The Business Structure of Manchester in 1815

For those who witnessed the economic changes of the Industrial Revolution, Manchester was recognised as the capital of a new system of production 2 ‘and the international emporium for cotton goods’. 3 As Frederick Engels observed, ‘in Manchester English manufacture finds at once its starting point and its centre’. 4 Yet Manchester’s reputation, as the capital of the Industrial Revolution, has not gone unchallenged. Michael Fores has recently claimed that ‘The particular story of cotton manufacture, Manchester commerce, technological change and fairly dramatic events in one … county, Lancashire, has been generalised out of all sensible proportion’. 5 Perhaps Manchester’s contribution to the process of industrialisation has been exaggerated but before we can accept hypotheses which seek to dismiss its virility as a centre promoting change, we require a greater understanding of the structure and working of the town’s economy. In other words, Manchester cannot be easily disentangled from that process of rapid economic change based upon the factory and the machine. It was a recipient of Ashton’s ‘wave of gadgets which swept over England’, 6 though, as Donald McCloskey points out, ‘these gadgets came more like a gentle, though unprecedented rain, gathering here and there in puddles’. 7 Undoubtedly Manchester represents the largest and deepest puddle, at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, but how large and how deep?