China today is following Victorian Britain’s industrial pattern
On a damp Derbyshire day in 1771, Richard Arkwright watched the world’s first water-powered mill begin to turn, setting in motion a force that would remake the world. The tailor’s son from Preston had become one of Britain’s first industrialists, his spinning frames driven by water and his workers by hunger. Within those mill walls, as Edmond Smith argues in Ruthless, the modern economy took its first breath. Yet the real invention was not mechanical but social. Arkwright had helped pioneer the system that would propel Britain into the lead in the first Industrial Revolution – web of investors, miners, shippers and merchants, bound by credit, trust and the push
