Introduction: ‘Beyond Coal and Class’: Economy and Culture in North-East England, 1500–1800

Summary

This volume explores the economy and culture of those who lived through one of the earliest episodes of industrialisation. Two centuries before the cotton mills of Manchester, an early Industrial Revolution occurred on the coal field of north-east England: emerging in the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, maturing in the eighteenth century and providing the platform for everything that was to be built on the Great Northern Coal Field of the nineteenth century. Much of this industrial infrastructure would be dismantled in the later twentieth century. Yet, historically, the area was among the first industrial regions in the world, a vital node in the larger region of north-western Europe, in which the conditions for industrial society more generally took hold. This early industrial revolution was accompanied by agricultural and consumer revolutions – all of which turned upon the exploitation of coal. But explaining the region's economy and culture in terms of coal alone overlooks the complexity and changing character of activity between 1500 and 1800 and obscures the processes of change that forged the region. Historical preoccupations with the origins of the English working class and of organised labour can lead us to miss the cultural dynamics that initially created the conditions historians have denigrated and solidarities often still celebrated. In looking beyond coal and class, the essays collected here offer a series of perspectives on early modern north-east England. This introductory essay sets these studies in the context of regionalisation as a transformative force in early modern Europe.

As part of the North-East England History Institute's ‘Regions and Regionalism in History’ series, this volume adds to the research presented in Regional Identities in North-East England 1300–2000, edited by Green and Pollard. That study was focused on finding evidence for self-conscious regional identities and conclusively demonstrated that you can search too hard for something that was not there. Only with the advent of broadcasting in the twentieth century did the familiar articulation of a self-conscious ‘North-East’ appear, and only in the context of contemporary preoccupations with political devolution amid a broader cultural response to electronic communication at the turn of the twenty-first century did ‘identities’ suddenly become a pressing concern among regional historians. In a more face-to-face world, dominated by work rather than communication, identities did not require endless self-reflection. Before 1800, only the innovation of commercially printed newspapers provided a mechanism for anything like an imagined regional community.