Volume 12, Number 3 · February 13, 1969
England Atomized
By J.P. Kenyon
The Making of Modern English Society Vol. I Reformation to Industrial Revolution 1530-1780
by Christopher Hill
Pantheon, 256 pp., $6.95
The Making of Modern English Society Vol. II Industry and Empire 1750 to the Present Day
by G.J. Hobsbawm
Pantheon, 336 pp., $6.95
Christopher Hill and Eric Hobsbawm have been commissioned to produce a new economic and social history of England in a little more than 600 pages. This is a meager allotment of space in which to explain why a small, poor country outside the mainstream of European development—Hill accurately describes her medieval status as 'colonial'—rose to be one of the richest nations in the world in a matter of two centuries, why the same nation also took the lead in the process of technological expansion and development known as the Industrial Revolution, and why in the twentieth century she has subsided into a chronic state of economic valetudinarianism.
Review, 1933 words
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