The First Industrial Revolution (Web Resource)
Title: The First Industrial Revolution
Author: Margaret Jacob
Abstract: This historical study, a collaboration between Margaret Jacob and Larry Stewart sees industrialization as part of a cultural process with scientific knowledge playing a central role. The humanistic study of industrial life has revealed the depth and sophistication of human agency, a model that contradicts a mechanistic vision of economic activity. The project makes pertinent industrial archives and writings available on the www.
Year: 2008
Primary URL: http://industrialization.ats.ucla.edu/
Primary URL Description: From the 1770s onwards Britain experienced an economic growth pattern that was distinctive in world history. The economy did not boom or bust, innovation did not happen and remain dormant, but rather both steadily and continuously grew. What we see in the eighteenth century is the emergence of what Joel Mokyr calls the first "enlightened economy." Progress rested on knowledge and it too expanded throughout the century and into the next. This site, made possible, in part, by NEH funding, aims to document the contours of this new knowledge economy by providing manuscripts and printed books from the period that can searched for research into transformations in textile production, coal mining, and steam engines in the mechanization of industry.

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