these cases, the criteria by which periods were distinguished were intellectual, political and religiou

But from the late 18th century onwards the most alert observers began to sense that there was a new type of society developing – new not just in Europe, but in human history as a whole – and here the criteria were economic and socia

the lineaments of ‘commercial society

growth of a new mechanised form of industry, together with the concentrated capital it required, was the force that was transforming the world. Steam power, machinery, factories – those areas in the Midlands and North of England where the landscape was being transfigured (many said destroyed) by these novel forms now began to be seen as the vanguard of this epoch-defining change

A common thread in the variously inflected accounts of this transformation was the claim that, alongside the new economic practices and social arrangements, there also emerged a new way to conceptualise patterns of interaction, perhaps even a new way to understand human motivation.

Another historical line of attack was taken by R.H. Tawney, whose Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926) depicted early modern England as a society in which economic practices were informed and constrained by moral and religious norms. Tawney argued that the decline in the social power of such beliefs allowed the rise of more purely instrumental, profit-oriented practices in the 18th century which laid the foundations of what he deplored as the economic tyranny of the prese

Dale summarises this view: ‘Despite common misconceptions, the title alludes to his prognostication, not to any historical sociology.’ I wouldn’t dispute that judgment, but it is worth pointing out that Polanyi’s writing does sometimes give encouragement to the alternative reading. Still, the opening sentences of the book are emphatic: ‘Nineteenth-century civilisation has collapsed. This book is concerned with the political and economic origins of this event, as well as with the great transformation which it ushered in.’ The ‘it’ in the final clause seems pretty clearly to refer to the ‘event’ of the collapse rather than to ‘19th-century civilisation’. Textual and biographical evidence notwithstanding, the wider reputation of the book has been as an analysis of the transformation brought about by the industrial revolution.