Paisley, a Scottish village, here recapitulates the whole story of the Industrial Revolution - its borrowings from Indian textile production, its radical politics and the emerging splits between commerce and manufacturing and between capital and labor. In the nineteenth century, Paisley experienced the next phase as industrialization matured. Its skilled handloom weavers were part of the destruction of the Indian textile industry, as well as one episode of worker unrest that became political activism. How the radical handloom weavers of Paisley were replaced by steam power tells how the larger profession of handloom weaving swelled during industrialization and then disappeared into powered production. When the book ends in the 1840s, industrialization had developed new class structures, and both workers and industrialists used their social class - their relation to the means of production - as the basis for political activism. The concept of invention was itself invented as a buttress to industry’s ideals, which achieved specific political goals when Parliament repealed the Corn Laws in 1846. This accomplishment enshrined an ideology of free trade and a mythology of laissez-faire that accurately described neither the past from which industrialization had sprung nor the imperial nation then coming into being.

This preindustrial history of capitalism touches on the history of guilds, the domestic systems of cloth production in England, and medieval international commerce as well as the early-modern expansion of Britain into the spice and textile trade of the Indian Ocean. The Atlantic triangular trade used Indian textiles to buy slaves in Africa to work on plantations that originated for the cultivation of sugar. All these elements feed into the Industrial Revolution story in the next chapter, where it is painted as the response of an existing textile industry to global competition.

Nicknamed Cottonopolis, Manchester was the city most closely associated with the Industrial Revolution, as it became first the manufacturing center of cotton cloth in England and then the marketing center for its surrounding hinterland villages. Local history, from canal infrastructure and legal provisions to the technical choices its people made, shaped the technological paths and outcomes of industrialization. Extending the Industrial Revolution story beyond individual machines to “Cottonopolis” also supplies links between the industrial prowess of Manchester and the slave factories in Africa and plantations of North America, as well as to the cotton industry of India, to demonstrate the reverberations between technological change and its widening contexts. Cottonopolis describes Manchester in the Industrial Revolution, and links local history to global processes.

Traditional myths of invention ascribe technological change to individual men and machines. Familiar tales of the Industrial Revolution are here presented and linked to their larger contexts. Associating these machines with the men who invented or adopted them helps us to understand the contexts within which they lived and operated. Their worlds indicate what external inputs went into making famous machines work. From the pauper children apprenticed to work in spinning mills to the American plantations that switched to cultivating cotton using slave labor, new machinery worked by utilizing existing sources of supplies, even as they were changing. The most important element in mechanizing the cotton industry was Richard Arkwright’s successful Parliamentary maneuvering, which carved out an exception to the Calico Acts that made cotton spinning profitable for those who used his system.

Introduces the argument that technological change draws on existing social and economic structures in order to succeed, even while destroying or transforming them. Those institutions and expectations, however, are themselves changing in order to make new machines work. A literature review guides readers through the methods and approaches developed in the history of technology and deployed in the text. These include the divide between internalist and contextual analysis, between the causation claims inherent in technological determinism and social constructivism, and the effort to reconcile the two in actor-network theory and in maintenance studies. This historiographical overview also briefly addresses the approaches found in economic history, national and global history, and social and labor and environmental history, and shifts the Big Question in the history of Industrial Revolution historiography from “Why did England industrialize?” to “Why did these specific machines work then and there?”

Comparing the industrializing systems of Britain and North America sets the stage for understanding the contingencies that shaped the eventual solidification of English manufacturing processes. Contrasting organizations of labor, power sources, and business organization demonstrates the particularity of the British case, as well as the larger trends in which it participated. In nineteenth-century Britain, in several instances, worker unrest led manufacturers to adopt steam power, which then began to demonstrate the advantages usually ascribed to its adoption. A series of conflicts between labor and capital - including the 1819 Peterloo Massacre in Manchester, the 1811–1817 Luddite rebellion in Yorkshire’s woolen districts, and a series of strikes in the 1820s leading to the adoption of the Iron Man self-acting mule, demonstrate the complicated, back-and-forth relationship between technical and social change.

The Industrial Revolution provides a useful case study of the complicated relationship between technological change and the changing world around it, and how they are bound up together and with the political goals and roles of the people and institutions involved.

Sara Levy's letters to Karl Gustav von Brinckmann (1764–1847) ended up in a castle in Southern Sweden. Trolle Ljungby, built in the Renaissance style, holds one of the most extensive turn-of-the-nineteenth-century private manuscript collections that have come down to us. In this private archive, hundreds of letters written by Jewish women in Berlin around 1800 survive. Brinckmann, who served as Swedish diplomat at the Prussian court, was acquainted with Rahel Levin, Henriette Mendelssohn, and Brendel Veit (later Dorothea Schlegel), Sara and Marianne Meyer, Henriette Herz, Friederike Liman, and Freude Fränkel, among many others. And he was in close contact with the Itzig daughters. From Brinckmann's “Briefverzeichnisse,” the almost obsessive lists of letters he had written and received, we know that he corresponded with five of the sisters: Vögele/Fanny von Arnstein, Zippora Wulff/Cäcilie von Eskeles, Sara Levy, Rebecca Ephraim, and Recha Itzig. His affection even extended to women of the next generation: Henriette von Pereira-Arnstein, Lilla Salomon/Lea Mendelssohn Bartholdy, as well as her older sister Rebekka Salomon/Seligmann.

Karl Gustav von Brinckmann preserved all of the letters written by Berlin's Jewish women, who must in turn have received more than a thousand letters from the Swedish diplomat. Unfortunately, only Rahel Levin handed his letters down to posterity; all the other letters were lost. Only one-sided dialogues can be found in the Swedish castle. Only the women's voices have survived.

Like so many of her contemporaries, Sara Levy was engaged in extensive correspondences. From the letters she wrote to Brinckmann, we learn that she was in close contact with her older sisters Fanny von Arnstein and Cäcilie von Eskeles, both of whom lived in Vienna. With those who lived in Berlin, such as Bella Salomon, grandmother of Fanny Hensel and Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, and Hannah Fließ (at whose house the famous “Fließische Konzerte” took place), Sara Levy probably exchanged billets, short and often very sophisticated texts delivered by servants. When Henriette Mendelssohn first moved to Vienna and then to Paris where she worked as a governess in noble families, Sara Levy kept in close touch with her.

We do not know how and when Sara Levy and Brinckmann first met.