Why are some countries rich and others poor? In 1500, the income differences were small, but they have grown dramatically since Columbus reached America. Since then, the interplay between geography, globalization, technological change, and economic policy has determined the wealth and poverty of nations. The industrial revolution was Britain's path breaking response to the challenge of globalization. Western Europe and North America joined Britain to form a club of rich nations by pursuing four polices-creating a national market by abolishing internal tariffs and investing in transportation, erecting an external tariff to protect their fledgling industries from British competition, banks to stabilize the currency and mobilize domestic savings for investment, and mass education to prepare people for industrial work. Together these countries pioneered new technologies that have made them ever richer. Before the Industrial Revolution, most of the world's manufacturing was done in Asia, but industries from Casablanca to Canton were destroyed by western competition in the nineteenth century, and Asia was transformed into 'underdeveloped countries' specializing in agriculture. The spread of economic development has been slow since modern technology was invented to fit the needs of rich countries and is ill adapted to the economic and geographical conditions of poor countries. A few countries - Japan, Soviet Russia, South Korea, Taiwan, and perhaps China - have, nonetheless, caught up with the West through creative responses to the technological challenge and with Big Push industrialization that has achieved rapid growth through investment coordination. Whether other countries can emulate the success of East Asia is a challenge for the future. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

"In a vigorous discussion, which goes beyond the standard explanations that credit geographical factors, the role of markets, politics and society, Mokyr argues that the bases of the emergence of modern economic growth in Britain are to be found in what key players knew and believed, and how those convictions affected their economic behaviour. The belief in progress, coupled with the strategies to bring it about led Britain, and eventually most of the western world, into the modern era." "With a remarkably wide range of reference, and covering sectors of the British economy often neglected, this masterful book both synthesizes existing scholarship and provides a wholly new perspective for understanding Britain's economic development in the ageof the Industrial Revolution." --Book Jacket.

Why did the industrial revolution take place in 18th century Britain and not elsewhere in Europe or Asia? Robert Allen argues that the British industrial revolution was a successful response to the global economy of the 17th and 18th centuries.

A lively, inviting account of the history of economics, told through events from ancient to modern times and the ideas of great thinkers in the field What causes poverty? Are economic crises inevitable under capitalism? Is government intervention in an economy a helpful approach or a disastrous idea? The answers to such basic economic questions matter to everyone, yet the unfamiliar jargon and math of economics can seem daunting. This clear, accessible, and even humorous book is ideal for young readers new to economics and for all readers who seek a better understanding of the full sweep of economic history and ideas. Economic historian Niall Kishtainy organizes short, chronological chapters that center on big ideas and events. He recounts the contributions of key thinkers including Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes, and others, while examining topics ranging from the invention of money and the rise of agrarianism to the Great Depression, entrepreneurship, environmental destruction, inequality, and behavioral economics. The result is a uniquely enjoyable volume that succeeds in illuminating the economic ideas and forces that shape our world.

DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "The Industrial History of England" by Henry de Beltgens Gibbins. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

Why are some parts of the world so rich and others so poor? Why did the Industrial Revolution--and the unprecedented economic growth that came with it--occur in eighteenth-century England, and not at some other time, or in some other place? Why didn't industrialization make the whole world rich--and why did it make large parts of the world even poorer? In A Farewell to Alms, Gregory Clark tackles these profound questions and suggests a new and provocative way in which culture--not exploitation, geography, or resources--explains the wealth, and the poverty, of nations. Countering the prevailing theory that the Industrial Revolution was sparked by the sudden development of stable political, legal, and economic institutions in seventeenth-century Europe, Clark shows that such institutions existed long before industrialization. He argues instead that these institutions gradually led to deep cultural changes by encouraging people to abandon hunter-gatherer instincts-violence, impatience, and economy of effort-and adopt economic habits-hard work, rationality, and education. The problem, Clark says, is that only societies that have long histories of settlement and security seem to develop the cultural characteristics and effective workforces that enable economic growth. For the many societies that have not enjoyed long periods of stability, industrialization has not been a blessing. Clark also dissects the notion, championed by Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel, that natural endowments such as geography account for differences in the wealth of nations. A brilliant and sobering challenge to the idea that poor societies can be economically developed through outside intervention, A Farewell to Alms may change the way global economic history is understood.

This is the first systematic quantitative account of British economic growth from the thirteenth century to the Industrial Revolution.

It is commonplace to assume that the twentieth-century British economy has failed, falling from the world's richest industrial country in 1900 to one of the poorest nations of Western Europe in 2000. Manufacturing is inevitably the centre of this failure: British industrial managers cannot organise the proverbial 'knees-up' in a brewery; British workers are idle and greedy; its financial system is uniquely geared to the short term interests of the City rather than of manufacturing; its economic policies areperverse for industry; and its culture is fundamentally anti-industrial. There is a grain of truth in each of these statements, but only a grain. In this book, Alan Booth notes that Britain's living standards have definitely been overtaken, but evidence that Britain has fallen continuously further and further behindits major competitors is thin indeed. Although British manufacturing has been much criticised, it has performed comparatively better than the service sector. The British Economy in the Twentieth Century combines narrative with a conceptual and analytic approach to review British economic performance during the twentieth century in a controlled comparative framework. It looks at key themes, including economic growth and welfare, the working of the labour market, and the performance of entrepreneurs and managers. Alan Booth argues that a careful, balanced assessment (which must embrace the whole century rather than simply the post-war years) does not support the loud and persistent case for systematic failure in British management, labour, institutions, culture and economic policy. Relative decline has been much more modest, patchy and inevitable than commonly believed.

Beginning at the time of the revolution in 1688, and ending in the 1950s, this book sets out to establish the main quantitative features of the British economy over as long a period as available statistics permit. Topics include changes in the population structure, industrial structure and more.