The Engine of the World

In 1760 the world was still lit by fire and muscle, and had been, in its essentials, for thousands of years — poor, slow, dark, and bounded by the annual gift of the sun. A century and a half later it was unrecognisable: a world of factories and railways, of steel and electricity, of crowded cities and mass-produced goods, of sustained growth that had, for the first time in history, begun to lift ordinary people out of age-old poverty. This is the sweeping story of how that transformation happened — the Industrial Revolution, the hinge on which the modern world turned.

From the spinning frames of Lancashire and the coke furnaces of Coalbrookdale to the steam engines of James Watt, the railways of the Stephensons, and the steel and electricity of the second great wave, this is narrative history at its most gripping: the machines and the men who built them, the mills and the children who worked in them, the reformers and rebels who fought to make the new economy humane, and the thinkers — Smith, Malthus, Marx — who struggled to understand it.

Clear, vivid, and honest about both the miracle and its cost — the wealth it created and the suffering it inflicted, the liberation it offered and the slavery it fed, the prosperity it built and the warming skies it left behind — this is the unforgettable account of the revolution that never ended, and inside which we are living still.