William Blake - Noam Chomsky - Tony Benn - Mankind: The Story of All of Us TV - Michael Moore TV - The Genius of Turner: Painting the Industrial Revolution TV - America: The Story of the US TV - Mark Thomas TV - E F Schumacher - Edward Heath - Joseph Ettor - Alexis de Tocqueville - Thomas Carlyle - Ted Castle - Harold Wilson - Fred Dibnah TV - Jeremy Black TV - Andrew Marr TV - Adam Curtis TV - Frank Zappa - Jean de la Bruyere - T S Eliot - Karl Marx - Elmore Leonard - James Garfield - David Katzman - Francis Brett Young - Thomas Jefferson - Eric Schlosser - David Hume - Christopher Lasch - Elon Musk - Remy de Gourmont - Raoul Vaneigem - Gerhard Kocher - Lewis Mumford - John L Lewis - Isaac Barrow - Ben Jonson - Hugh Gaitskell - Patrick Ness - The Men Who Built America TV - George Orwell - The Road to Partition TV - Dominic Sandbrook TV -
I turn my eyes to the Schools and Universities of Europe,
And there behold the Loom of Locke, whose Woof rages dire,
Wash’d by the Water-wheels of Newton: black the cloth
In heavy wreaths folds over every Nation: cruel Works
Of many Wheels I view, wheel without wheel, with cogs tyrannic,
Moving by compulsion each other; not as those in Eden, which,
Wheel within wheel, in freedom revolve, in harmony and peace. William Blake, Selections from ‘Jerusalem’
Industry can only be democratically owned and controlled by the workers electing directly from their own ranks industrial administrative committees. Noam Chomsky, lecture Poetry Center of New York 1970, ‘Government in the Future’
We have come to the end of a chapter in our industrial history. The industrial system to which the Tory Party adheres – at least officially and in its manifestos – has failed us … It is no use blaming working people or the unions if they have to work in ancient factories with obsolete equipment producing old-fashioned goods at uneconomic prices and earning low wages as well. Working people not only are not responsible for the weakness of British manufacturing industry. They have hitherto been denied the tools and tackle that they needed to put it right … We have got to make a fresh start now. We have got to get investment up, and to get it up as soon as we can. If the market economy cannot or will not give us that investment, we must do it direct. Tony Benn, speech House of Commons 17 February 1975
Trade and industry are forging new connections around the world. Mankind: The Story of All of Us I, History 2012
Actually, what Reagan presided over was the wholesale dismantling of our industrial infrastructure. It was done for short-term profits. And to destroy the unions. Michael Moore, Capitalism: A Love Story, 2009
Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway 1844 ... For Turner, industry has become the sublime. The Genius of Turner: Painting the Industrial Revolution, BBC 2013
Manufacturing, technology, infrastructure: it will change the face of America. For the first time in history industry is put behind the war effort. An approach to conflict that America will exploit in the First and Second World Wars. It is the beginning of a new integrated economy that will become the hallmark of the modern United States. America: The Story of the US e5: Civil War, History 2010
[Andrew] Carnegie is the first ever to mass produce steel. In America prices plummet by over 80%. Output rockets from a few thousand tons in 1860 to eleven million by 1900. America: The Story of the US e7: Cities e
There are over three hundred people who die – who are killed – at work each year. 300 people killed at work each year and we haven’t got a proper law to deal with that. And this is a class issue. Because if it was three hundred chief executives or three hundred directors dying in industrial accidents each year ... you can guarantee the law would change like that. Mark Thomas Comedy Product s6e3: Corporate Killing, Channel 4 2002
The most striking thing about modern industry is that it requires so much and accomplishes so little. Modern industry seems to be inefficient to a degree that surpasses one’s ordinary powers of imagination. It’s inefficiency therefore remains unnoticed. E F Schumacher, Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered
It is the unpleasant and unacceptable face of capitalism, but one should not suggest that the whole of British industry consists of practices of this kind. Edward Heath, re Lonrho affair
Our country has been ravaged and stolen by industrial pirates and yet, learned judges have decreed that it was ‘legal’ ... Whatever the king has done, the courtiers have most humbly considered right and the guards and men-at-arms been ready to see that the slaves did not rebel against it all. Joseph Ettor, IWW organizer, Industrial Unionism: The Road to Freedom
