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Reviews
| The Industrial Revolution in Shropshire. By Barrie Trinder. Chichester, West Sussex, UK: Phillimore & Co., 3rd edition, 2000. xiii+286 pp., illus., maps, diags., appens., notes, bibl., index. £25 hb (ISBN 1-86077-133-5).
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In the world of academic textbook publishing, new editions are to be feared. New editions of academic monographs, on the other hand, are often a reason for excitement. Such is the case with Barrie Trinder's new edition on the birthplace of the industrial revolution. Nearly two decades since the second edition (1981) and almost three since the first (1973), this new edition covers similar ground and yet pays more attention to where academic discourse on industrialism has moved in the last 30 years. It is also much more compact and yet broader than the first edition (the second edition was not available for comparison in this review): it has been reorganized into 10 rather than 21 chapters, made a slightly larger format book (a solid 7–1/2 × 10 inch quarto), and augmented with more than 100 black and white photographs of the region. Most libraries seem not to have bought the second edition (WorldCat lists 167 owning the first edition and a mere 32 with the second, of which only 6 are in all of North America), so now, more than three decades on, it would be well worth the investment to get this new edition for libraries and individuals alike.
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While trained as an industrial archaeologist, Trinder largely stays away from the technologically determinist, artifact-heavy explanations of the industrial revolution and its birth in the Ironbridge valley of Shropshire. Instead, he integrates those artifacts into the social networks, industrial organization, business and economic history, and even religious and recreational activities of life at the time. Certainly there are artifacts present in the story (although readers who like that approach may be better served by Trinder's, The Industrial Archaeology of Shropshire [Phillimore, 1996]), but this is not a typical story of the heroic men (Darby, Watt, Wilkinson) who tamed the natural raw materials (iron and coal/coke) to create the modern world. Rather, Trinder is at pains to point out that "the key to the Industrial Revolution was to be found not in the dynamics of technological creativity, but also in the structure of industrial communities" (p. xvii, quoting Maxine Berg). It was work and people, not machines, that made the modern world. Hence, almost entirely absent here are discussions of Georgian banking reforms and national trade policies emanating from London as well as machine diagrams (some still appear; you just can't get rid of them in this field). Instead, one will read about worker housing, industrial diversification, and the confluence and conflict among religions, classes, laws, and authorities within the larger Severn Valley in Shropshire.
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Trinder explicitly states that he intends to offer a new framework of social and economic factors for analyzing the industrial revolution, rather than to justify or denounce the term "industrial revolution." It is clear that Trinder wrote the book as a response to where the field of industrial and technical history had moved by the 1990s. Still, readers will not find that the story he tells is all that unfamiliar. He emphasizes that the Shropshire coalfield was a region with a multiplicity of resources and industries revolutionized by the growth of iron from the later 17th century. In dealing with the growth of industrial partnerships and the transportation infrastructures (canals and plate railways) in the Ironbridge region, Trinder offers some comparisons with other regions' experiences and the general 19th-century industrial expansion, but when readers get to the obligatory chapter on the iron bridge itself, little new, it seems, is offered.
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In his concluding sections on living and working in the area, Trinder has taken up the penchant in industrial landscape studies to focus on worker houses at length, and on the date heavy and genealogically dominant stories of the workers and non-elites that this reviewer finds data rich but data laden at the same time. The last chapter, combining both religion and recreation, seems a bit forced, with connections suggested but not fully shown; the recreation section, in particular, seemed like seven pages tacked on to an otherwise narrowly focused chapter on John Fletcher and Methodism. On the other hand, Trinder's mixture of very detailed investigation of artifacts combined with broad-brush survey generalizations that keep the general reader comfortable with where he is going does make for engaging reading. The effective integration of both technological history and to a lesser degree economic history, without either becoming intrusive, may again reflect personal taste but will nonetheless reward readers who may have hitherto only learned of the "genius" of "great men" such as Darby and Watt.
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4
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In consequence, this book is rather intensely local in its focus. If one has had the chance to visit the Ironbridge region, this work will make much more sense. Even if not, the rich heritage of the region in artifacts, landscapes, and documentary evidence allows Trinder to reconstruct the working milieu of the region in the 18th and early-19th centuries. In particular, if one has taken the guided tours of the furnaces, potteries, tile works, and workers' village, this book will explain in much more depth all those things academics would want to know about the sites. How did the financial dealings and interests in the valley come together to exploit the resources in just that area? What factions were active in social change and debate in the valley and its hinterland? Even though the conclusion tries to engage with the protoindustrialization debate and the currently trendy Atlantic world frameworks, the book remains a study of one region at one period in time.
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| Admittedly, this edition has a few shortcomings. While a number of maps are included, they are very skeletal and, if the reader is not intimately familiar with Shropshire already, largely ineffectual in terms of orienting the reader to the region. Photos, too, are often reproduced rather small or at much too high a contrast. This seems odd, since most are credited to the Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust, an organization that should have a stronger interest in more appealing images to encourage visitation. It seems like Phillimore was pushing towards a more illustrated version under the pressures of an ever-tighter publishing industry but only got halfway to the coffee-table book one might expect was wanted (the notes are quite copious, which one would not expect from a more heavily illustrated volume). The style is readable and the citations are excellent, even if typos of the word-processor age ("the the" or grammatically legitimate but incomplete sentences) are not too rare. A very complete index leads readers directly into the sections they seek, and the sewn binding and paper make for a very durable book. Shortcomings aside, a new generation will be very pleased to delve into this work on the social history of the quintessential region of the original industrial revolution. |
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