Making Sense of the Industrial Revolution. By Steven King and Geoffrey Timmins. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001. Pp. xiii, 402

This book engaged my attention in a way that few textbooks do, and if I have some critical things to say, these do not detract from my overall view that the book is a carefully considered and well-executed account of its subject. The subtitle accurately describes the book as being about “English Economy and Society, 1700–1850.†It is not, however, a conventional textbook treatment. The idea of the Industrial Revolution as great transformation, and any attempt to specify carefully what was transformed and how, is deliberately downplayed by the authors, who repeatedly refer to the view of contemporaries that “something was happening,†and sometimes seem as uncertain as those contemporaries as to what it was.