Rethinking the Industrial Revolution: An inquiry into the transition from agrarian to industrial capitalism in Britain

How did industrial society emerge? This work argues that the answer is to be sought in understanding the relationship between the world's first Industrial Revolution and the prior development in England of an agrarian capitalism. As Robert Brenner, Ellen Meiksins Wood, George Comninel and others have argued, it was only in England that a unique set of social property relations which could be identified as capitalist first came about as an unintended consequence of the actions and struggles of the economy agents in the pre-capitalist or "feudal" economy seeking to reproduce themselves as they were. Through a complex and protracted process of transformation, involving the extinguishing customary law in agriculture, the majority of direct producers were converted to a condition of market-dependence and agrarian production was subjected to competitive market pressures that made the transformation of production an imperative, an imperative that demanded the dispossession of direct producers from the means of production and their control over the labour process. Threatened with such dispossession, direct producers resisted the capitalist imperative and full exposure to market dependency. This resistance, however, was sustained for a much longer period among craft workers in manufacturing than among agricultural workers.;Through an exploration of the evolution of British manufactures over the course of half a millennium, the present study seeks to challenge readers to rethink long-standing views of the Industrial Revolution as the result of the natural unfolding of an already existing economic logic by showing how attempts by employers to transform production in such a way as to make it responsive to competitive market pressures were resisted by workers themselves seeking to shield themselves from full exposure to the market, in turn prompting the application of the coercive powers of the state to suppress such resistance. Contrary to the view that the decision by large sections of the British working class to abandon resistance to capitalism and the search for alternatives was voluntary, this study argues that such an accommodation only came about after a series of devastating defeats suffered by the artisan-led working class over the course of many generations.