In her last chapter, Gillian Cookson declares that Adam Smith’s famous pin factory “most probably never existed” (p. 195). Smith borrowed the story from Diderot’s Encyclopédie, and Diderot himself had never visited such a place. Her point is that Smith’s pin factory “says more about his own situation among European intellectuals than it does of British industrial process in the 1760s and 1770s” (p. 195).

It is precisely this kind of tension between careful historicization of past settings and the “generalized claims” of economic historians that forms the substance of Making an Industrial Revolution (p. 203). The book draws on archival research, including the author’s extensive work at industrial sites such as Sheffield’s Wortley Forge, to argue that community, context, and contingency were far more relevant forces in the British industrial revolution than the oft-invoked spread of applied science (see Joel Mokyr, Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy [Princeton, 2002], and Margaret Jacob, The First Knowledge Economy: Human Capital and the European Economy, 1750-1850 [Berkeley, 2014]).

In refuting Mokyr’s “industrial enlightenment” and the Victorian “‘great inventor’ myth,” Cookson builds upon a foundation laid in her earlier work, Age of Machinery: Engineering the Industrial Revolution, 1770-1850 (Woodbridge, UK, 2018) (p. 171). As in Age of Machinery, in this book also, social networks and craft skill, shaped on the “shop-floor” by local needs, are far more potent drivers of industry than any single technological innovation.

Making an Industrial Revolution begins with an account of Britain’s iron industry in the early to mid-eighteenth century. From the 1720s to the 1750s, domestic industry was small, and production relied on charcoal fuel. In the latter part of the century, war spurred a move away from Russian and Swedish metal imports and toward domestic innovations in coal-smelted iron. Cort’s puddling process was introduced in the 1780s and worked out in the 1790s.

Cookson attends not only to technological change but also to shifts in ownership and management at eighteenth-century ironworks. She explores the impact of personal relationships and class on innovation in iron and iron-adjacent products. While class could limit “what people knew” and “cut through collaborative endeavour,” possibilities for upward mobility were opening to those with skill in “novel forms of work in the new, rising industries” (pp. 65, 139, 103). By the end of the eighteenth century, “technical expertise was increasingly recognized as a business asset,” and could even be leveraged into a partnership as ironworks moved more toward a professional managerial model, with agents and record keepers (pp. 167, 159).

Using the Spencer family of Wortley and the Walkers of Masbrough, Cookson presents ironworks’ “complex” ownership arrangements, “fluid” partnerships, and frequent cases of infighting (p. 154). These data cause her to question the thesis that “high trust” personal networks facilitated growth, and she concludes that “partnering with the familiar” was simply “pragmatic…before the advent of limited liability companies in the 1850s” (p. 167).

Chapters 3, 5, and 7 refute and add nuance to the idea that science accelerated economic productivity. Cookson corrects what she calls “the tradition of misconstruing millwrights,” dismantles Boulton & Watt as the quintessential supporters of applied science, and turns her attention to eighteenth-century chemists such as Joseph Priestley and William Lewis (pp. 105, 184, 114, 73). Concluding that the iron industry’s “capacity to produce solutions” was not dependent upon chemistry in the eighteenth century, Cookson shows that, in fact, industrial developments most often preceded chemical theory (p. 192). The evidence presented here is compelling, though reference to the work of historians of science on early modern European chemical practice and theory would have bolstered Cookson’s argument (see Lissa Roberts, Simon Schaffer, and Peter Dear, eds., The Mindful Hand: Inquiry and Invention from the Late Renaissance to Early Industrialisation [Amsterdam, 2007], and Ursula Klein and E.C. Spary, eds., Materials and Expertise in Early Modern Europe: Between Market and Laboratory [Chicago, 2010]).

Cookson asks what contribution scientific institutions made to eighteenth-century industry and concludes that the Manchester Literary & Philosophical Society was “unique” among English societies in its attention to industrial concerns (p. 124). In Scotland, the scene was different. Whereas, in England, industrial developments were individualistic and local, in Scotland, public policy prompted industrialization via the Board of Manufactures and the universities (p. 142). Given her careful work in the archives of eighteenth-century English industries, one wonders how Cookson’s detailed approach to evidence might have shifted her interpretation of the science–industry connection in Scotland, which, in this chapter, is based largely on secondary sources.

Making an Industrial Revolution is full of nuanced interpretation and important detail. For that reason, it will be of more use to researchers already enmeshed in eighteenth-century British industry than to undergraduates. Community, context, and contingency are slippery forces to delineate, and the narrative is sometimes lost among the many people, places, and “scenes” presented. The conclusion offers business historians underexplored archives in Barnsley and Sheffield that could fruitfully contribute to “new business histories of the early iron trade” (pp. 208–209). It ends with an appendix of people involved in Britain’s industrial scene. Cookson asserts that these 90 people—many, but not all, of whom feature in the narrative—were interconnected and that their connections intensified over time (often through migration), but the linear list format does little to help readers understand this process (pp. 174, 211). A network model may have helped, but then again, it may have only reinforced the difficulties inherent in presenting so complex an argument. In Cookson’s own words, the networks, feedback loops, and trials and errors of machine-makers and iron workers that combined to make the industrial revolution were “a mass of contingency” that “worked”—not particularly satisfying to historians searching for neat cause-and-effect relationships, but perhaps closer to the messy historical truth (p. 190).