That the industrial innovations which ushered in the modern economy made their appearance first in Britain has often been understood in relation to economic “factors” such as wage rates, size of work force, and cost of labor and materials, capable of being compared over a variety of situations. But the historiographical field created by this literature is a jumble of opposing claims. While it may be possible to show that certain of these factors contributed to economic growth in particular situations, the transformation that began in Britain in the 1760s was a unique historical event. Any of these factors that may have contributed to it only did so by operating in that specific time and place. We need therefore an account that focuses on what made Britain a fertile site for such a transformation and then on the actors who effected it. The chapter stresses two such determinants, first the overall economic development that gave Britain an unparalleled national market and connections to international ones, and second, a “culture of science” within which technical innovation was encouraged. Both these domains developed a high degree of autonomy by the eighteenth century, and James Watt emerged at the intersection of them.

Nicknamed Cottonopolis, Manchester was the city most closely associated with the Industrial Revolution, as it became first the manufacturing center of cotton cloth in England and then the marketing center for its surrounding hinterland villages. Local history, from canal infrastructure and legal provisions to the technical choices its people made, shaped the technological paths and outcomes of industrialization. Extending the Industrial Revolution story beyond individual machines to “Cottonopolis” also supplies links between the industrial prowess of Manchester and the slave factories in Africa and plantations of North America, as well as to the cotton industry of India, to demonstrate the reverberations between technological change and its widening contexts. Cottonopolis describes Manchester in the Industrial Revolution, and links local history to global processes.

Comparing the industrializing systems of Britain and North America sets the stage for understanding the contingencies that shaped the eventual solidification of English manufacturing processes. Contrasting organizations of labor, power sources, and business organization demonstrates the particularity of the British case, as well as the larger trends in which it participated. In nineteenth-century Britain, in several instances, worker unrest led manufacturers to adopt steam power, which then began to demonstrate the advantages usually ascribed to its adoption. A series of conflicts between labor and capital - including the 1819 Peterloo Massacre in Manchester, the 1811–1817 Luddite rebellion in Yorkshire’s woolen districts, and a series of strikes in the 1820s leading to the adoption of the Iron Man self-acting mule, demonstrate the complicated, back-and-forth relationship between technical and social change.