ABSTRACT
The age of manufactures in Britain was a complex web of improvement and decline, large-and small-scale production, machine and hand processes. This book has attempted to present some of the richness and variety of early industrial Britain. It has explicitly redressed the balance of recent teleological accounts of the process of industrialization. It has abandoned the perspective which probes back to the eighteenth century for examples of the ‘modern’, for instances of striking increases in productivity, and for some clearly defined path into nineteenth-century industrial greatness. It has challenged the applicability of the economists’ growth models and stage theories, which have narrowed our account of historical processes to aggregate and macro-economic analysis. Such purely economic history has contributed little to understanding the wider historical framework, especially social history. In many ways, purely economic history has presented a misleading picture of the eighteenth-century economy itself: focusing on but one path into industrialization, it has cut us off from understanding alternative paths, and the whole experience of traditional and declining sectors.
