Class Formation and Urban Industrial Society: Bradford, 1750–1850

In 1750 Bradford was a small market town of about 4000 inhabitants in the Yorkshire, West Riding. By 1850 it had become a major industrial city of 100,000, the international centre of the worsted production and trade. Behind this massive expansion of population there occurred a fundamental transformation of society. This book examines the process by which a capitalist society emerged in Bradford. Although Bradford represents an unusual social environment where industrial development began very early and proceeded very fast, its history discloses with unusual force and clarity a process that was more gradually transforming the wider society of nineteenth-century Britain and that subsequently spread throughout the world. By explaining the process of class formation in industrialising Bradford, this book seeks to shed some historical light on the character, contradictions and ultimate resilience of the competitive liberal social order we still occupy.