Alvin Toffler The Third Wave

1 04. The Industrial Revolution: Great Britain, U.S., France, Germany, Imperial Russia, Japan

The Third Wave is a book published in 1980 by Alvin Toffler; it is the sequel to Future Shock, published in 1970, and the second in a trilogy that was completed with Powershift in 1990. In the book Toffler describes three types of societies, based on the concept of “waves” – each wave pushes the older societies and cultures aside. First Wave is the society after Agrarian Revolution and replaced the first huntergatherer cultures. The transition from the earlier hunter-gatherer societies to the agrarian and agricultural societies is also known as the Neolithic Revolution; this coincides with the transition from the Mesolithic era to the Neolithic
Historians ask why the Industrial Revolution happened, why it happened where it did (in England instead, of, say, France), and why it happened when it did and not either earlier or later. According to those who have studied this turning-point in world history, the following conditions had to exist before the first phase of the Industrial Revolution could occur: • Population with “modern” attitudes towards work: to create the combination of factory work and urban life required, one needed a population no longer tied to the land and specific places; without changes in attitudes towards place, one could not find a workforce willing to move from country to the
For many scholars regional analysis offers the most satisfying means of understanding the process of industrialization. Yet a third way to view the process of industrialization, however, is the more conventional method of looking at it in terms of national economies. Such a procedure has the disadvantages of possibly overlooking the international and supranational ramifications of the process and of ignoring or slighting its regional dynamics. But it has two powerful offsetting advantages: 1. The first is the purely technical advantage that most quantitative descriptive measures of economic activity are collected and aggregated in terms of national economies; 2. Second, and more fundamentally, the institutional framework of economic activity, and the policies intended to influence the direction and character of that activity, are most often set within national boundaries. 3. Fortunately, the three approaches are not mutually