The 1899 census for Puerto Rico carried out by the US War Department, the subsequent decennial censuses of the island carried out by the US Census Bureau in 1910, 1920, and 1930, and the 1935 special census for Puerto Rico carried out by the Puerto Rico Reconstruction Authority permit a series of statistical calculations that may be used to estimate the percentage of rural families on the island who did not own land in each census year. These data may be used to measure whether there were significant changes over time on the island as a whole and in regions characterized by the predominance of the major export crops, sugar, coffee, and tobacco.

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was itself invented as a buttress to industry’s ideals, which achieved specific political goals when Parliament repealed the Corn Laws in 1846.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.