Thread by @shrikanth_krish

Manchester, the venue of today's game, can be regarded as the birthplace of modernity in one sense

The birthplace of the Industrial Revolution

Today its pop is barely 3 MM - a medium sized town

But in the year 1900, Manchester at 1.4MM was the 9th largest city in the world!

In 1764, the "Spinning Jenny" was invented in Lancashire, and revolutionized the production of cloth

Here's an image of some of the early cotton mills set up in Manchester (this is from 1820)

Seems unremarkable - but these must have seemed like imposing structures 200 yrs ago

One reason for Manchester's rise was that it was v well connected with Liverpool, a port, through a manmade navigation course - "Mersey and Irwell Navigation" in mid 18th cen, enabling import of raw cotton on a large scale

The world's first steam-powered passenger railway was set up in the vicinity of Manchester in 1830

The Liverpool and Manchester Passenger Railway

An illustration of this historic train

Many great personages of the era hailed from Manchester. Including the English chemist and formulator of modern atomic theory John Dalton, a native of Manchester

The British Prime Minister of the 1830s-40s, Sir Robert Peel, hailed from Lancashire, from a town close to Manchester

Manchester saw one of the early demonstrations of radicalism in the modern era - the great Peterloo Massacre in 1819, when a large gathering campaigned for parliamentary reform

Eventually these pressures led to the reform act of 1832

Back in the early 19th century, Manchester was the trend-setter both within UK and for the world at large

"What Manchester does today," it was said, "the rest of the world does tomorrow"

Benjamin Disraeli, the British PM of 1860s-70s, was a young novelist in the 1830s.

In one of his novels "Coningsby" (1844), a character said -

"The age of ruins is past ... Have you seen Manchester? Manchester is as great a human exploit as Athens ..."

That makes me wonder - which city is the Manchester of today? The city that portends the future of the world?

Seattle? San Francisco?

But they have been around for a while.

Not a new economic geography that has emerged in the past decade