Liberty's Dawn A People's History of the Industrial Revolution

"A totally compelling account of the Industrial Revolution. Through a remarkable range of life stories, Emma Griffin opens up this extraordinary epoch of change, providing a brilliant chronicle of its social history and upending traditional interpretations in the process. With her light touch and rigorous scholarship, Griffin provides an important and rewarding overview of this defining moment in British history.' —Tristram Hunt, author of Building Jerusalem: The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City

"Emma Griffin's brilliant use of the voices of the poor that survive in memoirs allows us to grasp the ambiguities and complexities of their encounter with the momentous changes of the Industrial Revolution as never before. It was not simply a time of hardship and disruption but of opportunity and release from social constraints. Griffin's stylish and accessible account marks a major shift in our understanding of this period that moves beyond economic abstractions: we hear the voices of those who lived through the creation of the world's first industrial society." —Martin Daunton, author of Wealth and Welfare: An Economic and Social History of Britain, 1851–1951

"Emma Griffin gives a new and powerful voice to the men and women whose blood and sweat greased the wheels of the Industrial Revolution." —Tim Hitchcock, author of Down and Out in Eighteenth-Century London

“In this marvelous book, Liberty’s Dawn, Emma Griffin introduces us to or reacquaints us with 350 of the William Aitkens of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Britain—lower-class men and a handful of women who wrote autobiographies, some of them printed, many of them manuscript accounts discovered in repositories across the country.” —Brian Lewis, McGill University