Britain's Industrial Revolution: The Making of a Manufacturing People, 1700-1870

The industrial revolution in Britain changed the world. The images we all share - of steam engines and locomotives, smoke and smog, multi-story textile mills and regiments of working men and women flooding out of factory gates at the end of their shift - are all so familiar that it is easy to forget how enormous, far-reaching and upsetting were the events and processes that brought us into this new, industrial age. In Britain all of these things, and more, happened first and most dramatically. Factories as we know them were invented here; mines were sunk to new depths; inventive and entrepreneurial minds sought to make things in new ways that were better, faster and cheaper; engineers harnessed water and steam power as never before to drive machinery and equipment in concentrated centers of production. Innovations were put to work in new types of building, by new types of people and organizations. Alongside functional innovations such as these emerged entirely new ways of living. A flood of rural humanity swept into industrializing towns in search of work; people came to live in the shadows of the mills, the chimneys or the winding gears that - in the minds of many contemporaries - now enslaved them; patterns of life as well as work became tied to those of the machine. Society changed just as fundamentally as did the economy. And the landscape changed forever too: rural valleys filled with water-powered workshops and mills; canals were cut through fields, and along their banks sprang up yet more factories; in towns the air was thick with smoke from hundreds of chimneys. Towns sprawled; production boomed; British exports dominated trade. Britain became "the workshop of the world", its inhabitants "a manufacturing people". Contemporaries were shocked, thrilled and fascinated. This important new book endeavors to explain the industrial revolution throughout the British Isles. It is difficult to know how, fifty years from now, the industrial revolution will be viewed; perhaps, amid irreversible global warming and environmental disaster, as one of mankind's greatest mistakes? Alternatively, might the mixture of enterprise and technological innovation of the type that flourished in Great Britain from the eighteenth century in fact provide remedies to such problems?