Prefer to listen? To hear this entire conversation, and more episodes in the weeks ahead, follow Ones and Tooze wherever you get your podcasts.

Andy Burnham took office as Britain’s prime minister this week promising to apply the economic program he calls Manchesterism, which he developed in its namesake city while serving as mayor for the past nine years. But Manchesterism is a term with a long history—one that in many ways represents the opposite of what Burnham claims for it today.

What exactly was the original 19th-century Manchester school of economics? How did the city of Manchester develop over the 20th century? And how has Burnham given Manchesterism new meaning today?

Andy Burnham took office as Britain’s prime minister this week promising to apply the economic program he calls Manchesterism, which he developed in its namesake city while serving as mayor for the past nine years. But Manchesterism is a term with a long history—one that in many ways represents the opposite of what Burnham claims for it today.

What exactly was the original 19th-century Manchester school of economics? How did the city of Manchester develop over the 20th century? And how has Burnham given Manchesterism new meaning today?

Those are just a few of the questions that came up in my recent conversation with FP economics columnist Adam Tooze on the podcast we co-host, Ones and Tooze. What follows is an excerpt, edited for length and clarity. For the full conversation, look for Ones and Tooze wherever you get your podcasts. And check out Adam’s Substack newsletter.

Cameron Abadi: What exactly was the original Manchester school of economics, and why did it develop in Manchester in the first place?

Adam Tooze: Manchester in the 19th century was a world historic site. If arguably the secular enlightenment was triggered into its polemics in the 1750s by the earthquake in Lisbon, and the French Revolution has its epicenter in Paris in 1789, Manchester is the preeminent city of the Industrial Revolution, bar none. It’s the cotton city of world. It’s the first genuinely exclusive product of industrial modernization, which we talk about so much on this show and which now in the current generation, of course, is most represented by the cities of East Asia and China, in particular.

So, in 1717, Manchester in the northwest of England has a population of 10,000. By 1773, 25,000. By 1801, 70,000. By 1851, 300,000. This is explosive, economically driven urbanization of the type that we now know as a pattern but was for the first time produced really in Manchester through the import of cotton raw material, which of course doesn’t grow in England, and its spinning into thread in the spinning mills of Manchester—out of which then developed the first modern industrial product, which is widely abundant cotton cloth.

And as such, it really........

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