


East India Co's sales

East India porcelain

Queen's Royal Cookery

Cabinet of curiosities

Sugar in Britain

Bartholomew Fair

Gulliver's Travels

Executions at Tyburn

Textile production

Cities in chaos

East India textiles

The Harlot’s Progress

Handel's Messiah

Advert for a giant

Surgery

Muffin Seller

JS Bach manuscript

The Art of Cookery

Henry Fielding: Crime

Gin addiction

Ranelagh pleasure gardens

Johnson's Dictionary

'The British Giant'

Jigsaw Puzzle Map

The Spinning Jenny

Pleasure gardens

Factories

London prostitutes

Captain Cook's journal

Declaration of Independence

Map of the Gordon Riots

Storming of the Bastille

Runaway slaves

First curry powder advert

First hot air balloon

Abolitionist meeting notes

Georgian entertainments

Georgian Theatre

Mozart’s notebook

Poverty

Thomas Paine's Rights of Man

Mary Wollstonecraft

Execution of Louis XVI

William Blake's Notebook

An acrobat's 'Surprising Performances'
British industries in the early 1700s were generally small scale and unsophisticated. Most textile production, for example, was centred on small workshops or in the homes of spinners, weavers and dyers: literally a ‘cottage industry’ that involved thousands of individual manufacturers. Such small-scale production was also a feature of most other industries, with different regions specializing in different products: metal production in the Midlands, for example, and coal mining in the North-East. This image shows workers preparing flax in a cottage industry. Later in the century, the emergence of the new industrial technologies, such as James Hargreaves’ ‘spinning jenny’, would revolutionise the way that items such as textiles were produced.