Differing Responses to an Industrialising Economy - eTheses ...

enhanced through newspapers and books, while an improved transport network of
turnpikes and navigations eased commercial activity. Solo entrepreneurs and groups of
interested parties, (such as turnpike trusts and those petitioning for enclosure), moved the
economic climate along apace. Adam Smith championed the free market and advocated
the gains in profitability from better organisation and work practices. Though concepts
such as division of labour were not new, the ideological climate of industrial
enlightenment was conducive to their dissemination. 101
However, Berg points out that the ‘uneven and unbalanced nature of industrial
growth was above all a discontinuous transformation of different parts of the country….
Before the eighteenth century pre-industrial regions were relatively cut off from one
another, their communications networks oriented to the metropolis or international ports.
From the mid-eighteenth century these were displaced by internally integrated regions
concentrating on an interrelated set of industries.’ 102
Hudson also stresses the variation
in growth in different regions at this time. 103
The study area was an adjunct of the increasingly influential west midlands
region, which was ‘fast becoming capable of sustaining its own independent development
and of setting the pace for the rest of the country.’ 104
The region was gaining a distinct
commercial identity and attracting thinkers, engineers and businessmen from elsewhere,
such as various members of the Lunar Society. 105
Transport links from Birmingham and
Worcester to London were still vital and indeed improving, but contemporary local
newspapers give weight to Berg’s comments regarding increasingly important links with
101 Mokyr in Floud and Johnson, The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain, vol. 1, pp. 1-27.
102 Berg, The Age of Manufactures, p. 27
103 Hudson, The Industrial Revolution, p. 101.
104 J. Money, Experience and Identity: Birmingham and the West Midlands 1760-1800, (Manchester, MUP,
1977), p. 24.
105 J. Uglow, The Lunar Men, (London, Faber and Faber, 2002), and M. Dick, ed., Priestley and
Birmingham, (Studley, Brewin Books, 2005).
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