The best Industrial Revolution books

My sole non-fiction choice. I love the scope of this book: the early engineers and industrialists who were involved, the palaeogeological conditions that made coal deposits possible, the legacy of burning carbon, and, chapter by chapter, a description of most of the coalfields of Britain and the landscapes that resulted. Add poems and songs and paintings and you have a wonderful book. My sole gripe: the illustrations are too tiny. The breadth of content deserves something better.

The Industrial Revolution required machine tools, and machining tolerances far tighter than those prevailing in 1700.

That revolution was chiefly the result of Joseph Bramah and Henry Maudslay. Bramah designed an improved water closet and invented the hydraulic press.

He discovered the need for replaceable parts and tight tolerances after building a complex Challenge Lock, which became commercially viable after Maudslay enabled him to manufacture it in quantity – the Bramah Locks business still exists today.

Maudslay left Bramah in 1797, becoming the pioneer of the machine tool industry, inventing the screw-cutting lathe, the bench micrometer, and the table-top steam engine, as well as the steam dredger.

He was also responsible for the Portsmouth Dockyard Block Mills, a Royal Navy facility that used a production line, two steam engines, and 45 specially designed machines to make 130,000 pulley blocks in 1808 – the world’s first true mass production. 

James Brindley built the core elements of Britain’s canal system, which halved the coal price in several industrial cities.

He began as the son of an impoverished rural farmer, then apprenticed to a millwright, before setting up as a craftsman-engineer. Granville Leveson-Gower, 2nd Earl Gower hired him to survey a potential Trent and Mersey Canal, before introducing him to his brother-in-law Samuel Egerton, 3rd Duke of Bridgewater who wanted to connect his Worsley coal mines to Manchester.

Corble’s book centres on the Bridgewater Canal, which Brindley surveyed, developing new “puddling” techniques to seal the bottom. Brindley then used the Bridgewater Canal as a demonstration project for his much larger “Grand Cross” canal system, connecting the Severn, Trent, Mersey, and Thames rivers.

With Gower’s help, Brindley got Parliamentary authorization, raising capital from local landowners and country banks. Brindley’s Grand Cross became a gigantic infrastructure leap forward, kick-starting the Industrial Revolution. 

The study of world development is often conflated with a particular image of capitalism, where the latter is associated with freedom – the freedom to buy and sell goods, including one's capacity to work.

In this book Eric Williams shows to the contrary, how capitalism was founded upon the vast expansion of unfreedom. He details how slavery provided much of the material resources that facilitated industrialisation in Britain and beyond.

In doing this Williams shows how the original division, between wealthy states in today’s ‘global north’ and impoverished states in the ‘global south’, was established and reproduced over several centuries. 

The Rape of the Rose is an unforgettable novel that details the horrors of the Industrial Revolution in nineteenth-century Britain. Hughes, also a poet of note, portrays the enslavement of children in those “dark Satanic mills” with disturbing precision, offering his youngest characters shreds of dignity, which life has deprived them of so roundly. He also shows men and women maimed and worked to death by owners intent on extracting every last ounce of their labor. A major figure in the novel is a father who flees a mill and joins the Luddite Revolution. I read this book thirty-five years ago and remember it vividly. It presents the underbelly of the Industrial Revolution—and the ample reasons for the rebellions it triggered. 

This book has given me more delight than just about any other book dealing with the woodlands. It is not a herbarium or any other dry enumeration of plants. The Oxford Don takes us by the hand and shows us enchanted spinneys, lovely copses, ancient savannas, woodland pastures, and so much more that were once enchanting. In the everyday environment, the inspiration of poets, the meeting place of lovers, and the haunt of human beings seeking solitude. 

"A state-of-the-art survey of Britain’s woods by the acknowledged expert in the field… He seems to know woods like old friends, each with its unique past, its cranky or capricious personality, and its hoard of secrets. And he writes like an angel.” - The Times 

This is a thick history of the Cold War that breaks new ground in that it shifts the emphasis from Europe, where the Cold War started and ended, to the Third World where it was actually fought in a bloody manner through a series of proxy wars, large and small.

Even though Adam Smith is often said to be the father of all that is good or bad about capitalism very few people have read his famous Wealth of Nations. Why? Well, 1) they think they already know what’s in it: no government intervention in the economy, thank you. 2) It is two volumes. 3) It must be very dreary because it is about economics, and 4) they are not good at economics or math.  

But read it for yourself, and you will find that it is readable, nuanced, and you can skip the bits that you can’t make out, enjoy the examples, and decide for yourself what he actually argued and whether you agree with it or not.

This novel was a massive influence on me. Rutherfurd takes the city of London as his subject, and follows the life of the city through the centuries, taking in Celts, Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Normans etc…right through to modern times. I don't have quite such a huge canvas in my book, but I do follow a series of historical events in a manner which is somewhat reminiscent of Rutherfurd. Rutherfurd takes you on a wonderful journey. 

