Chemical Glasgow and Its Chemical Entrepreneurs, 1760–1860
MAX-PLANCK-INSTITUT FÜR WISSENSCHAFTSGESCHICHTE Max Planck Institute for the History of Science 2015 PREPRINT 472 John R. R. Christie Chemistry through the ‘Two Revolutions’: Chemical Glasgow and its Chemical Entrepreneurs, 1760–1860 Chemistry through the ‘Two Revolutions’: Chemical Glasgow and its Chemical Entrepreneurs, 1760-1860* John R. R. Christie University of Oxford Introduction The principal focus of this essay, the town of Glasgow and the chemical works of St. Rollox, is local, but has a general resonance, for St. Rollox has at times been regarded as a paradigmatic case of industrialized chemical production within the encompassing orbit of the Industrial Revolution. Here, inarguably it seems, are to be found the kinds of research-based, knowledge-induced technical innovation, entrepreneurship, growth rates, scale transformations, employment and wage patterns, which allow assimilation to some or other historiographical normativity of industrialization, at least in British terms. One may note in passing here, that although St. Rollox’ development is known well enough in outline, and with some quantified information, this is not known directly from archives of company records, or from any detailed history of the company, for few such records, if they still exist, are currently available to the historian.1 Information is derived rather from sources such as the New Statistical Account of Scotland, and other contemporary observers.2 Some informal local or parish histories, and biographical and family- history treatments of the two principal figures of the early history of St. Rollox, Charles Tennant and Charles Macintosh are also useful. The most recent and conceptually sophisticated, albeit relatively brief treatment of St.
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