Birmingham

city · earth

The counter-example that keeps the story honest. Birmingham industrialised as thoroughly as Manchester and looked nothing like it: not one dominant fibre but hundreds of metal trades — buttons, buckles, guns, jewellery, toys, brass, coinage — carried on in small workshops by masters and journeymen rather than in mills by hands. Its typical unit of production had a handful of workers, its skills took years to learn, and its labour force therefore kept a bargaining position that Lancashire's did not. It also had no medieval corporation and no guild restrictions, which is usually offered as part of the explanation for its openness to newcomers, including the religious dissenters who supplied much of its capital and most of the Lunar Society. Boulton's Soho Manufactory sat on its edge, and Watt's engines were built there. Two industrial revolutions therefore ran side by side about ninety miles apart, one concentrating labour and deskilling it, the other dispersing labour and keeping it skilled.