The making of steam power technology : a study of technical change during the British industrial revolution

Writing in 1845 Friedrich Engels (and with him many other informed contemporaries) had few hesitations in pointing out the driving forces of the epochal transformation he was witnessing:The history of the proletariat in England begins with the second half of the last century, with the invention of the steam engine and the machinery for working cotton. These inventions gave rise, as is well known to an industrial revolution, a revolution which altered the whole civil society; one, the historical importance of which is only now beginning to be recognized.