Page:American Historical Review, Volume 12.djvu/895

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