The Industrial Revolution was published by Swan Sonnenschein in London in 1901, when Beard was a young graduate student at Oxford. It was his first book, written under the influence of the British labor movement and the Ruskin Hall workers’ education project, in which Beard was deeply involved during his time in England.
The book traces the transformation of English economic life from the pre-industrial system of cottage industry and guild regulation to the factory system of the nineteenth century. Beard’s account emphasizes the social dislocation caused by industrialization — the destruction of rural communities, the exploitation of factory workers, the creation of urban slums — and the resistance movements that arose in response: Luddism, Chartism, trade unionism, and cooperative socialism.
The book is notable less for its originality (Arnold Toynbee’s lectures on the industrial revolution, published in 1884, had already established the subject) than for its tone: Beard writes not as a detached historian but as a man outraged by the human cost of industrial progress and committed to the idea that historical knowledge should serve social justice.
Collecting The Industrial Revolution
First edition (Swan Sonnenschein, London, 1901): Beard’s first publication. Scarce.
Market values:
- First edition: $100–$300
- American editions: $20–$50