The 'Mechanically Literate Entrepreneur' Reconsidered: Subscription Libraries and the Industrial Revolution

Utilising a library history approach to economic and social phenomena, this project addresses a central debate in the historiography of the industrial revolution in Britain: whether innovation occurred as a result of regulatory action by the state (Ashworth) or through individuals' creative response to new ideas associated with the Enlightenment (Mokyr). It probes Jacob's assertion that industrialisation was led by the 'mechanically literate entrepreneur' who was well versed in the latest scientific knowledge (2007, p.207), assessing the extent to which voluntary membership libraries fostered scientific culture through the provision of books and informed conversation. It also asks how far libraries helped readers across the social scale negotiate for themselves the varying impacts of rapid industrialisation on living conditions, gender and politics.
The project has a further focus on the industrial experience in Liverpool. While Haggerty uses visual analytics to assess the role of cultural institutions (including the Liverpool Library, an earlier subscription library founded in 1758) in facilitating mercantile networks, the city's industries and industrialists have been very little researched. The project aims to establish the identity, social networks and intellectual interests of Liverpool's manufacturers while extending earlier work on the city's scientific culture which focused primarily on philosophical and scientific societies (Kitteringham).
The project utilises source material held in the Athenaeum (Liverpool), such as minute books, membership records, accounts, catalogues and a unique collection of contemporary pamphlets. This material will be used to recover the extent to which the Athenaeum served to promote industrial innovation, both through the provision of books on natural philosophy, mathematics, mechanics and chemistry, and through the business networking that membership helped to facilitate. Detailed consideration of the Athenaeum's books and members will be extended both socially (by considering working-class venues for reading and intellectual exchange in Liverpool alongside the elite perspective offered by the Athenaeum) and geographically (by comparing Liverpool's sea-based economy to mill towns such as Manchester, Halifax and Bolton, and/or to early manufacturing hubs in the newly independent United States).
The project expands on data and digital methods developed by the AHRC-funded Eighteenth-Century Libraries Online (E-CLO; www.c18librariesonline.org), including a focus on membership records, pamphlets and books and marginalia.