A Short History of the British Industrial Revolution Paperback – 22 Nov. 2010

My book arrived in good time and in good condition. Well presented and worth the money

Great overview of current thinking and debate.

perfect

Griffin's account of the Industrial Revolution rather modishly reminds us that it was only ever called that in retrospect, reflecting the need of subsequent generations to understand the processes and causes of so much social and economic change. Her emphasis on getting the data to help understand what these were, and what drove them, is refreshing and astute, enabling some realistic comparison between economies and the means of distinguishing their relative performance. The best chapters are the final two, where she makes use of the data to best effect. Griffin is surely correct to suggest it was not simply the availability of coal that forced the pace of industrialisation in Britain, but more generally the need to use energy as a way of avoiding high labour costs (and this just happended to be through coal in the UK). Further, the chapter on social conditions illustrates just how difficult it can be to draw conclusions from patchy evidence, but whilst the exploitation of energy certainly generated more wealth, in Griffin's view it failed to create much social justice or distribute the benefits of prosperity to the hard workers who suffered so much to make it happen.

I'm a first year history student who didn't care much for the Industrial Revolution, forced into doing an Industrial Revolution module in my first semester. This was one of the core texts fot that module and I've got to say it proved very useful.Each week a chapter of this book would be set for pre-seminar reading and it was accessible enough for me to really grasp the debates we would discuss in class.In addition to this, it was a great little book to reference in my essays and the like as it summarises much of the events and details of the period.As I've said, I'm not largely interested in the Industrial Revolution, but I feel that my interest would be lower still were it not for this book. And besides, it helped me get an A grade in the mentioned module.

Required reading for uni

This book might be good I can't tell because it assumes you already know a bit about the industrial revolution and then begins telling you about the subject in more depth, I would have expected to see a introduction to what it is, how it happened etc..

I liked Emma Grifffin's style and she really gets to the key issues about the industrial revolution. I'm an economist myself (well at least trained as one) and I cannot disagree with any of her analyses. If you had believed that the education of the UK citizens and the development of then current scientific theory drove the IR, read the book--it did not. The real trick was relative wages (the British ones were high and gave a demand to make workers more productive with machinery) and coal (the British had the best and easy to access) which provide the cheap energy to use machinery. A book well worth reading.