List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Note on Money
1. Introduction: What this Book Is About
2. The Competitors: Europe's Potential Industrializers in 1600
3. Britain in 1600 and Early Changes, 1600-48
4. The Restoration Renaissance, 1649-88
5. Iron, Steam and Finance, 1689-1720
6. The Industrial Revolution Takes a Whig Nap, 1721-60
7. The Tory-Assisted Take-off, 1761-83
8. Pitt, Rotary Steam Engines and War, 1784-1806
9. Liverpool's Policies Lead to Modernity, 1807-30
10. Epilogue: The Victorians and After
Bibliography
Index
Martin Hutchinson was born in London, brought up in Cheltenham, England, and has lived in Singapore, Croatia, London, suburban Washington, and since 2011 in Poughkeepsie, NY. He was a merchant banker for more than twenty-five years before moving into financial journalism in 2000. He earned his undergraduate degree in mathematics from Trinity College, Cambridge, and an MBA from Harvard Business School. He is also the author of Britain's Greatest Prime Minister: Lord Liverpool (Lutterworth Press, 2020).
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'This timely book reminds us what a great achievement the
Industrial revolution in Britain was in the period 1660-1830,
taking living standards far higher than on the continent for the
many and witnessing a flowering of new products and technologies.
Furthermore, it gave ideas to the world to raise their wages and
wealth as they caught up in the nineteenth century. Hutchinson
explains why this happened first in Britain, and how Tory politics
helped by allowing local and entrepreneurial diversity and
experimentation without heavy handed taxation and regulation. It is
refreshing to be told that there is a lot good about economic
growth, freeing people from poverty and extending opportunities for
many to earn and save more and enjoy a better lifestyle.' - \outl0
Rt Hon. Sir John Redwood, \outl MP for Wokingham\par
'An entertaining, splendid and stunningly original history of one
of the most important events of human history, Forging Modernity
explores the origins of the Industrial Revolution when human living
standards were pulled up from grinding Malthusian poverty and onto
the path to modern levels of prosperity. Why did the industrial
revolution occur first in Britain, and what was its main cause?
Hutchinson\rquote s answer is that it occurred thanks to
Britain\rquote s strong property rights and the relative lack of
state interference in the economy. Its intellectual roots are to be
found in the royalism of the post-Restoration period, which was to
find its apogee in the high Toryism of the eighteenth century. And
had it not been for the Whigs\rquote grubby meddling early in that
century, the Industrial Revolution might have occurred half a
century before it did. At long last, a Tory and not a Whig
interpretation of history!' - \outl0 Professor Kevin Dowd, \outl
Durham University\par
An interesting and well-written new book about the deep historical
causes of modern economic growth\'85 Forging Modernity is an
excellent example of old-school economic history, rich in detail
and fine reading on a cold winter night, huddled together with
loved ones for warmth, thanks to war, inflation, and plummeting
economic freedom.- Robert E. Wright, American Institute for
Economic Research, February 2023\par
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The long-neglected Tory model of industrialisation that Martin
Hutchinson has done so much to recover created the conditions for
modernity, and the model forged in the UK was copied across the
world. Its abandonment first by an insouciant Victorian liberalism
and latterly by a post-Cold
War progressivism has distorted the understanding of the conditions
that gave the United Kingdom its wealth and prestige. Subordinating
the past to
the present has left us with a woke version of the Whig
interpretation of history that requires atonement for past
political and environmental sins. This
post-industrial vision of the UK offers a carbonfree,
public-service economy, guilty about its past and progressively
immiserated. David Martin Jones In Quadrant January-February 2024,
pp.40-45.
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