ABSTRACT
Most early towns were market towns servicing agriculture, or military, ecclesiastical or administrative centres, by the eighteenth century in Britain they had developed other economic functions. In addition, such towns increasingly provided a penumbra of recreational services, and a rapid increase in the number of theatres, literary institutes and assembly rooms took place in the later eighteenth century. The growing sophistication of Britain's economy and its increasing integration as a national economy rather than a series of local economies were reflected by the development of towns with specialist economic functions. The later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw the rapid growth of large-scale manufacturing in the cotton districts of North-West England and the West of Scotland, at first in the countryside but increasingly concentrated in the towns. Water transport was far cheaper than land transport in the eighteenth century, so bulky goods went by water if possible.
