30 The Industrial Revolution

In the century and a half after 1750, the economies and societies of much of Europe and North America were completely transformed. Whereas wealth had previously been predominantly grounded in land, it increasingly flowed out of industry, whether mining or manufacturing, both of which were revolutionized by new technologies.

There was a massive growth in towns and cities, as people flocked from the countryside to work in the new factories. In so doing, many exchanged rural poverty for urban degradation and squalor—a phenomenon that can still be witnessed in many newly industrialized countries around the world. But the transformation also created a new managerial and entrepreneurial middle class, who gained more and more political power at the expense of the old landed aristocracy.

The Industrial Revolution began in Britain and then spread to other parts of Europe and the USA. Various factors contributed to Britain becoming the first country to undergo widespread industrialization. First of all, there was a large accumulation of capital for investment in new enterprises. This derived both from wealthy landowners who had improved their estates and thereby increased their profits, and from Britain’s increasing dominance of world trade—particularly the Atlantic trade, where fortunes were made out of slaves, sugar, tobacco and other commodities. Britain had by the middle of the 18th century acquired an extensive overseas trading empire, which not only provided such raw materials, but also a growing market for manufactured goods. Also of importance in Britain’s industrial growth was its physical geography, with its extensive shoreline with plenty of natural harbors giving access to overseas markets, its many navigable rivers and its reserves of coal and iron ore in close proximity.

The Agricultural Revolution

Another kind of revolution was in progress alongside the Industrial Revolution. In the 18th century the whole way that food was produced began to be placed on a more rational footing—partly under the influence of Enlightenment thinking. However, agricultural improvement had a human cost. In Britain large areas of common land were “enclosed” by wealthy landowners, who obtained the legal right to do so via their friends in Parliament. The people who had worked this common land were evicted, leading to terrible suffering in places such as the Scottish Highlands, where humans were cleared from the land to make way for a more profitable animal—the sheep. Similar developments occurred elsewhere in Europe.

But with large areas of land now under their control, wealthy landowners could introduce scientific improvements, such as four-field crop rotation, selective breeding (especially of animals) and the use of new crops such as turnips to keep animals alive during the winter, rather than slaughtering most of them at the end of autumn. Technology, particularly in the realm of mechanization, also played a key role: notable innovations ranged from Jethro Tull’s seed drill of 1730 to John Deere’s steel plow of 1837, which made it possible to farm the hard soils of the US Midwest for the first time. The increased food production that resulted from these improvements made it possible to feed the growing numbers of people, both in Europe and North America, who worked in factories rather than on the land.

Mechanization and the factory system Mechanization was the key that unlocked the Industrial Revolution. In the pre-industrial period, manufacturing had been carried out by self-employed individuals in their homes, or in small workshops in which a master-craftsman oversaw the work of journeymen and apprentices. Commonly, one person would undertake all the tasks involved in producing an item, from start to finish. However, in The Wealth of Nations (1776) the pioneering economist Adam Smith had pointed out the inefficiencies of this craft-based approach. Taking the example of a pin factory, Smith said that one man working alone would struggle to complete one pin a day, whereas if ten different workers each undertook one stage in the process, the factory might produce 48,000 pins a day. Such a division of labor, Smith argued, also encouraged the development of new machinery.

In Britain the textile industry (based on home-grown wool and imported American cotton) witnessed a string of innovations to mechanize spinning and weaving. The self-employed hand-loom weavers could not compete with the new factories with their new machines, and were obliged to surrender their independence and go to work for the mill-owners in return for pitiful wages. In some places, disgruntled weavers—known as Luddites—smashed the new machines. When caught, the leaders of this agitation were either executed or transported to Australia.

“The race that lives in these ruinous cottages … or in dark, wet cellars, in measureless filth and stench … this race must really have reached the lowest stage of humanity.”

Friedrich Engels, in The Condition of the Working Class in England,1845, describes life for the many in Manchester, one of the great industrial cities of Britain

The Steam Age Initially, the new machinery was powered by water mills, but with improvements in the steam engine, coal became the principal source of power. Coal (in the form of coke) also provided the heat necessary for smelting iron ore, and the burgeoning demand for coal led to the exploitation of deeper and deeper seams.

One of the biggest impacts of coal and steam was on transport. For centuries, bulk goods had been moved by boat on rivers and coastal waters rather than by road, as roads were poorly maintained and often, especially in winter, impassable. The 18th century witnessed a massive expansion of waterborne transport, in the form of new networks of canals linked into the existing natural waterways. Although there was also at the same time a major program of road improvement, the most significant revolution in transport was the coming of the railways, heralded by the opening of the Stockton and Darlington line in 1825. Soon networks of railways were proliferating all over Europe, North America and elsewhere. The railways made possible the cheap bulk carriage not only of goods, but also of passengers, giving rise both to commuting, as cities grew ever larger, and to a widening of horizons, as people could travel further and further afield. A similar impact was experienced once steam power was applied to ships, making transatlantic travel, for example, almost routine.

“We remove mountains, and make seas our smooth highway; nothing can resist us.”

Thomas Carlyle puts a positive spin on technological advance in Signs of the Times, 1829

In its turn, steam power began to be superseded by electricity and the internal combustion engine. In the later 19th century, Britain’s economic rivals, Germany and the USA, were more effective in adopting these new technologies, allowing them to pull ahead. By the beginning of the 20th century, the USA had become the world’s leading industrial power.

the condensed idea

The Industrial Revolution created a new prosperity, but at a human cost