West Cumberland today is primarily renowned for its nuclear plant at Windscale. Once, however, the ports of Whitehaven and Working-ton were centres of trade and commerce on a par with Liverpool, Bristol and Glasgow. Coal, the eighteenth-century equivalent of twentieth-century oil, was mined at various points along the Cumberland coastline. Much of it was sent to Ireland, and the prosperity engendered by the trade enabled west Cumberland to thrive. Whitehaven enjoyed a short-lived but lucrative tobacco trade, and the confidence that this inspired led to the planning of new industries and trade routes. But as this book will attempt to show, the region remained overdependent upon its coal industry; too many of the plans never got off the drawing board, and the local economy failed to change sufficiently to accommodate rapid development. Consequently the period covered by this book was one of considerable, but unsustained prosperity for the region.

If coal made economic development possible, one family was supremely responsible for turning potential into reality: the Lowthers. Indeed, this book is largely a study of two men, Sir John Lowther (1642–1706), and his son Sir James (1673–1755), and the area that they did so much to develop in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Their papers are voluminous, yet their careers have never been studied in any detail. I shall hope to repair this omission, but not within the conventional biographical mould. Jointly their active lives spanned the period during which Cumbria, and particularly the west coast area, underwent a rapid rise in economic importance.