David Dale was a leading Scottish industrialist, merchant and philanthropist during the Scottish Enlightenment period at the end of the 18th century. He was a successful entrepreneur in a number of areas, most notably in the cotton-spinning industry, and was the founder of the cotton mills in New Lanark, where he provided social and educational conditions far in advance of anything available anywhere else in the UK. New Lanark attracted visitors from all over the world. Robert Owen, who married Dale's daughter, Caroline, in 1799, used New Lanark to develop his theories about communitarian living, education and character formation. Scottish historian, Tom Devine, described Dale as 'the greatest cotton magnate of his time in Scotland'.

New Lanark is a village on the River Clyde, approximately 1.4 miles from Lanark, in Lanarkshire, and some 25 miles (40 km) southeast of Glasgow, Scotland. It was founded in 1785 and opened in 1786 by David Dale, who built cotton mills and housing for the mill workers. Dale built the mills there in a brief partnership with the English inventor and entrepreneur Richard Arkwright to take advantage of the water power provided by the only waterfalls on the River Clyde. Under the ownership of a partnership that included Dale's son-in-law, Robert Owen, a Welsh utopian socialist and philanthropist, New Lanark became a successful business and an early example of a planned settlement and so an important milestone in the historical development of urban planning.