The Penguin Economic History of Britain: Reformation to Industrial Revolution : 1530-1780

The period 1530-1780 witnessed the making of modern English society. Under the Tudors, England was a society of subsistence agriculture, in which it was taken for granted that a fully human existence was possible only for the landed ruling class. By 1780, England was a national market on the threshold of industrial revolution, and the ideology of self-help had permeated into the middle ranks. A universal belief in original sin had been supplanted by the romanticism of "man is good". And the first British Empire had already been won and lost. In this study, the author analyzes the complex interaction of economic, political and cultural change that went into this transformation in British society.