In the popular mind the Industrial Revolution has always been associated with the steam engine and the cotton mill. For a long time this was also the characteristic view of the economic historian: traditionally, the story of the Industrial Revolution was written as the triumph of new techniques, and the inevitable march of invention. In recent years economic historians have indeed attempted to displace this technological bias in their predecessors, offering broader accounts of the economics of ‘take-off’ or balanced growth, of capital accumulation or gains in labour productivity. Important though these new interpretations are, however, they can never entirely supplant the popular, traditional conception of the Industrial Revolution. For the traditional has the justification of being the contemporary view: to those who lived through it, the Industrial Revolution was not take-off, but, more equivocally, the machinery question.

The machine was not an impersonal achievement to those living through the Industrial Revolution; it was an issue. The machinery question in early nineteenth-century Britain was the question of the sources of technical progress and the impact of the introduction of the new technology of the period on the total economy and society. The question was central to everyday relations between master and workman, but it was also of major theoretical and ideological interest. The very technology at the basis of economy and society was a platform of challenge and struggle.

The machinery question was, furthermore, an issue which stimulated analysis in political economy during the key years of the formation of this new intellectual discipline.