Philip Riden has been awarded £2360 under the British Academy's Small Research Grants scheme to fund work over the next two years on this aspect of the early modern regional economy. He will be looking at how improvements in all modes of transport before and during the early stages of the Industrial Revolution helped all branches of the economy. The former will include coastal shipping (through Gainsborough and Hull) as well as river navigations, canals and turnpike roads, and the latter will include agriculture as well as manufacturing industry. The study will also consider industries whose products or raw materials passed through the region but did not originate there, for example the potteries of north Staffordshire.
His aim is to test textbook assumptions about the 'Transport Revolution', notably the extent to which carrying costs were lowered, against empirical evidence from a particular region, and to try to gauge the importance of the transport sector as an employer, consumer of capital and generator of income, using as much quantitative detail as possible. In terms of methodology, he hopes to demonstrate how a large body of descriptive detail that has long been available relating to both transport and industry in the East Midlands can be used to create a more sophisticated model of the role of transport in the Industrial Revolution in the region, an approach that may be transferable to other parts of the country.
Posted on Monday 26th March 2012