Why did Manchester become a symbol of industrial society?

Manchester became a symbol of industrial society because it served as an urban prototype—the first of a new generation of massive industrial cities created during the Industrial Revolution.2

As the world's leading industrial city, Manchester was viewed by 19th-century observers as a "social laboratory" where the general process of industrialization could be studied. Its rapid transformation from a market town of 10,000 people in 1717 to a manufacturing and commercial hub of over 300,000 by 1851 exemplified the era's unprecedented growth.12

The city’s influence was so profound that foreign thinkers, including Friedrich Engels, analyzed Manchester to understand the future of industrial development. The term Manchestertum was coined by Germans to describe the industrializing ideologies and institutions associated with the city. Because the British experience was generalized as the model for the world, Manchester came to represent the "package" of economic, social, and political changes—such as the massing of workers in factories and the rise of new urban values—that defined modern industrial society.31