth of nations. This chapter, then, asks why and how this great transformation occurred and what were its consequences for Britons as well as all those implicated in Britain's new global economic order.

Historians used to capture the speed and scale of this great transformation by referring to it primarily as theIndustrial Revolution. Conceived as the product of a peculiarly British genius of invention and lasting just six decades – between the invention of the spinning jenny in 1764 and the passage of the New Poor Law in 1834 – the Industrial Revolution was often portrayed as nasty, brutish and short. So influential was it thought to be that Eric Hobsbawm, one of the finest historians of the twentieth century, believed it ushered in ‘the most fundamental transformation of human life in the history of the world recorded in written document’.