Making an Industrial Revolution: Skill, Knowledge, Community and Innovation

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.

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.