Romanticism and the industrial revolution in Britain

Abstract

Abundant and recent references about the 'industrial revolution' and their major topics, demographics, economics, socials... The industrial revolution is one of the major transformations in human history, and Britain was the first society to experience it. But if that transformation was fundamentally economic, a profound increase in both outputs and productivity, it had important social, cultural, intellectual and political dimensions: class, gender and generational relations changed considerably; new attitudes towards risk and consumption were forged; radical new ideas proliferated about the economy and the environment, the individual and the collective; and both state and empire played important roles in this great transformation. This course seeks, therefore, to locate economic developments within a wider framework and to explore how dramatically yet uncertainly Britain changed in the century before 1830. It concludes by considering why the industrial revolution appeared first in Britain and what that meant for Britain, Europe and the rest of the world.

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