Around 1760, something happened in Britain that had never happened before in all of human history: for the first time, a society began to grow richer and more populous at the same time, and it did not stop.

Before that moment, most of the world's cotton cloth came from India and China, stitched together by hand in villages and workshops. In Lancashire, it took four or eight spinners working flat out to keep a single handloom weaver busy. The bottleneck seemed unbreakable.

Then, within a generation, the bottleneck shattered. James Hargreaves invented the spinning jenny in 1764. Richard Arkwright patented the water frame in 1769 and put it to work at Cromford, Derbyshire, where water drove the spindles instead of human hands. Samuel Crompton's spinning mule followed, producing thread finer than any hand spinner could match. Cotton consumption in Britain leapt from fifty-two million pounds in 1800 to nearly six hundred million pounds by 1850.

The engine underneath all of it was steam. Thomas Newcomen had built a working piston engine before 1712, good enough to pump water from flooded mines. It was James Watt, backed by his Birmingham partner Matthew Boulton, who turned that pumping machine into something that could drive a factory. By 1800, Boulton and Watt had built nearly five hundred engines. Steam output across Britain grew from around ten thousand horsepower in 1800 to more than two hundred thousand within fifteen years.

Iron fed the machines, and coal fed the iron. Abraham Darby had shown as early as 1709 that coke could replace charcoal in a blast furnace. His grandson Abraham Darby the Third cast the beams for the world's first iron bridge in 1778. Henry Cort's puddling process, developed in the 1780s, made structural iron cheap enough to build with at scale. Britain, which had imported Swedish bar iron by the shipload, became a net exporter within a decade.

The railways arrived as the final transformation. The Stockton and Darlington Railway opened in 1825. Then, on the fifteenth of September 1830, the Liverpool and Manchester Railway carried its first passengers: the world's first inter-city line, linking a cotton city to its port, at speeds no horse could match.

The human cost was rarely hidden. Friedrich Engels walked the backstreets of Manchester in 1844 and found families in unenclosed shacks with dirt floors and no sanitation. Two-thirds of workers in cotton mills were women and children. The Tolpuddle Martyrs, six Dorset labourers who formed a union to resist wage cuts, were transported to Australia in 1834. The Luddites smashed machinery from 1811 onward, and the government sent the army to stop them.

What the revolution produced, in the end, was a split world. Manufacturing shifted from Asia to Western Europe and North America. India's hand-weaving industry, which had clothed continents, was undersold into ruin. Europe's population quadrupled between 1700 and 1900. And the question that had governed every human society since the first harvest, the question of whether there would be enough, began, slowly and unevenly, to have a different answer.