Coming at the end of 2024 – Making an Industrial Revolution: Skill, Knowledge, Community and Innovation is about the many routes to industrialization in eighteenth-century Britain.
If I have to describe it in ‘things’, I’d say it’s about the iron trade, and how science related to industrial development, and a narrative extending across almost all regions of Britain, including trade connections into Sweden and elsewhere in continental Europe, and with North America.
The real story though – and some answers to contested aspects of industrialization – are found in human connection. How did new technology develop on the ground? The explanations come through exploring relationships, creative hubs, and the activities of a lot of quite ordinary people. Is this a big departure from my usual historical haunts? Not really, for it was the early textile engineers’ dispersed factories and interconnections of key families (described in Age of Machinery) which set me on this track. Engaging reverse gear, into the eighteenth century, and earlier still, has been a revelation. Especially about Scotland’s influence in this process – but you’ll need to read the book.
Some of my detailed background research, not in the book, is already out as journal articles. One on Wortley Forge (near Penistone) is on Open Access in Northern History. I’ve also completed an entry on the Cockshutt family of Wortley for the Dictionary of National Biography.
‘Hunslet Foundry and the Making of Modern Leeds’ is available on Open Access in the Yorkshire Archaeological Journal.
Boydell and Brewer will publish Making an Industrial Revolution in late 2024.
From The Book of English Trades (1827)