ABSTRACT
Professor Asa Briggs has spoken of the modern steel industry as ‘the core of a changing economy’. During the Industrial Revolution, when iron and steel was established as a large-scale, coal-burning industry basic to Britain’s industrialisation, this truth was only then being worked out. The alliance of coal and iron, as we know, forged the superstructure of an industrial civilisation. Previously, iron smelting and forging had been a rural, somewhat scattered, industry, and its products, horse-shoes, nails, chains, hoes and so on, had been chiefly used by the yeoman farmer. Now, when that Industrial Revolution was under way, the furnaces and forges, rolling mills and foundries, would be concentrated together on the coalfield; the cast iron and wrought iron would be ‘manufactured’ into pistons, pinions, cog-wheels, rails and girders for the new factories and their power-driven equipment.
