Not for the faint of heart, but interesting non-the-less, the Economic History blog has a nice series of posts on articles studying the Industrial Revolution.
This blog summarizes papers published on Economic History in major academic journals. The industrial revolution series includes an interesting post on why the industrial revolution happened in the North and not the South. An article by Earle and Ronald (1980) argues that it was because of the monoculture agriculture (just one crop) in the north, cheap labour was available for industry.