The Historian is the magazine of the Historical Association which serves historians, history teachers and enthusiasts throughout the UK.

I feel it as a great privilege that they reviewed and published a review of my latest book How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World.

The review balances positivity with criticism. The writer’s life is a solitary one, and so to receive constructive criticism from a professional historian is of huge value. I shall certainly take it forward in the sequel I am working on now.

I wanted to tell the astonishing story of British manufacturers. The review points to my extensive research and the large number of lesser known names I write about. I see this as success.

The review regrets that I didn’t write more about Britain’s seafaring and trading history, also that I didn’t write about the industry of other nations to justify my assertion that British led the field. These are undeniably important areas. They were the victims of the word count; as it was I had to lose 15,000 words from my initial draft.

Trading history is a big subject and draws in the horrors of slavery. This was outside my scope, however I did reference three books which I found helpful. The Mayflower Generation by Rebecca Fraser which followed the journey of those fleeing religious persecution to the New World, Endeavour in which Peter Moore told the story of a ship which witnessed a remarkable period of seafaring and David Gilmour’s The British in India, which explores the East India company and much more. A fourth book picking up the seafaring theme is by my brother in law Andrew Bond and is called Favourite of Fortune about Captain John Quilliam, Trafalgar Hero.

Slavery is fundamental certainly to the start of the British industrial revolution and is a subject in itself. There was not room to do it anything like justice in the book. There are many books for those wishing to explore further. Slavery and the British Economy is recent and academic. There is also a BBC Bitesize.

I plan to explore the manufacturing of other nations in my British Manufacturing History blog with the same starting point of the Great Exhibition of 1851 about which I make the observation that British engineers ‘may have looked at the British exhibits and perhaps may have felt uncomfortable when they compared them to the sometimes technically superior products of some European countries and the USA’.

Two other criticisms were that I should have done more about linkages. I agree, and again I shall explore these in my blog. The other was the lack of a narrative threading through the book. Certainly for the sequel I shall address this.

It is the story of British manufacturing since 1951. I am calling the book Vehicles to Vaccines, covering the changes over the seven decades from mass production of motor vehicles for the postwar export drive to the current leadership position of our pharmaceutical companies. The subtitle is ‘a quiet revolution in British manufacturing’ and this will be the narrative theme.

I very much hope that readers with find these books of interest.

The full text of the review may be found in the Historian Magazine either in hard copy or online.

An extract on Pen & Sword