Aim for FiveEuropean History

Short-answer question (SAQ)

Toynbee on the Industrial Revolution

  • Unit 6
  • 3 points
  • About 13 minutes

You read one source and answer three short parts (A, B and C) about it, each in a few sentences. Each part asks you to describe or explain something about the source or the history around it. On the exam: 3 required questions in 40 minutes (Section I, Part B), 20% of the score. Starting May 2027 every SAQ has a source: question 1 a secondary text, question 2 a primary text, question 3 a non-text source such as an image, map or chart.

The question and its sources

Use the passage below to answer all parts of the question that follows.

Passage

We now approach a darker period,—a period as disastrous and as terrible as any through which a nation ever passed; disastrous and terrible, because, side by side with a great increase of wealth was seen an enormous increase of pauperism; and production on a vast scale, the result of free competition, led to a rapid alienation of classes and to the degradation of a large body of producers.

The essence of the Industrial Revolution is the substitution of competition for the mediaeval regulations which had previously controlled the production and distribution of wealth. . . .

. . . The effects of the Industrial Revolution prove that free competition may produce wealth without producing wellbeing. We all know the horrors that ensued in England before it was restrained by legislation and combination.

Source: Arnold Toynbee, British economic historian, Lectures on the Industrial Revolution in England, given at Oxford in 1880–1881 and published after his death (London: Rivingtons, 1884), pp. 84–85, 93.

Suggested time: 13 minutes

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Part (a)

1 point

Describe ONE claim Toynbee makes about the effects of the Industrial Revolution in England.

0 / 2,500 characters

Part (b)

1 point

Explain how ONE piece of historical evidence from the period 1750–1850 supports Toynbee's claim that free competition produced "wealth without producing wellbeing."

0 / 2,500 characters

Part (c)

1 point

Explain ONE way that European governments or reformers responded to the conditions Toynbee describes in the period 1815–1914.

0 / 2,500 characters

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