Regions and Industries: A Perspective on the Industrial Revolution in Britain

It is the contention of this book that industrialization in Britain (and elsewhere) occurred first and foremost within regions rather than in the nation as a whole and that attempts to understand the ‘first industrial revolution’ as a fundamentally important economic, social and political process are best undertaken with the regional perspective at centre stage. In Regions and Industries a team of distinguished historians contribute a series of interconnected essays illustrative of the richness and variety of fundamental change at regional level. Each essay is focused around a set of clearly articulated themes, concerning the relations between agriculture, population, resources, communications and cultures, and the changing national and international context within which regional economies functioned. The volume provides a comprehensive analysis of the existing theoretical and empirical literature, and emphasizes again the need to evaluate aggregate studies of ‘national’ variables in the light of contrasting regional experiences.