Price: Free
Industrialization embraced much more than machines and ‘great men’, and every local experience was a unique one. Leeds, with its breadth of industrial activity, offers multiple examples of innovation, which came in many forms. The individuals of significance range from the renowned – Smeaton, Priestley, Murray – to many that you’ve probably never heard of.
But how exactly, we should ask, did those people contribute to industrial development? Indeed, how widespread was innovation? And how were the essential components of technical advancement – that is, knowledge, information and experience – brought together?
Human connection was clearly key, though the very evident divisions of a class-ridden society impeded those associations. Science, for instance, was not accessible to most artisans. Did that actually matter?
Using many local examples – canals, Kirkstall and Seacroft Forges, the Middleton colliery and railway, Holbeck’s early machine-makers – the lecture will share fresh insights from Gill’s forthcoming book on British industrialization, due to be published in early 2025 by Boydell & Brewer.
Dr Gill Cookson graduated in History from the University of Leeds. Inspired by Maurice Beresford’s special subject on Leeds’ industrialization and urbanization, she started a career in historical research on the RCHME Yorkshire Textile Mills survey in the 1980s. She went on to take a DPhil in economic history at York, with a study of early textile-machine making in Yorkshire, from 1770. That topic was revisited and reworked in The Age of Machinery (Boydell, 2018).
After a Leverhulme fellowship on 1850s-60s transatlantic telegraphy, Gill managed the Co. Durham Victoria County History project from 1999, which produced major new histories of Darlington and Sunderland.
She was president of the Yorkshire Archaeological and Historical Society, 2015-19, and co-edits the Yorkshire Archaeological Journal.
