Adam Smith Excerpt

1. A simple system of natural liberty in which people are allowed to spend their capital in pursuit of any (legal) interest the please.   This system serves to stimulate and promote economic growth.

2. According to Smith, government involvement in the economy serves only to stifle its growth, rather than to promote economic growth (which is actually the intention of the government, to promote growth).

3. The ideas of Montesqueiu (separation of of powers reference regarding the responsibilities of the sovereign) and Rousseau (concept of inequality: i.e. the workers’ responsibilities compared to the monarch or sovereign’s responsibilities).

4. Division of labor is the division of the certain tasks required to make a product among a number of workers.  It allows each worker to work on one specific part of the construction, rather than creating the whole item (basically, the workers form an assembly line, which increases efficiency).

5. Smith talks about the roughly eighteen distinct manufacturing operations required to make a pin, and how each worker is responsible for at most two tasks, thereby increasing efficiency.

6. Smith talks about how each individual worker would be able to produce maybe one pin/day if he was working alone (due to lack of skill), whereas the ten workers together produced 48000 pins in one day, due to the division of labor (a worker need only be familiar with one or two parts of the pin’s construction).

7. The division of labor allows for the use of less skilled workers, since each worker only needs to be familiar with the construction for, at most, two parts of the object being produced (in this case, the pin).

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Industrial Revolution Preconditions

There were several preconditions that laid the ground work for the industrial revolution.  One of these factors was increased population growth.  From the end of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century, the world population increased by about 700 million, from 950 million in 1800 to 1.6 billion in 1900.  This increase in population led to an increase in the demand for food and energy sources.  Improved whaling techniques and technologies, allowing whalers to hunt more efficiently and to hunt previously untouchable species of whale, began to meet the additional energy demands.  Improvements in agriculture allowed for a massive increase in food output without giving over a large amount of land specifically to the production of food.  Finally, improvements and new developments in food preservation technologies allowed food to transported over larger areas, and allowed the foods to be preserved for a much longer amount of time.  These improvements paved the way for the industrial revolution, since improvements in food and energy production without an increased demand for manpower to maintain those high outputs allowed a large amount of the new population to work in other areas.  The most important factor was probably the new developments in agricultural technology, since it allowed many of the new population to work somewhere other than the fields to produce goods other than food.

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French Revolution Secondary Source Evaluation

I chose to analyze The World: A History by Filipe Fernandez Armesto. This source is a textbook, so it cannot exactly go into a very great amount of detail on every single topic in history (otherwise it would be an encyclopedia, not a textbook).  This source does, however, provide a fairly good amount of information on the French Revolution.

Mr. Armesto’s textbook does do several things very well.  It does explain some of the causes of the French Revolution, such as the pent up rage of the peasants over high taxes and their desire to be released from the “traditional obligations of peasants and the traditional privileges of lord’s…” (Armesto 758).  This source also highlights the major eras and phases of the revolution.  The text moves from the eras of the Liberal Revolution (1789-1792), to the Radical Revolution (1793-1794), to the Thermidorian Reaction (1795-1798), and finally to the Napoleonic Era (1799-1815).  It talks about some of the different developments during the French Revolution, such as the ‘imprisonment’ of Louis XVI by the National Assembly and the eventual execution of the whole royal family in 1793.  This text also talks about the primary figures in the Revolution, such as Louis XVI, Napoleon, and some of the radical revolutionaries like Marquis de Sade.  This source also uses more casual explanations of the Revolution to creative a solid, cohesive narrative.  He highlights only the bigger, more important parts of the Revolution and focuses less on random trivia and facts, which lends itself to the production of a cohesive narrative.  Finally, this source is a pretty authoritative one (it is a textbook, after-all).

There are a few shortcomings to this source.  While it does provide a large amount of information, I don’t think that it goes into enough detail regarding some of the developments presented in the book.  For example, while it can be inferred from the line “In 1793, the royal family was executed” (758) that Louis XVI was executed in 1793, the text does not specifically state this.  I think that this event must be stated explicitly, due to the importance of the event in the Revolution and in history as a whole, since it is one of the first times that a monarch was executed by the people of his state (Charles I of England has the dubious honor of being the first to claim this achievement).  This source does not present any real argument regarding the French Revolution, only presents the fact that it happened.  It talks about some of the events of the Revolution, some of the major factors that led to the Revolution, and the major eras, developments, and individuals of the Revolution, but never does it present and argument on the Revolution.  Since the source does not even present an argument on the revolution, it does not use its authoritative position as a textbook to buttress its argument.  It does, however, use its authoritative status to buttress its explanation of the French Revolution (causes, effects, etc.).

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