It is convenient to regard the first industrial revolution as consisting of not one but a galaxy of revolutions in the traditional system of economic activity, each springing in part from an independent set of causes and each interacting with the others to produce cumulative effects, the causes of which it is very difficult to disentangle. The four associated revolutions which have been considered in the four preceding chapters can each lay some claim to having helped to precipitate and condition the industrial revolution proper. So long as we do not fall into the trap of supposing that they effectively preceded it in time, instead of being an integral part of it, we might say that the demographic revolution, the agricultural revolution, the commercial revolution and the transport revolution were the most important preconditions of successful industrialization and the sustained economic growth which goes along with it.

Now it is time to come to grips with the process that is generally assumed to be at the heart of the first industrial revolution, that is the growth of modern manufacturing industry and all that this implies—large-scale units of operation, labour-saving machinery, and regimentation of labour, for example. There were two industries which more than any others first experienced the early revolutionary changes in technology and economic organization that made Britain the ‘workshop of the world’. They were cotton and iron.