Thanks for downloading the NRTIME podcast. For more details about NRTIME and for our terms of use, please go to bbc.co.uk forward slash radio for.

I hope you enjoy the program.

Hello, between the middle of the 18th century and the early years of the 19th, Britain expires the most significant transformation in its history.

This was a revolution, not a political one. Within a few generations industrialisation swept the country.

Rural communities lost precedence to factory towns as the population tripled and enormous cities developed around manufacturing centres.

The focus of the economy moved from farming to textiles and iron, aided by technological developments such as the steam engine.

But this revolution went much deeper than the invention of a few machines. It changed society here and abroad forever.

The political economists, the social reformer Arnold Toynbee wrote, the industrial revolution isn't only one of the most important facts of English history, but Europe owes to it the growth of two great systems of thought, economic science and its antithesis socialism.

But what caused the British industrial revolution? Why did it happen here?

We'd me to discuss the industrial revolution are Jeremy Black, Professor of History at the University of Exeter, Pat Hodson, Professor Emeritus of History at Cardiff University, and really Mashworth, senior lecturer in history at the University of Liverpool.

Jeremy Black, this can't be dated precisely, unlike many other revolution, 1789, however it is. But can you give us some of the headline facts about it?

Yes, the industrial revolution in most cases would be seen as gathering pace in the middle and later decades of the 18th century and then moving to a much higher rate of activity in terms of volume in the 19th century.

There's a big difference between the situation by, say, the 1760s, 1770s, 1780s, when you've got the population rising, when you've got important sectoral developments in, for example, textiles, and the situation earlier in the century.

It would be mistaken to say there's no change, but England, Britain, the British Isles in the 1717, 1720s, was coming out of the little ice age, cultural productivity was increasing but still relatively low.

The population hadn't was not rising significantly, and there were no major changes in industrial sectors at that point.

Well, when you say it was a headline effect, we're doing two programmes on this one this week and one next week, what's the headline effect of the industrial revolution?

It is to transform the relationship between human beings and the world in which they live, and there is no accident that this is called the industrial revolution rather than an industrial revolution.

There had been significant changes in the history of the human species earlier, which could be seen as industrial revolutions, but nothing on this scale or transformative quality.

You say, in the notes of our read of yours, a major turning point in human history, it's quite a clone.

Yes, so I think it is a major turning point in human history. By 1850 and even more 1900, you have large parts of the leading sectors of the world in which the majority of the population live in urban areas.

They are involved in no way in economic activities directly related to the land. There is a situation in which what you will know is that change is occurring.

Now, to roughly the mid-18th century, history had been essentially cyclical. You have a situation in which the productivity of the economy and indeed demographics are going in patterns, but not with the transformative change, not with some quantum leap forward.

...