From the 1770s onwards Britain experienced an economic growth pattern that was distinctive in world history. The economy did not boom or bust, innovation did not happen and remain dormant, but rather both steadily and continuously grew. What we see in the eighteenth century is the emergence of what Joel Mokyr calls the first �enlightened economy.� Progress rested on knowledge and it too expanded throughout the century and into the next. This site, made possible, in part, by NEH funding, aims to document the contours of this new knowledge economy by providing manuscripts and printed books from the period that can searched for research into transformations in textile production, coal mining, steam engines � in the mechanization of industry.

• The Marshall Manuscripts from the Brotherton Library, Leeds (hosted at UCLA)
• A Selection from the Dinwiddie Manuscripts at the University of Halifax, Nova Scotia


Coming Soon:


• Cotton Manufacturers in Manchester, 1780-1820. Primary and Secondary Texts
• Manuscripts in the Special Collections, Young Research Library, UCLA
• Lectures on Chemistry by Doctor Black and Doctor Hope taken by Lovell Edgeworth (MS 170/587)
• Memoirs of Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Esq. begun by himself, and concluded by his daughter, Maria Edgeworth (MS 170/650)
• Historical writings based upon the Leeds collection

(Download the PDF file with the article by clicking on the underlined title of the article.)

• Margaret Jacob,. Mechanical Science on the Factory Floor: The Early Industrial Revolution in Leeds. History of Science, 45(2), 2007, 197-232.
• Larry Stewart, "A Meaning for Machines: Modernity, Utility, and the Eighteenth-Century British Public," Journal of Modern History, vol. 70, June, 1998, pp. 259-294.
• -----, Other centres of calculation or, where the Royal Society didn't count: commerce, coffee-houses and natural philosophy in early-modern England, British Journal for the History of Science, vol. 32, 1999, pp. 133-153.
• -----, Philosophers in the Counting-Houses: Commerce, Coffee-houses and Experiment in Early Modern London, in Patrick O’Brien, Derek Keene, Marojlein t’Hart and Herman van der Wee, eds., Urban Achievement in Early Modern Europe. Golden Ages in Antwerp, Amsterdam and London (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 326-45.
• -----, Putting on Airs: Science, Medicine and Polity in the Late Eighteenth-Century, in Trevor H. Levere and Gerard L’Estrange Turner, eds. Discussing Chemistry and Steam: The Minutes of a Coffee House Philosophical Society 1780-1787 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 207-255.
• -----, Science and the Eighteenth-Century Public. Scientific Revolutions and the changing format of scientific investigation, in Martin Fitzpatrick, Peter Jones, Christa Knelworf and Iain McAlmon, eds., The Enlightenment World (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 234-246.
• -----, The Public Culture of Radical Philosophers in Eighteenth-Century London, in Paul Wood, ed., Dissent, Nonconformity, and Science in Britain, 1600-1945 (London: Ashgate, 2004), pp.112-129
• -----, Science, Instruments and Guilds in Early-Modern Britain, Early Science and Medicine, vol. 10, August, 2005, pp. 392-410.
• -----, "Experimental Spaces and the Knowledge Economy," History of Science, vol. 45, June, 2007, pp. 1-23.
  
• -----, "Assistants to Enlightenment. William Lewis, Alexander Chisholm and Invisible Technicians in the Industrial Revolution," Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, vol. 62, March, 2008, pp.17-29.
• -----, The Laboratory, the Workshop, and the Theatre of Experiment, in Christine Blondel and Bernadette Bensuade-Vincent, eds. Sciences and Spectacle in European Enlightenment (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 11-24.
  
• -----, "Measure for Measure: Projectors and the Manufacture of Enlightenment, 1770-1820," in Maximillian Novak, ed., The Age of Projects (Toronto and London: University of Toronto Press and UCLA Center for Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century Studies, 2008), pp.370-389.
• Historical writings that employ the Dinwiddie collection
• Records of Literary and Philosophical Societies in industrial cities