London by 1800 was the greatest city in the world and at the center of the world's greatest empire. This book demonstrates that London was also at the heart of the Industrial Revolution--a major engine of Britain's world-wide economic domination. Traditional historiography has regarded London as a minor player in the Industrial Revolution--"a storm that passed over London and broke elsewhere"--but this book, together with other more recent studies, argued that London, in addition to providing financial and other essential service skills, was at the forefront of industrial development. The book builds on and refines earlier works and shows how London became the hub of the Industrial revolution as a result of a huge and diverse range of manufactures and its drawing together a number of other vital factors making for dynamic growth: these included stimulating dynamism of smaller firms with rapid response to a changing market conditions, as well as the growth of larger enterprises. This study is unique in being based on hard data based, for example, on contemporary insurance records and trade directories, and it provides a rich mine of information for research as well as giving a vivid picture of London during the period of rapid and unprecedented development as the world's first great modern industrial city at the center of a national industrial economy.