The author demonstrates convincingly that state policy, driven by the increasing demands for state revenue, played a critical role in determining Britain's industrial turn ... Ashworth's The Industrial Revolution should be required reading for anyone who wishes to understand industrialization and the role of the state more clearly. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.
CHOICE
This ... Read morerefreshing book is a welcome antidote to those histories of the Industrial Revolution written during the Cold War ... This is a major study in a different mould, which provides a new understanding of the Industrial Revolution and the role and dynamics of the state that lay behind it.
History Today
This is a brilliant, daring, and thoroughly researched book. Its originality rests on Ashworth's remarkable capacity to link commercial and political history to the history of science in the making of the industrial revolution. Ashworth calls into question the claim that a unique scientific culture underpinned Britain's early industrial ascendancy. Moreover, he emphasizes the role of the British state and its industrial policies rather than free markets in providing an effective context for industrial change. In doing so, he knits together commercial expansion, the protectionist and regulatory practices of the state, and the transformation of British technology in a highly compelling manner.
Leonard Rosenband, Utah State University, USA
Every decade or so a book comes out that forces historians to reinterpret fundamentally Britain's Industrial Revolution. This is such a book. Ashworth combines deep and even dense scholarship with fearless and sweeping interpretation, and though he is not the first to focus on the period after the Glorious Revolution, instead of prioritizing finance, commerce, or consumption, he argues that it was Britain's interventionist state and associated mercantilist controls that boosted Britain's productivity and created her manufacturing pre-eminence. It follows that, far from creating the industrial revolution, Adam Smith's market theory and free trade political economy were only possible because of it. All in all, a tour de force.
Boyd Hilton, University of Cambridge, UK
Historians have long debated the nature of the British Industrial Revolution, and their debates have invariably had profound implications for the way we view the present. Every so often, a book comes along that reframes the terms of this debate. The Industrial Revolution: The State, Knowledge and Global Trade is such a book. Ashworth's narrative combines vast synthesis with profound research. Marshaling an enormous range of secondary source material, and interrogating that historiography with his own deep archival knowledge, Ashworth succeeds in producing that rare effect: a historical gestalt shift. Those who read and digest this book will come away with a radically new perspective.
Andre Wakefield, Pitzer College, USA
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