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History Corner
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Laslett: England
Before The Industrial Age
Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost: England Before the Industrial
Age (Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1965),
204-205.
‘English social
experience since the death of Victoria is the only lengthy experience any
country has ever had of really mature industralization. . . .
In so far as the industralizing process is to be described above all as a change in the scale of
living . . . only in England does it seem to have been virtually complete by
1901.
What has happened since then has been a matter of the levelling up of
standards, the lengthening of life, the diminution of poverty, the universalization
of education. . . .
It is
difficult for us now to realize what in meant in 1901 for England to have to
recognize that after a century of leading the world in economic matters, when
she was still undoubtedly the world’s greatest political and military power,
still in many ways the world’s wealthiest power, a quarter of her population was
living in poverty, in something like destitution.’
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