This new edition of The Age of Manufactures provides an exciting alternative overview of the eighteenth-century British economy. Recent macro-economic history has discounted many of the achievements of the Industrial Revolution. Maxine Berg argues that at the heart of the Industrial Revolution, we find many new consumer industries employing a women's workforce, and bringing with them a rich diversity of technological and organizational change. Four new chapters explore recent perspectives on: * The Industrial Revolution * Eighteenth century industries * Machines and manual labour * The rise of the factory system Statistical summaries, and a thorough revision of the whole text have refreshed and enhanced this well-established and important contribution to British ecomonic history.

Integrating analytical tools from feminist theory, cultural studies and sociology to illuminate detailed historical evidence, Sonya Rose argues that gender was a central organizing principle of the nineteenth-century industrial transformation in England. She elaborates a cultural theory of gender that suggests why it is an inherent aspect of all social and economic relations. Analysing employer strategies and state policies and the role of work in family life, she demonstrates that neither industrial transformation nor class relations can be understood when reduced to gender-neutral and abstract forces.

This text is a wide-ranging survey of the principal economic and social aspects of the first Industrial Revolution.

The author offers a reassessment of how women's experience of work in 18th- century England was affected by industrialization and other elements of economic, social and technological change.; This study focuses on the household, the most important unit of production in the 18th century. Hill examines the work done by the women of the household, not only in "housework" but also in agriculture and manufacturing, and explains what women lost as the household's independence as a unit of economic production was undermined.; Considering the whole range of activities in which women were involved - including many occupations unrecorded in censuses which have, therefore, been largely ignored by historians - Hill charts the increasing sexual division of labour and highlights its implications. She also discusses the role of service in husbandry and apprenticeship, as sources of training for women, and the consequences of their decline.; The final part of the book considers how the changing nature of women's work influenced courtship, marriage and relations between the sexes. Among the topics discussed are the importance of the women's contribution to setting up and maintaining a household; labouring women's attitudes to marriage and divorce and the customary alternatives to them; and the role of spinsters and widows. The author concludes by asking to what extent the industrial revolution improved the overall position of women and the opportunities open to them.; This series aims to re-establish women's history, and to challenge the assumptions of much mainstream history. Focusing on the modern period and encouraging perspectives from other disciplines, it seeks to concentrate upon areas of focal importance in the history of Britain and continental Europe.; Bridget Hill is the author of "Eighteenth-Century Women: An Anthology" and "The First English Feminist".

The Industrial Revolution had a profound and lasting effect on socioeconomic and cultural conditions in Britain. The Birth of Industrial Britain examines the impact of early industrialisation on British society in the century before 1850, coinciding with Britain’s transition from a late pre-industrial economy to one based on industrialisation and urbanisation. This fully revised and updated second edition provides a comprehensive range of pedagogical material to support the text, including a Glossary of terms, people and parliamentary acts, new primary source documents and a brand new Chronology and ‘Who’s Who’ section. The Birth of Industrial Britain provides an essential up-to-date synthesis of the impact of the Industrial Revolution on British society for students at all levels.