The First Generation of British Industrialists: Scientific Culture and Civic Life, 1780-1832

FAIN: RZ-50395-05

UCLA; Regents of the University of California, Los Angeles (Los Angeles, CA 90024-4201)
Margaret C. Jacob (Project Director: November 2004 to December 2011)

Production of a web site, and publication of articles and a book, that will document the scientific education of early British entrepreneurs and the ways in which their knowledge facilitated the industrial revolution. (36 months)

This historical study, a collaboration between Margaret Jacob and Larry Stewart and two summer graduate research assistants, sees industrialization as part of a cultural process with scientific knowledge playing a central role. Because of previous collaborative work by Jacob and Stewart, historians and development experts now know much more about the cultural resources available to cotton manufacturers or steam engine makers. Now 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 proposal will make the archives of ten industrial sites available on the www, and result in six or more articles and a co-authored book.

Associated Products

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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