It is from the midst of this putrid sewer that the greatest river of human industry springs up and carries fertility to the whole world. From this foul drain pure gold flows forth. Here it is that humanity achieves for itself both perfection and brutalization, that civilization produces its wonders, and that civilized man becomes again almost a savage. Alexis de Tocqueville, Journeys to England & Ireland
Captains of industry. Thomas Carlyle
In Place of Strife. Ted Castle, husband of Barbara Castle, title of government white paper 17 January 1969
The Britain that is going to be forged in the white heat of this revolution will be no place for restrictive practices or for outdated methods on either side of industry. Harold Wilson, speech Labour Party Conference 1963
Fred made industrial history fun. Fred Dibnah’s World of Steam, Steel and Stone e2: Backstreet Mechanic, BBC 2006
In the 150 years from the beginning of the eighteenth century a revolution transformed the way we think, work and play for ever. This was the industrial revolution. And it started here in Britain. Professor Jeremy Black, Why the Industrial Revolution Happened Here, BBC 2013
Roads, railways and canals were built. Great cities appeared, and scores of factories and mills sprang up. Our landscape would never be the same again. ibid.
Coal kick-started a revolution in eighteenth-century Britain. ibid.
A wave of free-thinking and creativity. ibid.
Watt was determined to make the most efficient steam engine yet produced. ibid.
The Perrier brothers didn’t want to just copy the design of the Watt/Boulton steam engine, they wanted to improve on it … They failed. ibid.
Britain was the naval superpower with the largest fleet in the world. ibid.
The Royal Navy played a vital role in expanding the trade of the empire. ibid.
All this wealth was created at a terrible human cost with the exploitation and suffering of millions of slaves. ibid.
Just under two and a half million slaves were transported by the British across the Atlantic. ibid.
New institutions like banks and the stock exchanges were established. ibid.
Josiah Wedgwood – he was brought up in a family of potters in north Staffordshire. ibid.
The canals – the motorways of the eighteenth century. ibid.
Two-thirds of the world’s coal and half its iron. ibid.
By the 1880s voices of concern were raised but not by scientists. The writer, artist and Utopian socialist William Morris was among the leading Victorians to publicly question the benefits of industrialisation. William Morris was enraged by the appalling living and working conditions being forced on the industrial working classes. But he also had grave concerns about our changing relationship with Nature. Andrew Marr, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, BBC 2009
We’ve managed a shift from heavy industries to exporting services, ideas and creativity … There was also an entire array of new Elizabethans who found new innovations, adaptations, fresh ways to build and new things to sell. New Elizabethans with Andrew Marr III, BBC 2020
On 30th June 1953, less than a month after her coronation, Queen Elizabeth walked across the tarmac at London airport. The Queen was there to wave her mother and sister off but also to catch a glimpse of a very exciting new British aeroplane. The De Havilland Comet represented the future, the world’s very first commercial jet airliner … But within a year of the royal flight a series of terrible crashes would ground the Comet fleet and devastate Britain’s lead in the jet age. ibid.
In the 1950s Britain was dominated by a small group of men – the captains of industry. They were eminent industrialists and bankers who met together at the court of the Bank of England. Men like these were powerful because of the vast industrial empire they controlled. They worked in partnership with the politicians to shape the future of the nation. What these men did not realise was that within fifteen years their whole world would be destroyed. Their power would be taken away from them and their factories torn down and sold off. And the man who began their destruction was a suburban accountant called Jim Slater. To do it Slater awoke a force that had been dormant since before the war: the Stock Market. And as he grew powerful, Slater became an ally of politicians, but what neither he nor they realised was that the force he had awoken would overwhelm all of them. Adam Curtis, The Mayfair Set II: Entrepreneur Spelt S.P.I.V ***** BBC 1999