A New Age of Self Reliance?

geograph.org

Revolutions

Out of my office at home I am lucky to be able to look down the hill to the River Derwent. Four miles downstream is the first powered factory in the World, open in 1719 based on technology “borrowed” from an Italian. Fifteen miles upstream is Arkwright’s Mill, one of the main driving forces as the first Industrial Revolution got underway in 1769, fifty years later and peaked fifty years after that in 1820.

It’s been said that we don’t really know there’s been a revolution until after it’s happened, and I’m sure that if we’d been part of one of the six generations born during the one hundred and fifty years it took for the industrial revolution to go from first embers to full realisation, that may have been the case, as we only experienced a part of the whole, and our part of represented our “normal.

During that 150 year transition, we experienced the “cottage industry” as the potential for large scale manufacture met agrarian infrastructure. Bits of manufacture we…