📚 The Industrial Revolution

Steam, coal and the factory: how production moved from hand to machine, and how the speed of change remade work, cities and class.

Below are the 30 works carrying the subject industrial revolution in the Open Library catalogue with the most editions in print. Author and first year are as the record states them; a missing year means the record does not carry one, not that the book is undated. Novels set in the subject are left out, because a list of historical fiction is not a list of history. Where one author dominates the reprint counts, no more than two of their titles appear.

Cover	Title	Author	First published	Editions
	The economy of machinery and manufactures	Charles Babbage	1832	66
	The Age of Revolution	Eric Hobsbawm	1962	66
	Imperial Germany and the industrial revolution	Thorstein Veblen	1915	47
	Idée générale de la révolution au XIXe siècle	P.-J. Proudhon	1851	24
	Industry and empire	Eric Hobsbawm	1968	20
	Why Nations Fail	Daron Acemoglu	2012	15
	The Origins of the Modern World	Robert B. Marks	2006	13
	The industrial revolution	Arnold Toynbee	1884	10
	The industrial revolution, 1760-1830	T. S. Ashton	1948	9
	Industrial archaeology	Kenneth Hudson	1963	9
	Living through the industrial revolution	Stella Davies	1966	8
	Industrial Revolution	Charles Austin Beard	1969	8
	The industrial revolution, 1750-1850	H. L. Beales	1928	7
	The causes of the Industrial Revolution in England	R. M. Hartwell	1967	7
	Hard at Work in Factories and Mines	Carolyn Tuttle	1999	7
	Gender, work and wages in industrial revolution Britain	Joyce Burnette	2008	7
	The industrial revolution	Charles Austin Beard	1901	6
	The first industrial revolution	Phyllis Deane	1965	6
	The genesis of modern management	Sidney Pollard	1965	6
	Growth of the International Economy, 1820-2015	Michael Graff	2013	6
	The wealth of humans	Ryan Avent	2016	6
	Cambridge Economic History of the Modern World	Stephen Broadberry	2021	6
	Witness to History	Sean Connolly	2003	5
	A Global History of the British Industrial Revolution	Robert Allen	2008	5
	Nation, State and the Industrial Revolution	Lars Magnusson	2009	5
	Ireland and the Industrial Revolution	Andy Bielenberg	2009	5
	A short history of the British Industrial Revolution	Emma Griffin	2010	5
	Industry 4.0	Elena G. Popkova	2018	5
	The industrial revolution in Britain	Philip A. M. Taylor	1958	4
	The handloom weavers	Duncan Bythell	1969	4

List built from Open Library (CC0 metadata) · retrieved 03 Nov 2026 UTC · capped at 30 works per subject.

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