The work falls into three main parts. The first, entitled " The Ante-
cedents ", deals with the domestic system in the woollen manufactures
as typical of the older form of industrial organization, with the expan-
sion of commerce and transportation, and with the agricultural changes
which characterized the eighteenth century. The second part vivaciously
describes, with some new details but with little that is fresh in point of
view, the history of the chief among the great transforming inventions,
commencing naturally with those in the cotton industry, passing on to
coal and iron and concluding with the steam engine. A review of the
immediate consequences of the new industrial order forms the third and
last section of the book. In well-arranged sequence are discussed the
changes in amount and distribution of population, the formation and
character of the new industrial capitalist class, the condition of the
working class both in and outside the factory, and the struggle between
the old and new policies, state intervention and laissez faire. Here
especially is manifested the author's talent for narration, for the facile
grouping of multifarious details. He recognizes that in economic history" a multitude of obscure facts, almost insignificant in detail, group
themselves in great confused wholes and interact in infinite modifications.
To grasp all of them is a task which must be renounced, and when some
of them are chosen for description it cannot be ignored that there
vanishes, with a part of reality, the somewhat vain ambition of rigorous
distinctions and of complete explanations." M. Mantoux has perhaps
shrunk too much from distinctions and explanations, but certainly he
has succeeded in reducing to convenient order the " great confused
whole " which forms the first stages of the Industrial Revolution.
That there should be some slips in handling such a complex mass
of details is inevitable. In addition to the appended page of errata,
there are some incorrect references in the foot-notes and here and there
some errors of fact, such, for instance, as the statement that cotton
from Virginia and the Carolinas was first imported at Liverpool in 1794,
or that in 1753 the statutes of the Framework Knitters' Company were
abolished by Parliament. The existing evidence scarcely warrants the
repeated assertion of " a veritable arrest of development " and " diminish-
ing production " in the iron industry of England previous to the middle
of the eighteenth century. There is an apparent contradiction on an
important point regarding the cotton industry. Following the usual
view, it is stated that the industry " had all the advantages of liberty ",
yet later comes an equally positive declaration that it " did not escape
from protection and from official restraint ". One balks at an occasional
rhetorical flourish such as that which ends the chapter on labor condi-
tions : " It was on the money of the poor, extorted half from the public,
half from the poor themselves, that the great fortunes of industrial
capital were erected." But more disquieting than these random inac-
curacies are the errors in the chapter on agricultural changes. M.
Mantoux fails to recognize the composite nature of the class of yeomen
Page:American Historical Review, Volume 12.djvu/895
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Mantoux: Revolution Industidelle au XVIIIe Siccle
885
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