Arnold Toynbee's essay deals with the chief features of the Industrial Revolution. It opens with an introduction where the Revolution is defined as an historical process. Also its economic and social consequences are illustrated at a global level.

The essayist goes on developing an argumentation in order to explain the radical change brought about by the Industrial Revolution. He explains it mainly consists in the substitution of competition "for the medieval regulations which had previously controlled the production and distribution of wealth".

The consequences of the process meant the birth of the difference system of thoughts economic science and socialism which are exactly the opposite.

The Industrial Revolution brought with himself the growth of population and the relative and positive decline in the agricultural population.

The agricultural changes were the destruction  of the common-field system of cultivation: the enclosure, on a large scale, of common and waste lands; and the consolidation of small farms into large. The increase of lands brought a new method of cultivating: the rotation of crops.

Others great inventions altered the character of the cotton manufacture: the spinning-jenny, the water-frame, Crompton's mule, self-acting mule, steam-engine, the power-loom.

There were also a great advance made in means of communication; in that period people built canal systems, water-ways, turnpike roads and railroads.

Unfortunately this period brought rise in rent caused by due to money invested to improvements, rental of land, consolidation of farms and high price of corn. As consequence a new social class born: the class of capitalists in opposite of the working class. At the end Arnold Toynbee ended his essay saying that the competition may produce wealth without producing well-being