Hudson, The Industrial Revolution

Abstract

It is commonplace to mark the late eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth century as a momentous epoch in the north Atlantic world Profound demographic, intellectual, and political changes, accompanied by the onset of the Industrial Revolution, engendered the most fundamental socio-economic changes since the development of agriculture more than ten thousand years earlier. In a variety of ways the old order would persevere for decades, in some instances even two or three generations. But traditional society was henceforth on the defensive, fighting a losing battle to maintain accustomed ideological, political, and economic structures.