Abstract
Abstract At the outset, it is necessary to clarify an apparent paradox: industrial history is not a new field of study and yet it is a modern one. It is not new because its origins date back more than two hundred years to the eighteenth century, when England became the first country to begin to transform itself from a predominantly rural, agrarian economy and society to an overwhelmingly urban, industrial one. This long process of industrialisation — which produced some of the first industrial histories in print1 — can hardly be regarded as new. Nevertheless, industrial history must be regarded as modern. After all, it has been the transforming effects of industrialisation which produced the modern era. Indeed, the extent of industrialisation is often used as a gauge of the degree of modernity in an economy.
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