Using the modern view of science, many economic historians have sought to diminish the effects of science on the technologies in the 18th and 19th centuries. This wonderful book by a sociologist documents how science, as it was then practiced, pervaded the whole structure of British society, from preachers teaching that Newton had revealed the architecture that God had imposed during creation, to a journal teaching Newtonian science to women. As Jacob puts it: “The role of science…was not that of general laws leading to the development of specific applications. Instead it…[provided] the theoretical mechanics and the practical mathematics that facilitated technological change. Brought together by a shared technical vocabulary of Newtonian origin, engineers and entrepreneurs…negotiated…the mechanization of workshops or the improvement of canals, mines, and harbours.

I’m a sucker for fantasy blended with industrial strife. In Michael Swanwick’s Jane, we see a character trapped in an industrialized fairy-world, forced to work in a factory building bio-mechanical dragons. The Iron Dragon’s Daughter blends biting social commentary with a thoughtful coming-of-age narrative, resulting in a powerful story that’s accumulated a stack of award wins and nominations. 

At one point in her excellent study, the author writes, “Generations of historians have painted the industrial revolution in relentlessly dark colours: a force which was wholly destructive for the poor, remorseless, unforgiving in its grinding down of the independent labourer of old. This, clearly, is not the assessment of those who lived through it.” The basis of her claim is a survey of over three hundred autobiographies written by English laborers of the time. Though she expected her readers to be surprised, since workers are famously supposed to be the leading rebels against the onset of “capitalism,” those who have read the other titles on my list will be less surprised. Their messy and eclectic array of passions and interests will seem altogether familiar.

Gaskell wrote this novel at a time when workers and their families in Britain’s industrial cities labored under intolerable conditions, and it was all too common for their suffering “to pass unregarded by all but the sufferers,” as Gaskell puts it in her preface. Her aim in writing the novel was to bring their plight to the attention of those better off—and to engender sympathy for their plight in the hearts and minds of readers. In the first half of the novel, she succeeds completely; it would be impossible for any reader to remain unmoved while reading of the lives of the Wilson family and the Barton family. The second half of the novel succeeds less fully, but the first half remains as powerful a piece of writing as I have ever read.

Angus Deaton presents his own work and summarizes the work of others to describe the beginning of sustained economic growth, what is sometimes called the industrial revolution.

Not only does this sustained economic growth result in much greater health and wealth, but also in inequality.

Before, only a very small number of people enjoyed leisure and what were the luxuries of the time. After, increasing percentages of people escaped the so-called iron law of wages.

An even-tempered yet provocative sketch of the philosophy and design of a school “where actual & literal constructive activity shall be the center & source of the whole thing”... as when history students in Dewey’s experimental elementary school in effect recreate the industrial revolution, for instance reinventing crude cotton gins and looms and eventually even making some of their own clothes. What school could be! Dewey’s vision (first published in 1899!) is still radical (alas) and still topical and richly suggestive to scenario-staging pedagogy today.

I always preferred the title Heather chose for the original, unpublished story (Slurry) but I’m sure the publisher had a hand in that change. FD, Rock Star is chock full of sexy musicians with artistic temperaments. The Darcy and Elizabeth story leads the way; it’s great on its own, but the Richard/Charlotte B-story is fabulous as well. 

This series, to my mind, epitomizes the idea of a gradual rebirth after a galactic civilization collapses, leaving humans stranded on countless worlds with varying degrees of technology. I found the way in which Drake approaches said rebirth incredibly fascinating as well as entertaining, by using sentient artifacts of the long-vanished empire to guide humans back to the stars. And, as a dog lover, I really enjoyed him using oversized canines instead of horses for his pre-industrial cavalry.

An illustrated book of long-form nonfiction that examines poor Black, Indigenous, White, and Migrant communities in the United States, and how they have all been broken by extractive capitalism and racist public policy. Hedges’ writing is intentionally polemical, designed to shatter any illusions about the welfare of our fellow citizens living in communities ruined by racism and industrial-scale environmental degradation. Sacco’s long-form graphic illustrations are equally haunting. I’ve taught this book continually for many years.

Much of the literature about British scientific instrument making focuses on the London trade. This book explores the history of British provincial instrument making from the late 18th century to the mid-19th century. A.D. Morrison-Low places this trade in the context of the London market, as well as examining the social and economic factors, the origins of the provincial trade, the nature of their market, and how industrialisation impacted the instrument makers. A substantial appendix contains a directory of the provincial makers, their addresses, and business successions. This is not only an in-depth and interesting historical account, it’s also a valuable reference.

Another big thing to worry about. AI doesn’t have to be superintelligent to do real damage. Scharre identifies four areas where AI will radically change the future of international politics and conflict. 

As a former Army Ranger, Scharre looks first at the impact of autonomous weapons and decision-making systems, on the battlefield and behind the scenes. These will speed up the pace of warfare, perhaps beyond our human capacity to keep up and stay “in the loop.” 

But Ai will also move the battlefield to the political arena, economy, and social media. In each of these, AI has the potential to really destabilize our current systems, furthering autocracy, increasing unemployment, and filling our inboxes and minds with misinformation and propaganda. I fear we might see some of Scharre’s concerns borne out in the 2024 election.