This chapter addresses the question: How did the term become familiar in society? Even the earliest uses demonstrate the integration of knowledge classification and engagement with large audiences. Derived from German usage, the term ‘applied sciences’ was coined early in the nineteenth century by the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. It was key to underpinning a major new encyclopaedia project intended to structure knowledge and thinking. A succession of loyal editors realised his vision as the massive Encyclopaedia Metropolitana, advertised using Coleridge’s coinage. It would also be taken up by King’s College London seeking to describe its course teaching knowledge underlying engineering without claiming to be technical training. Meanwhile, the chemist J. F. W. Johnston used the term to promote the services he offered farmers. During and after debates over Corn Law Repeal, the press discussed Johnston’s applied science as a potential saviour of agriculture. The term’s use then snowballed.

In the autumn of 1845, as news of a potato blight came in from various parts of Great Britain and Ireland, the prospect of famine in the ‘second island’ began to loom. By December, Sir Robert Peel was convinced that his government would have to save Ireland by abolishing the Corn Laws, that shibboleth of the Tory landed class. Having failed to take his cabinet with him, he stepped aside, only to be reinstated by the queen when Lord John Russell failed to form a Whig ministry. Six months later the Corn Laws were abolished and the Tories were out of office. This chapter examines the private political letters exchanged between Peel and Sir James Graham, Richard Cobden and John Bright of the Anti–Corn Law League, and other leading players, on the brink of the ‘great hunger’ in Ireland and the eventual resignation of a prime minister.

Chapter 5 recovers the peculiar significance of the Napoleonic Wars for the formation of nineteenth-century British orthodoxies concerning the government of Ireland’s rural interior. In the decade after 1801, Ireland's rising population and grain production became central to Irish, British and European debates over Irish government. The indispensability of Irish grain to the British war effort proved the glowing potential of a model of Union that rested on an agricultural Ireland supplying the needs of industrial Britain, and provided evidence for the resilience of the British Empire in the face of Napoleon's Continental System. Patriotic Irish objections to Ireland’s agrarian turn found an unlikely echo in the pages of an influential new journal of politics and political economy, The Edinburgh Review. Alongside the agrarian improver and travel writer Edward Wakefield, Robert Malthus advanced the radical claim that only a transformation of Irish land tenure and consumption habits, under the auspices of the Westminster parliament, could bring about the diffusion of British civilisation promised by the proponents of the Union.

Chapter 3 investigates Burke’s thoughts on the Corn Laws and the enclosure movement. Burke’s support for the corn bounty was one of the rare exceptions in which he defended state intervention in the market. Burke believed that the bounty had made corn cheaper in the long run and empowered the landed interest to compete in the foreign market. I also examine how Burke generally viewed enclosure in a favorable light for encouraging productive agricultural activity; he maintained, however, that the practice should be carried out in a transparent and lawful manner. In addition, I explore broader themes of Burke’s views on the agricultural economy. He held that the rich were the trustees of the poor, and thus possessed the moral resonsibility to aid them in times of need. I further outline his discussion of the varieties of labor in Thoughts and Details, which he used to demonstrate the hazards in establishing a uniform wage regulation that overlooked such differences. I also investigate Burke’s antipathy to wealth redistribution in the grain market. In his judgment, schemes to take wealth from some to give to others would lead to universal poverty, not universal opulence, and would cause social disorder.

Paisley, a Scottish village, here recapitulates the whole story of the Industrial Revolution - its borrowings from Indian textile production, its radical politics and the emerging splits between commerce and manufacturing and between capital and labor. In the nineteenth century, Paisley experienced the next phase as industrialization matured. Its skilled handloom weavers were part of the destruction of the Indian textile industry, as well as one episode of worker unrest that became political activism. How the radical handloom weavers of Paisley were replaced by steam power tells how the larger profession of handloom weaving swelled during industrialization and then disappeared into powered production. When the book ends in the 1840s, industrialization had developed new class structures, and both workers and industrialists used their social class - their relation to the means of production - as the basis for political activism. The concept of invention was itself invented as a buttress to industry’s ideals, which achieved specific political goals when Parliament repealed the Corn Laws in 1846. This accomplishment enshrined an ideology of free trade and a mythology of laissez-faire that accurately described neither the past from which industrialization had sprung nor the imperial nation then coming into being.