Our choice to industrialise has changed the world more than any other decision in human history, yet the prevailing explanations are woefully inadequate in making sense of it all.

We chose to industrialise because thought preceded action. People developed completely new ways of thinking about the world on three levels: how we should relate to each other, to property and to nature.

Using the rich source material of Montréal, the first colonial city to industrialise, Sweeny reveals the importance of both new gender relations and qualitatively different environmental practices. The focus is on the personal and familial decisions that tens of thousands of people made before the first factories were built.

We see how all that was solid melted into air as people abandoned a centuries-old moral economy for a liberal one.

Informed by four decades of scholarship, Why Did We Choose to Industrialize? is a politically engaged argument about past and present, a sustained reflection on sources and method, and a powerful critique of liberalism when it really was new.