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The sudden acceleration of technical and economic development that begun in Britain in the second half of the eighteenth century had changed the lives of a large proportion of the population by the nineteenth century. Machinery and manufacturing made possible by technical advances such as the steam engine came to dominate the traditional agrarian economy.Exploitation of new, rich coal and ore reserves kept raw material costs down and the repositioning of factories near these reserves (and near population centres) slowly transferred the balance of political power from the landowner to the industrial capitalist (while creating an urban working class).
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