大象传媒

Historian Helen Castor explores the role of the Midlands in the story of England.

Many people think of the Industrial Revolution as a Northern phenomenon - but historian Helen Castor argues it was actually dreamt up and devised in the English Midlands. If Britain left the 18th century the world鈥檚 foremost industrial power, it was almost entirely thanks to Midlanders.

Helen tells the story of the Lunar Society - a group of Midland entrepreneurs, enthusiasts and inventors who met up at a location in or near Birmingham once a month, on the Monday nearest the full moon. There they discussed ideas that would revolutionise societies across the world, from Boulton and Watt鈥檚 steam engine to Erasmus Darwin鈥檚 early intuitions of evolutionary theory, which he wrote up in rhyming couplets.

The Lunar Society counted among its members many of the most innovative thinkers of a particularly innovative age - major figures of the wider Enlightenment whose individual contributions were at least as significant as those of Voltaire in France, Goethe in Germany, and Benjamin Franklin in the United States.

Distance from saltwater is a defining feature of the landlocked Midlands, but if the entrepreneurs of the Lunar Society lacked a natural waterway to carry their wares to market, they didn鈥檛 despair about their natural disadvantages.

Instead they set about creating an artificial sea. Josiah Wedgwood got Parliament to approve a new canal from the East Midlands to Liverpool.

Without the new canal network, Birmingham could never have emerged as the leader of the Industrial Revolution.

Producers: Robert Shore and Ashley Byrne.

A Made in Manchester production for 大象传媒 Radio 4, first broadcast in May 2016.

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