Population with "modern" attitudes towards work: to create the combination of factory work and urban life required, one needed a population no longer tied to the land and specific places. Without changes in attitudes towards place, one could not find a workforce willing to move from the countrty to the city.
Literacy: Such a revolutionary change in kinds of work also required people who could read and write.
An easily commercializable product needed by -- and affordable by -- many people: Cotton, little used until the technology to manufactuire it cheaply, proved such a product desirtable at home and abroad.
Adequate transportaion and communication: in eighteenth-century Britain "transportation and communication were comparatively easy and cheap, since no part of Britian is more than seventy miles away from the sea, and even less from some navigable waterway" (Hobsbawm, 17).
Markets: England and countries in similar conditions had to have access to both local and international economies.
Hobsbawm, Eric. Industry and Empire: The Birth of the Industrial Revolution. rev. ed. New York: New Press, 1999.
