IRON.

£375 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

The State of the Trade and Manufactory of Iron in Great-Britain Considered. First edition thus, an abridgement of the 1736 pamphlet The Interest of Great Britain, in Supplying Herself with Iron."This tract is curious from the information which it affords respecting the production of iron at the time, which the author estimates at 18,000 tons. He states the difficulties with which the manufacture had to contend from the scarcity and high price of timber; and yet, not very consistently, complains of the importation of Swedish iron, and still more bitterly of the establishment of iron works in our North American colonies. It is curious that not a word is said in this tract about the employment of pit-coal in the manufacture of iron; though Lord Dudley had taken out a patent for its application in 1619; and the practice of making iron by its means had been carried on to some extent at the works in Colebrook Dale since about 1740, or for ten years previously to the publication of this tract" (McCulloch, p. 238).

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