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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874 POSTSCRIPT as it did the industry and commerce of the time—appears to have produced a general diffused increase of comfort, in England at all events, but it certainly led to the accumulation ad up of large fortunes. This was also the case in the sixteenth of great and seventeenth centuries; the moneyed class rose in im- ontaihety portance; there was a steady trend of new men, who had been successful in the City, to fill up the ranks of the landed gentry; but the merchants and financiers continued to grow in wealth and power. The farmers of the taxes under Charles IL, the goldsmiths in the Restoration period, and the company promoters of the time of Queen Anne were men who often rose from small beginnings to be the possessors of large fortunes. The new accession of wealth during the last half-century has brought about an improved standard of comfort among the working classes generally! and among the middle classes, and modern conditions have also afforded opportunities for the accumulation of unprecedented fortunes in business. The poor are not growing poorer, but the very rich are becoming much richer. There were not a few complaints of the disintegrating influence which the absentee landlords and new men exercised in Elizabethan and Stuart times, and the millionnaire of the present day also seems to find it difficult to choose, among the various continents, the one in which he prefers to make his headquarters, to discern his duty to his neighbours there, and to do it. The rise of individuals to great wealth, in the seventeenth century, was associated with changes in the methods of business organisation. The civic and municipal gilds had fallen into decay, and the companies, which strove to carry on a regulated trade on national lines, failed to justify their existence. Commerce came to be conducted on new principles, and each individual was free to push his business as best he could; or it was handed over to joint-stock companies which enjoyed large concessions and judicial and military status. The whole of the elaborate system, by which efforts had been made in the Middle Ages to secure and enforce good order in commercial transactions, or in industrial life,broke down utterly and for ever. Free competition triumphed over the methods of careful organisation, and the right to freedom in bargaining, 1 Giffen. Essays in Finance. Second Series. 405 and in changes in business organisa- On.

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