The industrial revolution marks the genesis of modern economic growth; the transition from a universal regime of Malthusian constraint to an era of rapid economic expansion. Despite its importance, however, the causes of the industrial revolution remain poorly understood. By radically expanding the evidential base between 1700 and 1852, this thesis provides a fundamental reassessment of the contribution of patenting to British industrialisation. The fu·st half of the thesis analyses the institutional aspects of patenting. The first research chapter examines the administration of the patent system. In 1700, it was difficult for an inventor to navigate the protracted, expensive and politicised petition procedure necessary to obtain a patent. However, with developments in the legal construction of the patent, and the appearance of patent agents in the 1770s, patent protection became significantly easier to obtain. The second research chapter shows that patents were well protected in law and readily enforceable through injunctions. The first half of the thesis reaches a favourable assessment of the institutional efficacy of the patent system. This makes it plausible to argue that the patent system actively encouraged inventive activity during the industrial revolution. This possibility is explored in the last three chapters. The third research chapter argues that by obliging inventors to eschew secret working and set down written descriptions of their inventions, patents facilitated the codification and diffusion of industrial technology. The foUith research chapter demonstrates that inventors and manufacturers could obtain large returns from working patented inventions. Howeverh arguing that the returns appropriable with a patent encouraged the development of technology assumes that patentees were responsive to economic/commercial stimuli. This hypothesis is supported with a comparative analysis of the English, Scottish and Irish patent indices in the final chapter. The second half of the thesis concludes that the patent system was an important contributory factor to technological development during British industrialisation.