At heart, the Industrial Revolution has been a revolution in energy conversion. It has demonstrated again and again that there is no limit to the amount of energy at our disposal. — Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind (2011)
The Industrial Revolution did not occur in Britain merely because Britain had the most advanced technology, but because this technology was situated in a country with a secure financial system, global trade networks, lots of raw materials, including coal, a relatively stable political system with the capacity to direct economic development, and a skilled workforce augmented by skilled foreign labour. — Conor Farrington in the Times Literary Supplement of September 18, 2015
This sense that something revolutionary had happened, that they were living in a new world with infinite and unrealized possibilities for good or evil was very strong among those who lived in Britain in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. . . . But whether they liked or disliked it they knew very well that a revolution had taken place. . . . within a comparatively short period of history . . . . It is the first departure from immemorial habit, the first break through a barrier which had seemed to be a natural and permanent limitation on man’s activities which is significant and bewildering. After that it is probable that further changes will be easier in themselves and that they will be assisted by changes going forward in other fields, and it is certain they will be less surprising. But to contemporaries who saw one revolutionary change follow another in rapid succession, who saw industry drawing each year a larger section of the life of the nation into its grip, the change seemed portentous. And it was portentous, if a portent is the foreshadowing of notable and terrible things to come. — G. Kitson Clark, The Making of Victorian England (1971)
General
- The Industrial Revolution: A Chronology
- J. Kitson Clark asks, Was industrialization good or bad?
- Nineteenth-Century Sources of Energy
- Energy Conversion
- “Extraordinarily Lop-sided in its effects” — Mechanization & Victorian Work
- Secondary Materials for Studying the Industrial Revolution: Seven Bibliographies
Innovation and Tradition
- “Extraordinarily Lop-sided in its effects” — Mechanization & Victorian Work
- The Great Inventors, Creators of the Industrial Revolution
- The Great Engineers
- The Contractors, Great and Not so Great
- British failures; or Why Great Britain Declined
The Preconditions for Industrial Revolution
- What Had to Happen First
- Belt-driven Machine Shop
- Water-Powered Drop Forge
- Matt Ridley on the crucial importance of coal to the Industrial Revolution
- Brinsley Headstocks (colliery winding mechanism)
The First Phase: Textiles
- Sitemap (homepage)
- Introduction (the view in 1867)
- Early Victorian Manchester as Revolutionary City
- Jacquard Loom
- Mule spinner creating cotton thread
- Powerloom with Shuttles
The Second Phase: Railroads, Steam, and Steel
- The Steam Engine (sitemap)
- Victorian Railways (sitemap)
- The Growth of Victorian Railways
- The First Locomotives
- The Amalgamation of Victorian Railways; or What Followed the Railway Mania
- The Personalities of Victorian Railways
- The Social Effects of Victorian Railways
The Third Phase: Electricity and Chemicals
The Fourth Phase: Digital Information Technologies, Miniaturization
- Information Technology Does Not Begin with Computers
- From Print to Digital Text
- Hypertext and Hypermedia
Mechanization, Industrialization, and Culture
Last modified 21 October 2021