The industrial revolutionaries
In this vivid, sweeping history of the industrial revolution, Gavin Weightman shows how, in less than one hundred and fifty years, an unlikely band of scientists, spies, entrepreneurs, and political refugees took a world made of wood, powered by animals, wind, and water, and made it into something entirely new, forged of steel and iron, and powered by steam and fossil fuels.
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- I did read Winchester's chapter. I actually found Gavin Weightman's coverage of Wilkinson in The Industrial Revolutionaries better.
I wanted to have more on Wilkinson, but I had to draw the line somewhere. This was already the longest post I've ever written by a good margin.
- Coincidentally last night I was reading about the role of the cotton gin of the expansion of slavery in the American South [0]. Such mechanical inventions were the stuff of the era's startups. The cotton was largely shipped to the UK, which had outlawed slavery, where it was used in their most important industry [1]. There was some debate about the morality of this, but as we know, slavery was not ended for lack of demand for its products.
[0] "The Industrial Revolutionaries: The Making of the Modern World 1776-1914" Gavin Weightman [1] The book quotes Karl Marx "Without slavery, no cotton; without cotton, no modern industry"
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