ABSTRACT
While it is valuable to chart Britain's industrial progress, so far as is possible, using the conventional indicators of economic growth [D.ii.l, 2, 3] the mere manipulation of figures is not enough. The Industrial Revolution was made by people. Social historians have rightly debated the 'human dimension' to determine how industrialization affected the masses who laboured in the factories and swelled the towns of nineteenth-century Britain. In conscious reaction against 'history from above' some have paid less attention than they might to those who built the factories, bought the machines and chased the markets. Britain's Industrial Revolution depended not on governments but on men of initiative, determination, ambition, vision, resourcefulness, single-mindedness and (not infrequently) good, honest greed. Many social historians have found in the entrepreneur an ideologically unsympathetic subject and have either neglected or caricatured him. A proper understanding of early industrial Britain must include an appraisal of its mercantile and managerial pioneers and of the markets they developed.
