The Industrial Revolution

Bibliographic data

Monograph

Identifikator:: 1027928145

URN:: urn:nbn:de:zbw-retromon-159926

Document type:: Monograph

Author:: Cunningham, William http://d-nb.info/gnd/128907487

Title:: The Industrial Revolution

Place of publication:: Cambridge

Publisher:: The University Press

Year of publication:: 1922

Scope:: xxii S., S. 404-886

Digitisation:: 2021

Collection:: Economics Books

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A.D. 1776 ~=1850. which was partly due to the increased demand 704 LAISSEZ FAIRE times of dearth, and there were bread riots in many places where no industrial improvements were being made. The average price of corn during the twenty-five years which terminated with the Battle of Waterloo was very high, and there were not a few periods which might be rightly described as times of famine. This state of affairs, which contributed so much to the distress of the transition, was to some extent a result of the Industrial Revolution. Apprenticeship, and the difficulty of finding an opening to start as a domestic worker had been a barrier to early marriage, but this was broken down; there was ample opportunity for obtaining houses near the factories, and the war on cottages no longer served to check the establishment of new households. As early as 1792, attention was called to the way in which the development of industrial employment, along with other causes, had given rise to a fresh demand for the means of subsistence’. The great increase of the cotton manufacture, and the rise of new towns, where the spinners and weavers lived, reacted on agricultural enterprise, the demand for food was greater than ever before?; and as active efforts had been 1 The relation of these phenomena had been admirably stated in anticipation by Sir J. Steuart. Works, 1. 155. The influence of commerce and artificial wants in promoting the growth of population is very clearly put by Caldwell, Enquiry, in Debates, 747 (1766), and still earlier by William Temple, & clothier of Trow- bridge, in his Vindication of Commerce and the Arts (1758), pp. 6, 20, 74. He criticises W. Bell, whose Dissertation on Populousness (1756), p. 9, had advocated the development of agriculture as the best expedient for bringing about an increase of population; this essay, which obtained a Member's Prize at Cam- bridge, achieved some celebrity, and was translated into German by the Economic Bociety of Berne (Kleine Schriften, 1762). Temple's Vindication was published ander the pseudonym I. B., M.D.; see Brit. Mus. 1029. e. 9 (16), (McCulloch, Select Tracts on Commerce, p. xii) ; I feel confident that he was also the author of the anonymous tract Considerations on Taxes as they are supposed to affect the price of labour tn our manufactories, subsequently enlarged into an Essay on Trade and Commerce (1770), Brit. Mus. 1139. i. 4; the arguments of the Vindica- tion are reproduced, and there is a similarity in style and arrangement. This is confirmed by an examination of the amusing autograph MS. notes in Temple's copy of A View of the Internal Policy of Great Britain, 1764 (Brit. Mus. 1250. a. 44). Temple also wrote a refutation of part of Smith's Chronicon Rusticum, as I gather Irom Smith’s reply, Case of English Farmer (Brit. Mus. 104. m. 27). 3 Governor Pownall “entered into an explanation of the actual state of the supply and consumption of the kingdom ; and shewed that the present difficulties did not arise from any scarcity; that there was as much, if not more corn grown than formerly; but, from the different circumstances of the country, the con- sumption was considerably more than the supply; and that this disproportion

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