The other British industry whose technology was revolutionized in the last quarter of the eighteenth century was the iron industry. As with cotton, the effect of the technological transformation was to satisfy a long-established need with the production of a commodity which was so different, both in quality and in price, from what had hitherto been produced in Britain that it was virtually a new commodity.

In certain other respects the changes in the iron industry's system of production which were involved in the industrial revolution were less radical than the changes in the cotton industry. The textile industries were transformed in organization as well as in technology. There the domestic-handicraft type of manufacture gradually changed into a capitalistic factory industry. But the iron industry was already capitalistically organized. Its development in the sixteenth century was one of the outstanding examples of technological and organizational change which Professor Nef adduced to support his argument that the origins of the industrial revolution lie in the period 1540–1640. Professor Ashton makes the point forcibly in his study of the iron industry in the Industrial Revolution: