Manchester and the Age of the Factory: The Business Structure of Cottonopolis in the Industrial Revolution by Roger Lloyd-Jones, M. J. Lewis

Abstract

520 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Nor is MacLeod afraid to challenge old prejudices such as the “common assumption that the major goal of technical change is to save labour” (p. 159). She points out, for example, that several 18th-century patents were directed toward reducing risks to the workers’ health in the pottery, glass, and white lead trades, in seafaring, in brewing, and even chimney sweeping. When one considers present-day instrumentation for testing the safety of food, this should come as no surprise, except that we tend to think of people in earlier ages as more stupid than ourselves. One of the advantages of this book is that it treats the motives of people in earlier ages as basically rational and therefore worthy of serious analysis. Chapter 10, “Patents: Criticisms and Alternatives,” reminds us that before the mid-18th century the question of how best to promote invention was seldom asked in relation to patent law. Much later, and in other countries as well, alternative methods of stimulating invention—grants, prizes, competitions—were all tried. Ultimately, the system of obliging the patentee to find his own reward in the market was probably as successful as anything else. Yet even a man like James Watt, who kept a canny eye on his purse, occasionally invented for reasons other than monetary reward. Christine MacLeod’s book will become a landmark in the history of the patent law. It will promote further inquiries while remaining a useful reference work for generations to come. Historians of technol­ ogy will need books that are more explicit in their analysis of the relationship between technology and patent law, but in the meantime they will rejoice in this. Economic historians have already been influenced by it. Eric Robinson Dr. Robinson is professor of modern history at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. He is the coauthor, with Douglas McKie and A. E. Musson, of books on the Industrial Revolution and on James Watt. His article on “James Watt and the Law of Patents” appeared in Technology and Culture 13 (1972): 115-39. Manchester and the Age ofthe Factory: The Business Structure ofCottonopolis in the Industrial Revolution. By Roger Lloyd-Jones and M. J. Lewis. New York: Routledge, Chapman & Hall, 1988. Pp. 250; tables, notes, appendixes, bibliography, index. $72.50. This is an admirable and important book. Importance first. The position of Manchester, for contemporaries and historians, as the “shock city of the age” is firmly established, but over the past generation or so historians have begun to question the centrality of the factory, with which Manchester is so closely identified, in the early development of industrialism in Britain, and even (healthily, I think) TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 521 the reality of an Industrial Revolution. Roger Lloyd-Jones and M. J. Lewis, both of Sheffield City Polytechnic, address these revisionisms by looking at Manchester and its business structure in the years between 1807 and 1825, a period squarely in the middle of the century-long transformation of the British economy that is conven­ tionally summed up in the famous phrase. Garden-variety historians like me, insofar as we have questioned the role of the factory, have done so by opposing it to the workshop, by contrasting Manchester to Birmingham. Lloyd-Jones and Lewis set Manchester against itself, its economy divided between two types of activity differing in kind and often in strategy: the factory, based on power and a novel discipline, and the warehouse, devoted to ex­ change, marketing, and (literally) manufacture. The study is grounded on an impressive database derived from the poor-rate assessment books, which the authors analyze in terms of “property assets,” units that allow for shifting functions of firms and multiple occupation of premises and permit effective comparisons of size and value within and between the two sectors. The first half of the book deals with Manchester in 1815, a time when warehouses dominated, and factories, a few giants apart, were small and often in shared buildings. Warehouses were not particularly large either (they were sometimes located in converted houses), but they were more widely spread over the town and their influence extended far outside its boundaries, for the putting-out system...