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3 results

  • 1 - Britain, the Industrial Revolution, and Modern Economic Growth

  • from Part I - Regional Developments
  • Edited by Stephen Broadberry, University of Oxford, Kyoji Fukao, Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Economic History of the Modern World
    Published online:
    03 June 2021
    Print publication:
    24 June 2021, pp 21-44

  • Summary

    The British Industrial Revolution marked the beginning of modern economic growth. This breakthrough built upon earlier episodes of GDP per head growth with the economy remaining on a plateau between these episodes. Growth was accompanied by structural change, with the declining share of agriculture matched by the rise of services as well as industry. As a result, Britain improved its position relative to the rest of Europe (the Little Divergence) and also improved its position relative to the leading Asian economies (the Great Divergence). The chapter examines the proximate sources behind economic growth in Britain during 1700–1870, including investment, growth in the number of workers, and accumulation of human capital. Together, these factors accounted for about two-thirds of the increase in output growth, leaving the other third to be explained by total factor productivity growth. However, the ultimate sources of Britain’s growth lay deeper in geography and institutions. The chapter also examines the effects of the Industrial Revolution on living standards and the impact of trade and empire.

Forces of Reproduction

Forces of Reproduction
  • Notes for a Counter-Hegemonic Anthropocene
  • Stefania Barca
  • Published online:
    03 November 2020
    Print publication:
    26 November 2020
  • The concept of Anthropocene has been incorporated within a hegemonic narrative that represents 'Man' as the dominant geological force of our epoch, emphasizing the destruction and salvation power of industrial technologies. This Element develops a counter-hegemonic narrative based on the perspective of earthcare labour – or the 'forces of reproduction'. It brings to the fore the historical agency of reproductive and subsistence workers as those subjects that, through both daily practices and organized political action, take care of the biophysical conditions for human reproduction, thus keeping the world alive. Adopting a narrative justice approach, and placing feminist political ecology right at the core of its critique of the Anthropocene storyline, this Element offers a novel and timely contribution to the environmental humanities.

  • 13 - Assessing imperialism

  • from Part III - Politics
  • Edited by J. R. McNeill, Georgetown University, Washington DC, Kenneth Pomeranz, University of Chicago
  • Book:
    The Cambridge World History
    Published online:
    05 May 2015
    Print publication:
    30 April 2015, pp 331-365

  • Summary

    In the last two centuries, world agriculture succeeded in producing enough to provide more food per capita than ever before, in spite of an almost seven-fold increase in population, and to supply industries with raw materials, all using less land, capital, and labor per unit of output. Production can be augmented by using more inputs such as capital, labor, and land, and/or by using them more efficiently. This chapter highlights a key distinction between the number of agricultural workers and their share of the total workforce. The farmers have introduced thousands of innovations, which for the purpose of illustration can be grouped into four categories. They are new practices of cultivation, new plants and animals, chemical products, and machinery. In the economists' jargon, institutions can be defined as the set of formal or informal rules that determine the ownership of the goods and factors and regulate the interactions among individual agents or households.