Unlike a war that’s neatly book-ended by declaration and armistice, there’s no exact start date for the Industrial Revolution. Nor is there a commonly agreed point at which it subsided. Spanning from roughly 1760 until around 1840, it began in and was predominantly located in Britain. The extraordinary upheaval of the era not only affected every aspect of life, but also reshaped the nation. As the historian Emma Griffin explains in her book Liberty’s Dawn: a People’s History of the Industrial Revolution 2013, “No matter how much we dispute the fine detail, it is clear that something momentous happened in Britain between the end of the 18th century and the middle of the 19th. ‘Revolution’ is an unavoidable and apt description of these events.”
CHAOTIC COTTONOPOLIS Britain’s cotton centre, Manchester, quadrupled in size in just a few decades. As such, the city grew haphazardly and social problems were rife…
ILLUSTRATION: SOL 90, ALAMY X1, GETTY X2
The Revolution can be defined in many different ways, but – broadly speaking – it was the widespread conversion of Britain from a rural society into an urban one, when large swathes of the population left agricultural jobs for mechanised work in the noisy factories of the burgeoning industrial cities. The green and pleasant land was swapped for the dark, satanic mills.