Step 4: Put It All Together

Now, take a step back and try to explain the big picture. Remember to use specific examples from the chapter in your answers.

Click here to download the exercise for Step 4 in MS Word.

THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION IN BRITAIN

  • What advantages help explain Britain’s early industrialization? How did those advantages combine to spark the Industrial Revolution?
  • How did British innovators solve the eighteenth-century energy crisis? How did their solution help transform the British economy?
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INDUSTRIALIZATION IN CONTINENTAL EUROPE

  • Compare and contrast conditions in Continental Europe before and after 1815. What made conditions after 1815 more favorable to industrialization than conditions before 1815?
  • What role did government play in continental industrialization? How did continental governments work with private individuals and companies to promote economic development?
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RELATIONS BETWEEN CAPITAL AND LABOR

  • How did ideas about “women’s work” change as a result of industrialization?
  • What is class-consciousness? How did industrialization help produce a new sense among workers of their own social identity?
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LOOKING BACK, LOOKING AHEAD

  • How did developments between 1600 and 1800 contribute to the rise of Europe to world dominance in the nineteenth century?
  • Argue for or against the following proposition: “Given contemporary trends, the dominance of the West in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries should be seen as a temporary aberration, rather than as a fundamental and permanent shift in the global balance of power.”
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