British Isles Oldest Buildings

Trades and industries

How wool, tea, sugar and slavery, cotton, linen, coal, iron, fishing, drink and banking shaped the isles: for each trade, a timeline of its laws, events and inventions, its places and buildings on the map, the people linked to them, graphs from Change over time, and notes on what historians make of it, every claim quoted from a linked source. Where historians disagree, both sides are given.