Chapter 17 The Industrial Revolution
p313
It was reported that, in the factories, parents were the most cruel supervisors of their own children, because they depended on the children's earnings to keep the family alive.
p315
The engine [Watt's] had a distinct economic advantage over Newcomen's: it sved coal. This did not recomment it to coal miners, but it made it attractive to the metal mines of Cornwall, which were remote from the coal fields. Accordingly, Boulton sold the engine there, not at a fixed price, but at a rental calculated as a fraction of the coal saved each year. The saving, however, turned out to be so large that the owners of metal mines could seldom be persuaded to pay the rental for long.
p317
All forms of investment (except lending money to governments) were regarded by the church as usury. For this reason, banking and money-lending were often in the hands of non-Christians. They had often begun life as goldsmiths and traders in luxuries, and they usually lent money to those who had a taste for luxuries.
In 1711, a large company was set up to trade with the South Seas, and it offered such wild returns (indeed, it offered displace the Bank of England as the main holder of government bonds) that it started a wave of speculation. Owners of capital were in fact looking for somewhere to invest it, but there was as yet no real source of new wealth for them: there was no Industrial Revolution yet. The boom of 1720 was expanding into a vacuum, and when it collapsed, it left behind great bitterness among those who had lost money in it. As a result, laws were passed which made it illegal to found joint stock companies. These laws turned out to be a severe handicap later in the century, when the solid expansion of industry needed capital.引自 The Industrial Revolution
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