Arnold Toynbee's essay "The Chief Features of the Industrial Revolution" is divided in ten paragraphs.
The first paragraph is the introduction of the text: the Industrial Revolution is defined as an historical process which interested all western world and which characterized it with rapid and deep changes.
The essence of the Industrial Revolution is the substitution of competition for the medieval regulations which had controlled the production and the distribution of wealth in the previous period.
All these changes regard also the way of thought, causing the birth of two new systems of thought: Economic Science and Socialism, which is the opposite of the first.
The most important thinkers of the Economic Science were Adam Smith, who analyses the causes of wealth in his text "Wealth of Nations"; Malthus, who studied the causes of poverty in "Essay on Population"; Ricardo, who focused his attention on the laws of distribution of wealth in "Priciples of Political Economy and Taxation", and Stuart Mill, who wrote the "Priciples of Political Economy" which deals with the laws of production and distribution and how wealth ought be distributed.
The main fact of the period is the increase in population due to the births and to a decrease in deaths. So there's a general improving of social conditions. On the other side, there is a great decrease in rural population.
Three reasons caused that: the elimination of common fields, the spread of the enclosures and the consolidation of small farms into large. Large farms used agricultural engines because they had got a lot of soils and in this way the production was faster, improved and less expansive. In view of this, large farms didn't need many labourers, so they left the country moving to cities. This caused urbanisation: cities bacame big and many others were builded. Cities were born usually near coal mines, because they provided cities of machinery fuel.
Moreover the fields were included into the big farms properties and enclosured, not allowing people to work the soils and keeping a part of the crops (system of open fields).
With the deacrease in rural population, there was also an improvement of agricultural ways. It was necessarily a big production to satisfy the needs of a continued increase population. So it was introduced the rotation of crops to not impoverish too much the soils, the breed of cattles and the plough engine .
This agrarian revolution is important as the manifacture one. Looking at it, it's possibile to notice there were many changes in textile industry and in iron one. Regarding the first, there were many mechanical inventions: the spinning- jenny, the water-frame, the mule and the self-acting mule and then the most important steam engine and power loom, had as result the growth of production with a low cost for factories owners. Moreover there was also the fall of the domestic system of production, whit the consequent lost of a way of survival for many people.
In iron industry there was the invention of smelting by pit-coal and blast furnaces. The production of iron, steel and cast iron really growth and it aided not only the creation of agricultual and textile machineries but also trades, beacuse means of communication were improved with the creation of canals, roads and railroads, which guaranteed a faster transport of the manifactures and a decrase of the prices of transport.
Further changes of this improvement were the passage to indipendece to dependence because people didn't use anymore only what themself produced, but they wanted more and a consequence of this was the fluctuation of market, with periods of over-production and of depression, caused by the link between all this system.
These revolutions caused also many changes in society order. In agricultural society, the most important fact was the rise in rents, caused by the money spent in improvements and in the machinary buy. Other causes could be the enclosure system and the consolidation of farms. Farmers bacame very rich and they ceased to work and live with their labourers.
This break in the relations between the master and the workers happened also in the manifacture world: there was the birth of the new class of the capitalists, who had the money and controlled the factories, and, on the opposite side, the workmen. Their relation consisted only in a "cash nexus": capitalist didn't know his wormen and their were for him only the way to increase his wealth. So it happened many conflicts between them, and many workmen shared the views of socialism, wich contrasted with the ideas of capitalists.
Working people were constricted to live poorly because of the bad conditions of factory work (many incidents, very hard working rythms, no humanity), the rise of bread price and the fluctuation of trade, which caused moments of much work and moments of absence of it, with the consequent firings.
The conclusion is that the competition of the Industrial Revolution produced wealth but not well being. The nations became very rich and also people increase in part his richness, but this didn't guaranteed happyness.