‘A manufacturing people’: The industrial revolution in Great Britain, 1700–1870 (due in 2010)
Barrie TrinderThe industrial revolution in Britain changed the world. The images we all share – of steam engines and locomotives, smoke and smog, multi-storey 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. This was the age of urban over-crowding; of startling economic and technical change; of uniform working hours; of terraced streets; and of growing class divisions. It was a time of boom but also of repeated slumps; enormous economic advance alongside appalling living and health conditions for many of the new working classes.
Here 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 centres of production. Innovations were put to work in new types of building, by new types of people and organisations.
Alongside functional innovations such as these emerged entirely new ways of living. A flood of rural humanity swept into industrialising 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 for ever 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.
Understanding the industrial revolution – what it was, what processes it involved, and why – is one of the most important tasks facing any historian. This important new book endeavours to explain the industrial revolution throughout the British Isles. Prominent, of course, are those districts that saw the greatest economic and social changes between 1700 and 1870, including Manchester (‘Cottonopolis’), Birmingham (‘the town of a thousand trades)’ the Derwent valley (location of the world’s first true textile factories), the Ironbridge Gorge, Leeds, Blaenavon, Saddleworth and the East End of London. Yet the book also shows how even the sleepiest of sleepy hollows could be affected by the availability of coal and iron, by cheaper consumer goods and by the transformation of transport services. Views from Ludlow, Caernarfon, Kilkenny or Arbroath can be as significant as those from the great cities. This book has a strong sense of place, and Dr Trinder is keen to promote an understanding of the past that can be gained from the landscapes, buildings and artefacts that remain. Yet the analysis never becomes parochial, as wide-ranging comparisons are made with industrial communities elsewhere in the world.
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? In either case we must try to understand the true nature of those economic and social changes we now know as the ‘Industrial Revolution’. A new overview of this fascinating and important subject is now more important than ever. For we live in a time of momentous economic change, in which Britain is largely ‘deindustrialised’, manufacturing has shifted elsewhere including the Far East, and climate change is beginning to challenge the viability and validity of the whole concept of economic growth. Now is the right time to step back and to take a long, critical look at the industrial revolution in Britain.
About the author
Dr Barrie Trinder has gained acquaintance with many aspects of the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain and Ireland during a teaching career of more than forty years. He lived for several years in the Black Country, and spent four decades in Shropshire during which his research on Coalbrookdale and the Ironbridge Gorge gained international recognition. He has written about many of the most celebrated sites of the Industrial Revolution period, and has contributed substantially to nomination documents for World Heritage designation for three of them. As an active member of TICCIH (The International Congress for the Conservation of the Industrial Heritage) and as editor of the Blackwell Encyclopedia of Industrial Archaeology, he became acquainted with industrial history in many European countries and in North America. As an urban historian he has studied towns throughout England and Wales. During the last decade his published works have included studies of the probate inventories of people who lived in the Severn Gorge, the Upper Severn Navigation, the suburbs of Shrewsbury, twentieth century Industrial Archaeology and Victorian market town lodging houses. His career included 15 years at the Ironbridge Institute and five years at the University of Northampton. He is now a freelance writer and consultant and lives in Olney, Buckinghamshire.