Sometimes I wish I could time-travel back to the nineteenth century with some of my favourite urban historians. Imagine walking up Kirkgate in Leeds in 1830 with Bob Morris, doffing our caps to wool staplers, clothworkers and grocers, or entering the Old Nichol in 1887 with Sarah Wise, smiling at children playing in the streets and stopping for a quick word with a weary mother on her way back from rag sorting. The people we encounter might well be quite surprised at what my historian companions know about their lives, but just imagine how much we could all learn from these interactions! After reading Family and Business during the Industrial Revolution, I am rather fancying a walk down Market Street in Manchester in 1821 in the company of Hannah Barker. She could introduce me to the occupants of different premises along this busy thoroughfare (wonderfully captured in John Ralston's Views of the Ancient Buildings in Manchester, and reproduced on p. 2 of the book), like cheesemonger and provision dealer Charles Pollitt, or John Hemingway the silversmith and watchmaker; we could cross the road and drop in at Catherine Crossley's toy warehouse and then rest up with a drink in the Red Lion public house. There, she would likely have stories to tell me about the individuals we have just met – tales of economic aspiration or misfortune; who their family and kin are; the fallings out with business partners and greedy siblings; but perhaps also the strong familial bonds of affection that provide them with domestic and emotional stability in a turbulent economic world.

Family and Business during the Industrial Revolution is a thoroughly researched book that takes its reader deep into the complex economic and social lives of small traders and manufacturers in the fast-growing Lancashire towns of Liverpool and Manchester in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. We get to know several of these traders and manufacturers well, peering into their everyday world in order to appreciate the way that family and business were inextricably interwoven. At one level, the book is a significant contribution to the history of the early industrial revolution, focused on two of its most important urban heartlands. However, this is not the kind of economic history that pans out into the abstraction of econometric analysis; in putting family at the centre of her argument, Barker refuses to prise the economic from the social. Nor does she try to smooth out the complicated, contradictory and emotionally fraught contexts within which individuals and families sought to make a living. On the contrary – this is one of her core areas of interest. The book thus delineates a form of family capitalism that is different to that which we encounter in many accounts of the industrial revolution. Barker's is not a story of laissez-faire individualism, large-scale industrialization and the rampant search for profit, even if some of these characteristics can be detected in the later development of the north-west as a centre of industry. Instead, it is an empathetic assessment of how individuals and families engaged with the emerging economic possibilities of a rapidly developing region, seizing market opportunities and weighing up risks, but always in the context of their social priorities and strategies.

Although Barker's evidence base is wide-ranging and includes letters, diaries, commercial directors, street plans, drawings and paintings, much of the book is founded on the analysis of legal records and accounts of court proceedings, especially those relating to the transmission or management of wealth and assets. From the wills and other records of intergenerational property transmission among small tradespeople, chapter 1 interrogates the composition of family wealth and strategies of investment, finding that most people's fortunes were bound up with small-scale enterprise, urban real estate and the local cash economy, although in Liverpool some put their money into the riskier world of shipping. A desire to maintain control over family wealth and avoid too much risk is evident from the analysis of inheritance practices that follows in the next chapter. Wealth was kept in the family, passing to spouses and children where they existed, or other close consanguineal relations where they did not. Trusts and equity courts were used both to protect family wealth from financially incompetent or grasping interlopers and to offer some flexibility in how assets could be maintained and managed. The central chapters of the book illustrate that there was much that was strategic about the way that middling families managed their business and other assets. On the one hand, and as historians like Amy Erickson have also argued, tradespeople were surprisingly astute when it came to using legal instruments and referring matters to the courts to settle disputes and enforce contracts. On the other hand, Barker also helpfully reminds us that formal instructions laid out in some legal documents – notably wills and testaments – were frequently circumvented or even simply ignored in everyday practice. This is an important insight for those of us who put such records at the centre of our analyses of family practice.

While some parts of the book present conflict and litigiousness as core features of the north-west's family-oriented urban enterprise culture, chapter 4 emphasizes the importance of co-operation and family loyalty. It examines how emotions structured family relationships and in turn business practices. Duty and obligation, love and affection were central motives in conducting enterprise, often displacing profit as the primary goal of business, as Barker's sensitive reading of diaries, memoirs and letters of trading families reveals. In the final two chapters, attention is turned to the spatial and social contexts within which this complex form of family capitalism operated, tracing the interdependency of home and work. The spatial organization of households, shops and workshops – often within a single building – underlines the interweaving of family and business life and the hierarchies and ties that existed among family and members of the wider household. A valuable insight here is the significance generational (as well as gender) differences in shaping household hierarchies and in influencing the degree to which things ran smoothly for both family and firm.

Engagingly written and astutely aware of the contribution it is aiming to make, this is an important book that urban historians will find especially stimulating. It describes a particular kind of family-centred capitalism that has important consequences for understanding how towns and cities developed – it sets an agenda for studying the ‘urbanization of family capital’, to adapt David Harvey's formulation, that could be applied in other contexts. But it is also a volume that will make a significant impact in the fields of economic and social history. Alongside the work of other scholars, such as business historian Andrew Popp, it demonstrates the potential value of bringing history of emotions perspectives to understanding urban economic processes, rescuing us from the theoretical and methodological abstraction of some kinds of economic history. Finally, for social historians, Barker's book also encourages a way of thinking about the categories and contexts of urban social identity – class, gender, generation, neighbourhood, workshop and home – along less discrete and more intersectional lines, enabling us to grapple with the messiness and uncertainty of running a business in the early industrial revolution.