This comprehensive and innovative book on the Industrial Revolution uses carefully chosen case studies, illustrated with extracts from contemporary documents, to offer new perspectives on the process and impact of industrialization. The authors look at the development of economic structures, the financing of the Industrial Revolution, technological advances, markets and demand, and agricultural progress. The book also deals with changes in demography, the household, families, and the built environment.

Offering a reappraisal of the role of women in the politics and practice of welfare in late Victorian and early Edwardian England, this book focuses on the Lancashire mill town of Bolton, tracing the emergence of a core of female social and political activists from the 1860s. It analyzes their achievements as they rose from the humble origins of a workhouse visiting committee to become pivotal players in the formulation and implementation of local welfare policy after 1894. Using a unique working diary written by the activist and female poor law Guardian Mary Haslam, the book portrays these...

An overview of the literature on poverty, and of the welfare policies of the state, as well as the alternative welfare strategies of the poor for the period 1700 to 1850. Drawing on well-known contributions to the welfare debate, Steven King offers his perspective on how we should conceptualize poverty and how ordinary families and communities responded to that poverty. The book first details the legal framework which shaped the treatment of a poverty problem, before moving on to consider the historiography of poverty and welfare. A variety of primary source material is used to reconsider the...