A new look at Britain’s industrial revolution showing how communities of shared skill, knowledge and experience drove industrial innovation.
Making an Industrial Revolution presents a fresh perspective on British industrialization. Advances in technology, commerce and science played their part, but – as this book argues – above all it was communities of shared skill, knowledge and experience which drove industrial innovation in the eighteenth century.
Connections and relationships in key sectors – iron, textiles and engineering – produced transformative forces that revolutionized industrial life in Britain. Including new insights into Scotland’s unique contribution, the book explores industrial change across the country, highlighting the significance of inter-regional and overseas migration and connection. It considers how social status enabled or limited individuals. It questions how exactly eighteenth-century science linked with emerging industrial technologies; and the importance of science, relative to skills and experience, in shaping innovation.
Sobre el autor
GILLIAN COOKSON is an industrial historian. She is the author of The Age of Machinery: Engineering the Industrial Revolution, 1770-1850, published by The Boydell Press in 2018.