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This book presents the first scholarly study of the contribution of canals to Britain’s industrial revolution. Although the achievements of canal engineers remain central to popular understandings of industrialisation, historians have been surprisingly reticent to analyse the full scope of the connections between canals, transport and the first industrial revolution.
Focusing on Manchester, Britain’s major centre of both industrial and transport innovation, it shows that canals were at the heart of the self-styled Cottonopolis. Not only did canals move the key commodities of Manchester’s industrial revolution –coal, corn, and cotton – but canal banks also provided the key sites for the factories that made Manchester the ‘shock city’ of the early Victorian age. This book will become essential reading for historians and students interested in the industrial revolution, transport, and the unique history of Manchester, the world’s first industrial city.
This book is a major achievement, and a welcome and important contribution to the published literature on Manchester and on the Industrial Revolution. It is well structured, packed with a wealth of factual detail but with a powerful theoretical base, and (no mean achievement for a work on economic history) fluent, jargon-free, clearly written and eminently readable.'
Maw's work [...] represents a very important and substantial study of the impact of canal transportation on the ‘first industrial city’. It not only answers many questions about the commercial operation of canals and their impact on urban form, but also suggests some new and important avenues for research.
1. Introduction
2. Manchester canals: Trade, commodities, and markets
3. Competition and complementarity: Canals, roads and rails in Manchester
4. Bringing goods to market: Carriers in the canal age
5. On the waterfront: Basins, warehouses and wharves in canal-age Manchester
6. The waterfront and the factory
7. Canals, transport, and the industrial revolution in Manchester
8. Conclusion
Sources and bibliography
Index