Commerce, Industry, and the Laws of Newtonian Science: Weber Revisited and Revised

The cultural resources that facilitated the move to industrial society in late eighteenth-century Britain remain opaque. In nearly one hundred years we have barely moved beyond the Weber thesis, and among economic historians culture has become a low priority. This essay challenges that narrowness, not by repudiating Weber, but by building upon his legacy. It begins with the problematic: why were so many early British industrialists, Unitarians? They were represented far in excess of their presence in the general population. The attempt to answer the question relies upon archives in Birmingham and Manchester, upon a close reading of letters and sermons by James Watt, Josiah Wedgwood, Joseph Priestley, and chapel oratory in both places. The project was made possible by a grant from the National Science Foundation in Washington, DC, and it builds upon material presented by the author in Scientific Culture and the Making of the Industrial West (Oxford University Press, 1997).