Biography has never been the same since 1918, when Lytton Strachey defended his new approach in Eminent Victorians by lambasting traditional versions that were ‘as familiar as the cortège of the undertaker’ and carried the same air of ‘slow, funereal barbarism’. In his own bid to revise the genre, Ben Russell retains the conventional chronological unfolding of events in James Watt's life, yet at the same time transforms his subject into a lens for exploring ‘the hows, whys and whats of making things’ (p. 19) while Britain became increasingly industrialized. Covering the period from roughly 1760 to 1820, James Watt: Making the World Anew examines the development of the steam engine in the context of shifting craft practices across a wide range of industries, including chemistry and blacksmithing, as well as the manufacture of pottery and precision instruments.

This book about doing casts a fresh light on British industrialization. Explicitly distancing himself from accounts of an industrial Enlightenment characterized by the creation and circulation of useful knowledge, Russell focuses on things; rather than the familiar Lunar Society, he describes networks of artisans. Centring on Watt, he explains how men in foundries, fitting shops and factories transformed abstract ideas into tangible products that were useful or desirable and hence marketable. According to eighteenth-century commentators across Europe (strangely, Russell frequently quotes from Daniel Defoe, who died before Watt was born), Britain owed its wealth neither to original inventions nor to scientific achievements, but to the superior practical skills of the nation's workmen. Taking advantage of local raw materials, they improved techniques of production, organization and marketing to feed the booming economy with an unprecedented plethora of material goods.

Curator of mechanical engineering at London's Science Museum, Russell is admirably sensitive to the risks of squeezing Watt into modern categories and so converting him into multiple cardboard pioneers – prototype engineer, chemist, entrepreneur – although he never questions the reality of the Industrial Revolution, a label coined in the late nineteenth century and now contested. To borrow his own metaphor, Russell slices the Watt cake horizontally rather than vertically, unifying his life by refusing to label him with a specific identity and instead portraying him in terms of his behaviour, as a man who not only thinks but also does. To reinforce the merits of this approach, Russell frames his book by depicting Watt's workshop, which was acquired by the museum in 1924 when his Birmingham house was demolished. Its shelves lined with sculptures, minerals and bottles of chemicals, this ‘shrine to making things’ (p. 9) is packed not with drawings of steam engines, but with hammers, mirrors, thermometers and compasses, along with all those sundry projects that never quite got finished but were bound to come in useful one day.

Dividing Watt's life into successive chunks of around fifteen years, Russell tracks his burgeoning career. At the same time, he introduces us to Matthew Boulton and other important collaborators, provides a historical tourist's guide to key sites of Watt's activities – London, Glasgow, Manchester, Birmingham – and offers fascinating surveys of trades that now seem unrelated but were then underpinned by similar techniques and strategies. Thus for Watt and Boulton the task of mass-producing standardized engines seemed, in advance, identical to that of improving efficiency in manufacturing buttons. Far from being trivial commodities, buttons were important as high-fashion items, and modern steel was deemed so chic that glass was polished as a cheap imitation. The solution to supplying demand was Adam Smith's division of labour: a single button might go through fifty different processes, many of them simple enough for a small child to carry out. But engines proved far more problematic, involving successive refinements and patent disputes before the business was passed on to the next generation, who transformed this eighteenth-century innovation into the prime driver of Victorian industry.

‘Womb-to-tomb’ biographies may not be fashionable among academics, but they can help counterbalance retrospective hagiography and misleading interpretation. As Russell makes clear, innovators inherit from their predecessors rather than foreseeing the direction taken by their successors. Chapter headings such as ‘Inventive, creative genius’ reveal where Russell's sympathies lie, but he insists that Watt should not be classed among the thermodynamicists who followed him, because for him a steam engine was a piece of chemical apparatus, not a machine that performs work. Stressing the importance of antiquity, he illustrates how classical influences are apparent in the design of Josiah Wedgwood's medallions, Boulton's silverware and the Palladian architecture of Soho House. More surprisingly, Russell assesses the impact of the old on steam engines. As increasing attention was paid to their aesthetic appearance, these icons of modernity might incorporate Greek columns with ornate capitals, be styled to follow the Gothic revival, or be decorated with Egyptian motifs.

As Russell describes in his final chapter, ‘Life after death’, Watt helped to ensure that he would be remembered as a lone heroic inventor, the engineering equivalent of Britain's scientific genius, Isaac Newton. But even iconic figureheads are not always perfect: the neophyte Newton mistakenly trained his telescope on Venus instead of a comet, and Watt produced a dud dividing plate with only 359 marks (instead of 360) on its circumference. According to nineteenth-century mythology, the steam engine was born when a kettle boiled, but the real-life Watt sometimes despaired of ever making it work satisfactorily. ‘Of all things in life, there is nothing more foolish than inventing’, he wrote to his impatient partner John Roebuck, who accused him of ‘letting the most active part of your life insensibly glide away’ (p. 89).

Celebrated for his industrial inventions, Watt himself now belongs to Britain's heritage industry. Russell has provided a refreshingly original insight into the life and activities not only of this national hero, but also of his many less famous colleagues who together transformed traditional craftsmanship into industrial innovation.