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This book presents the first scholarly study of the contribution of canals to Britain's industrial revolution. Although the achievements of canal engineers remain central to popular understandings of industrialisation, historians have been surprisingly reticent to analyse the full scope of the connections between canals, transport and the first industrial revolution. Focusing on Manchester, Britain's major centre of both industrial and transport innovation, it shows that canals were at the heart of the self-styled Cottonopolis. not only did canals move the key commodities of Manchester's industrial revolution - coal, corn, and cotton - but canal banks also provided the key sites for the factories that made Manchester the 'shock city' of the early Victorian age. This book will become essential reading for historians and students interested in the industrial revolution, transport, and the unique history of Manchester, the world's first industrial city

This article uses American merchants' papers to identify the leading English textile exporters to New York and Philadelphia (1750–1805). It shows that Yorkshire and Lancashire took the initiative from London after 1783. The north's ascendancy stemmed from refinements to a well‐functioning trading system rather than from the creation of wholly new channels of trade. The emergent exporters of Leeds and Manchester were driven as much by the dictates of sales as of manufacturing; their factory investments were just one component of a series of connections with production. American importers retained their role as intermediaries between English exporters and backcountry retailers.

This article presents new data on mill location in Manchester in 1850 to show that water‐transport infrastructure played a key role in determining the intra‐urban pattern of factory development. The shift from water to steam power introduced new patterns of industrial water use, rather than the relocation of factories away from waterways. Five new public canals and 23 private canal branches activated a major expansion of Manchester's waterfront, providing the majority of the manufacturing sites that enabled the town to become the world's foremost factory centre. Without effective municipal water supplies, canals were the best available water source for steam engines.

AbstractThis article analyses the improvement of cotton‐spinning technologies in the years after the great inventions of Hargreaves, Arkwright, and Crompton. While these 'macro‐inventions' have attracted considerable historical attention, our understanding of the major changes in types and sizes of spinning machines used in the UK between the 1780s and the onset of state‐collected factory statistics in the 1830s is still largely based on the experience of high‐profile firms or specific technologies and regions. A new dataset of 1,465 machinery advertisements published in newspapers in England, Scotland, and Ireland between 1780 and 1835 allows us to examine the temporal and spatial dimensions of the market for cotton‐spinning machinery, the timings of transitions between different spinning machines, and increases in machine size. The article demonstrates the importance of post‐invention technical improvements in the cotton industry, showing that the productivity increases associated with the initial transition from hand to machine spinning have been overstated and that larger gains were made in the 'micro‐invention' phase, when spinning machines became larger and faster, and required fewer workers to operate them.