Britain's Industrial Revolution begins

Around 1750, Britain held a rare combination of ingredients for an economic transformation: abundant coal and iron deposits, a growing colonial empire supplying raw materials like cotton and new overseas markets to sell finished goods, deep pools of capital from trade and banking willing to invest in new ventures, and a stable government that protected property rights and patents so inventors could profit from their ideas. An agricultural revolution helped too -- new techniques like crop rotation and Jethro Tull's seed drill increased food production, and the enclosure movement (fencing off shared farmland into private plots) pushed many rural workers off the land and into cities looking for wage work, right as factories needed exactly that labor.

A wave of inventions then transformed how goods were made. James Hargreaves's spinning jenny and Richard Arkwright's water frame mechanized spinning thread; the power loom mechanized weaving; and James Watt's improved steam engine (patented 1769) provided reliable power that did not depend on rivers or wind. Textile production shifted from the "cottage industry," where families spun and wove cloth by hand at home, to large factories where machines did the work faster and cheaper, supervised by a small number of workers. Steam power then transformed transportation too: George Stephenson's locomotive, the Rocket, helped open the Liverpool and Manchester Railway in 1830, and railroads soon shrank travel times from days to hours, moving raw materials and finished goods -- and eventually people -- at a scale and speed no previous civilization had ever achieved.