Black and British: A Forgotten History, from the acclaimed historian and star of 'Celebrity Traitors'

by David Olusoga

The industrial revolution that had enabled Victorian Britain to become an economic superpower is often imagined as a great burst of heavy industry, an orgy of smelting, hammering, riveting and forging. Yet in the North-West of England the sounds that wafted over the valleys of industrialized Lancashire and Cheshire were not the thuds of heavy machinery or the roars of the blast furnace but the rhythmic chatter of the power loom and spinning jenny. Here industry and wealth rested upon the mastery of fine precision movement and repeatability. In that region and in smaller clusters elsewhere in the British Isles, mass production on an unprecedented scale had been perfected and new ways of life, new relationships to time and new family structures had all yielded to the discipline of the factory and the factory clock. The most important and profitable of all the goods that flowed out of the coal-blackened cities of northern England in the middle of the nineteenth century were cotton cloth, chintzy fabrics, thread and finished clothing. By 1860 cotton goods accounted for 40 per cent of all British exports.