INTRODUCTION

The story of the industrial revolution is usually told in terms of cotton and the textile industry. But men and women did not live by cloth alone. The houses and factories that they lived and worked in were built with brick and roofed with slate; they were heated, powered and lit by coal and its products; their sanitation and water supply were serviced with lead and copper pipes and cisterns; their tools and machinery were of iron and steel; and their household utensils and facilities were of pottery and ceramics. Whereas in the early 1860s the average annual per capita consumption of raw cotton in mainland Britain was around 30 lb., every man, woman and child in mainland Britain could consume something like 10 oz. of tin, 2 lb. of copper, 6 lb. of lead, over 220 lb. of iron and steel, more than 3 tons of coal, and a similar quantity of clays, sand, stone and gravel. The extractive industries were widely dispersed across the country and dominated a number of regional economies, not just in the north of England. The material culture of everyday life was firmly rooted in the products of the nether world and became ever more dependent on it. No matter how the textile sector grew and expanded, it was the domestic extractive industries, and those that processed their products, that dominated the industrial landscape. Overall, Britain’s mineralogical factor endowment created the defining context for the whole process of its industrialisation. By facilitating and encouraging the substitution of mineral for organic resources it guided technology in new directions that were particularly rich in innovative possibilities.