Region, Class and Nation: The Uniqueness of the British Experience

Abstract

The last chapter showed how the development of industrial capitalism in nineteenth-century Britain involved very different patterns of development at the regional scale. It has been suggested that the process of industrialisation was fundamentally a process of social recomposition which entailed the transformation of the social structure and modes of social existence centring upon the formation of a wage-dependent industrial working class. Different economic interests and social traditions, among the ruling class groupings as well as the subordinate classes, played an important part in determining the uneven pattern of regional industrialisation.