The Chief Features of the Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution is one of the most important facts of English history.

The essence of the Industrial Revolution is the substitution of competition for the mediaeval regulations which had previously controlled the production and distribution of wealth. People produce goods; goods are distributed in the market. The law is the competition. The market is regulated by the interchange between demain and offer. The period in which the Industrial Revolution started to develop was the end of the 18th Century. The Industrial Revolution brought radical changes in nineteenth century England and in the western world. The period of enclosures (the open field sistem of coltivation) ended so the Industrial Revolution goes together with the process of urbanisation. This process based on competition takes place of the medieval world based on the production and distribution of wealth.

It led to growth of two systems of thought: Economic Science, and its antithesis, Socialism.

The development of economic scienze has four main points.

Adam Smith in 1776 published "Wealth of Nations" ; he investigated the causes of wealth.

A second stage in the growth of the science is marked by Malthus' Essay on Population, published in 1798. Malthus inquiries not to the causes of wealth but to the causes of poverty.

In 1817 Ricardo published "Principles of Political Economy and Taxation", in which he sought to ascertain the laws of the distribution of wealth, the way in which taxes influence economic policy.

The fourth stage is marked by John Stuart Mill's Principles of Political Economy, published in 1848, he maked a distinction between the laws of production and those of distribution, and the problem he tried to solve was, how wealth ought to be distributed.

An important aspect of the industrial revolution is the great growth of population.

An agrarian revolution plays an important role in the great industrial change of the end of the eighteenth century.

The three most effective causes 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.