Samuel Greg (1758-1834) was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland. In 1766 he went to Manchester to live with an uncle. By 1782 Samuel had taken over his uncle's textile firm. He married Hannah Lightbody in 1789 and in 1796 they moved to the location of his mill in Styal, Cheshire. Descendants lived in Styal, Manchester and elsewhere in England. Includes history of the family's textile business.

This book explores the ways in which the lives and routines of a wide range of people across different parts of Europe and the wider world were structured and played out through everyday practices. It focuses on the detail of individual lives and how these were shaped by spaces and places, by movement and material culture – both the buildings they occupied and the objects they used in their everyday lives. Drawing on original research by a range of established and emerging scholars, each chapter peers into the lives of people from various social groups as they went about their daily lives, from citizens on the streets to aristocrats at home in their country houses, and from the urban elite at leisure to seamen on board ships bound for the East Indies. For all these people, daily routines were important in structuring their lives, giving them a rhythm that was knowable and meaningful in its temporal regularity, be that daily, weekly, or seasonal. So too were their everyday encounters and relationships with other people, within and beyond the home; these shaped their practices, movements, and identities and thus served to mould society in a broader sense.

This book links the world of finance directly to the fate of the cotton and textile industry, long a metaphor for the rise and fall of Britain as a manufacturing economy, for the first time.

Presents a selection of 30 gentle walks which map out ecological improvements, industrial archaeology, tourist attractions and geographical features of the River Mersey. This book is illustrated with photographs and is suitable both for family outings and for enthusiasts of local history and ecology.

A new literary-cultural history of the Industrial Revolution in Britain from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. Working against the stubbornly persistent image of “dark satanic mills,” in many ways so characteristic of literary Romanticism, Jon Mee provides a fresh, revisionary account of the Industrial Revolution as a story of unintended consequences. In Networks of Improvement, Mee reads a wide range of texts—economic, medical, and more conventionally “literary”—with a focus on their circulation through networks and institutions. Mee shows how a project of enlightened liberal reform articulated in Britain’s emerging manufacturing towns led to unexpectedly coercive forms of machine productivity, a pattern that might be seen repeating in the digital technologies of our own time. Instead of treating the Industrial Revolution as Romanticism’s “other,” Mee shows how writing, practices, and institutions emanating from these industrial towns developed a new kind of knowledge economy, one where local literary and philosophical societies served as important transmission hubs for the circulation of knowledge.

How capitalism first promoted fossil fuels with the rise of steam power The more we know about the catastrophic implications of climate change, the more fossil fuels we burn. How did we end up in this mess? In this masterful new history, Andreas Malm claims it all began in Britain with the rise of steam power. But why did manufacturers turn from traditional sources of power, notably water mills, to an engine fired by coal? Contrary to established views, steam offered neither cheaper nor more abundant energy—but rather superior control of subordinate labour. Animated by fossil fuels, capital could concentrate production at the most profitable sites and during the most convenient hours, as it continues to do today. Sweeping from nineteenth-century Manchester to the emissions explosion in China, from the original triumph of coal to the stalled shift to renewables, this study hones in on the burning heart of capital and demonstrates, in unprecedented depth, that turning down the heat will mean a radical overthrow of the current economic order.

Villages of Britain is the history of the countryside, told through five hundred of its most noteworthy settlements. Many of Britain's villages are known for their loveliness, of course, but their role in shaping the nation over the centuries is relatively untold, drowned out by the metropolitan bias of history. A consummate storyteller, Clive Aslet deftly weaves the worlds of agriculture, politics, the arts, industry, folklore, science, ecology, fashion and religion into one irresistible volume. The Bedfordshire works that a century ago manufactured half a billion bricks a year; the Cheshire municipality striving to become the country's first carbon-neutral community; the Derbyshire estate where the cottages represent the gamut of European architecture; the Gloucestershire community founded by Tolstoyans, who still live by anarchic principles; the Leicestershire town where pub walls are embedded with Jurassic-era fossils; the Morayshire settlement where Hogmanay is celebrated eleven days late; the Pembrokeshire fishing hamlet that inspired Dylan Thomas; the Somerset village that was built on the back of the trade in Peruvian bird droppings; the Suffolk village that is rejecting modernity by reconstructing a windmill for grinding flour; the Surrey woodland that fosters Europe's most ancient trees - all these are places that have made a unique contribution to the narrative of this country. Follow Clive Aslet in visiting all five hundred villages, and you will have experienced the history of these islands from a uniquely rural perspective.

Britain and America were the first two countries with mechanised cotton manufacturing industries, the first major factory systems of production and the first major employers of women outside of the domestic environment. The combination of being new wage earners in the first trans-national industry and their public prominence as workers makes these women's role as employees significant; they set the early standard for women as waged labour, to which later female workers were compared. This book analyses how women workers influenced patterns of industrial organization and offers a new perspective on relationships between gender and work and on industrial development. The primary theme of the study is the attempt to control the work process through co-operation, coercion and conflict between women workers, their male counterparts and manufacturers. Drawing upon examples of women's subversive activities and attitudes toward the discourses of labour, the book emphasizes the variety of women's work experiences. By using this diversity of experience in a comparative way, the book reaches conclusions that challenge a variety of historical concepts, including separate spheres of influence for men and women and related economic theories, for example that women were passive players in the workplace, evolutionary theories with respect to industrial development, and business culture within and between the two industries. Overall it provides the fresh approach that highlights and explains women's agency as operatives and paid workers during industrialization.

The pamphlets, newspaper articles and tracts in this collection provide source material for the study of the Anti-Corn Law campaigns of the 1830s and 1840s and their role in the formation of popular economics in Britain. Volume 5 covers entries from 1839 to 1842.