I'm going to find out the most relevant parts of the extract taken from the book The Industrial Revolution, written by A. Toynbee.

In his opinion the essence of the Industrial Revolution is the substitution of the medieval laws that went on in the market as far as the production and distribution of wealth, with the competition.

Competition bases itself on the rules made by the market, offer and demand; the market decides prices.

The change led to the growth of two new opposite system of thought: Economic Science and Socialism.

The development of the first one in England has four landmarks; each one connected with the name of four important English economists: Adam Smith's Wealth Of Nations (1776), Malthus' Essay On Population (1798), Ricardo's Principles Of Political Economy and Taxation (1817) and John Stuart Mill's Principles Of Political Economy (1848).

Moreover the Industrial Revolution brought two important facts: a growth of population and a decline in agricultural population; the latter was caused by the destruction of the common-fields system, by the enclosures and by the consolidation of small farms into larger.

Together with the development of the Industrial Revolution there is also an agrarian revolution; it describes the passage from an unscientific to a scientific approach to agriculture.

Some examples are the improvement of the breed of cattle, the introduction of the rotation of crops, the invention of the steam-plug and the institution of agricultural societies.

Also the growth of industry plays an important role in that period. As a matter of fact, it causes mechanical inventions in textile industry (invention of: the spinning jenny, the water frame, the mule and self-acting mule, steam-engine and power-loom), a mechanical revolution in iron industry (which produced the invention of smelting by pit-coal and the application of the steam engine to blast furnaces) and, last but not least, an improvement in means of communication (canal, roads and railroads developed in the country).

As a result of the improvements there were an increase in commerce and the substitution of domestic system in favour of factory system.