History of the Industrial Revolution.

There were instances of industrial concentration in several European countries before 1800, but manufacturing growth was largely a multiplication of small-scale artisan production. The Industrial Revolution of the late 18th and early 19th centuries was revolutionary because it changed the productive capacity through radically new methods of production and its organisation. It was also a revolution that transformed society that left no one unaffected by creating the European working and middle classes, and gave individuals the opportunity, knowledge and means to completely manipulate nature while Europe became mechanically industrialised.
          The most advanced economies in the world before the eighteenth century featured a combination of craft manufacturing (its most skilled components were based in cities) and a large labour force committed to agriculture. Most production, both manufacturing and agricultural, was based on manual household labour, with larger village groups combining for certain operations, such as harvesting and road building. Western technology and production methods remained firmly anchored in the basic traditions of agricultural societies, particularly in terms of reliance on human and animal power. Manufacturing, despite some important new techniques, continued to entail combining skill with hand tools and was usually carried out in very small shops. The most important Western response to new manufacturing opportunities involved a great expansion of rural (domestic) production, particularly in textiles but also in small metal goods. Domestic manufacturing workers used simple equipment, which they usually bought for themselves, and relied on labour from the household. Many combined their efforts with farming, and in general their skill levels were modest. The system worked well because it required little capital; rural householders invested a bit in a spinning wheel or a hand loom.
          Several factors then coincided at just the right time and amidst the optimal conditions to first allow Britain to give rise to industrialisation. The mercantilist economic system, by which state power was committed to intervention in the economy to accumulate military and financial power, and thereby political and military power as a worldwide manifestation of the industrial revolution. The acquired strength was in turn used to accumulate territory and colonies to expand the economy. Colonies provided raw materials and overseas markets for European countries that possessed colonial empires, and particularly England where the industrial revolution began. England’s overseas colonies provided all the raw materials it needed for booming industries. The colonies were also a captive market that guaranteed consumers for manufactured goods. Furthermore, the fleet used in the colonial empire could also be used to transport both raw materials and manufactured goods.
          This became one of the reasons for European industrialisation – the growing development of world trade, and western Europe’s dominance therein, from the sixteenth century onward. The industrial revolution was a world historical event from the outset, even though it was concentrated in one region. World trade generated profits and more commercial interests. The Atlantic slave trade, in which Europeans brought manufactured goods, especially weapons, to Africa in return for human beings, produced huge earnings for merchants and shippers in Britain, France, and elsewhere. The new patterns of world trade also taught Europeans that their best economic advantage involved producing goods for export and importing cheaper raw materials and foods. There was more money to be made from selling abroad manufactured goods, plus controlling the shipping and trading companies involved, than from concentrating on the domestic economy alone. Here were the sources of Europe’s steady, if limited, improvements in manufacturing technology.
          A second factor that played a major role in the development of British industrialisation was support from increasingly higher agricultural yields as a result of systematic improvements in agronomic practices, including managing soil nutrients through crop rotation. New agricultural methods came into use in the late 1700s. Peasants in many parts of Europe, including Ireland, France, and Prussia, began to grow potatoes, a New World crop long regarded with suspicion. Potatoes offered several advantages over the grains Europeans had traditionally relied upon as staple food: Higher caloric value could be produced from smaller and sometimes less fertile plots of land, and for many decades, potatoes were less subject to periodic diseases than were grains. Increasing adoption of the potato supported the beginnings of rapid population growth in Europe by the 1730s. Britain’s population, for example, doubled between 1750 and 1800, while that of France rose by fifty percent. The potato also freed up a percentage of rural labor for work in other areas, again because of its caloric yield on small plots. At roughly the same time, farmers in Holland began to develop new drainage systems by which swampland could be converted to agricultural use, and they introduced nitrogen-fixing crops that enabled them to keep fields in use every year rather than being rested every third year to regain chemical fertility. With less fallow land and more land in use overall, food production expanded, which also contributed to population growth and to release of new workers for other potential work activities. The greater numbers of people also created more consumers who demanded more goods.
          These conditions were visibly present in England, where commercially-minded landlords almost monopolised the land that was cultivated by tenant farmers who were fewer in number than they had been. British landlords successfully pried land away from smallholding farmers through the government’s Enclosure Acts. These required farmers to enclose their fields, usually by planting hedges, but the expense was beyond many small farmers, who had to sell their holdings to the larger landlords. British agriculture thus became dominated by large estates, and while these employed many workers, they did not absorb a growing population as readily as peasant-dominated agriculture proved able to do elsewhere. Thus, there were workers eager for new options. The enclosed estates, in turn, increased market production, providing food for growing cities. Agriculture was hereafter to carry out three fundamental functions for industrialization: increase production and productivity to feed a rapidly rising non-agricultural population; provide a large and rising surplus of potential workers for the industries in the towns; provide for the accumulation of capital to be used in the more modern sectors of the economy through applying commercialization that had begun in the countryside.
          Tolerance for commercial development was high in British society that was relatively open with greater scope for individual initiative and potential for social mobility, with strengthening institutions of political liberty under parliamentary government, and traditions of free speech and open debate that opened the way for introducing new ideas leading toward economic modernisation. The British government also favoured economic change, while there were also increasingly powerful protections for private property rights, which underlay industrial initiative. Tariff regulations in the eighteenth century, such as the barriers to the importation of cotton cloth from India, also spurred new industries. Other laws that discouraged the export of new machinery or designs impeded rapid imitation elsewhere of British gains. Laws made the formation of new companies relatively easy and officially banned combinations of workers – labour unions in the modern sense – which in turn constrained protest. During the eighteenth century, a number of local governments began to build better roads, and then a wave of canal building developed at the end of the century. The new infrastructure facilitated the movement of both raw materials and finished goods. At the same time, the British government did not attempt to regulate manufacturing extensively. Other European governments tended to control manufacturing with regulations about product quality, techniques, and some working conditions. The British state was less interventionist. This may have served well in setting a favourable framework for the first industrial revolution.
     Britain’s isolation from Europe also played a major role. The constant wars on the continent did not interfere with the development of the textile industry or with innovation. Britain also did not have to deal with trade restrictions and tariffs within its own borders, as was the case in other countries. The availability of natural resources in England also played a pivotal role in industrialisation. Britain had vast reserves of coal, which would be especially important for generating energy for steam engine powered production. Furthermore, the geography of Britain was such that a merchant never had to travel over exceedingly long distances to transport goods to a waterway or a port. Transportation over water routes often proved more efficient that ground transportation, and unless waterways were frozen, boats could travel under any weather or daylight conditions. Hence, easy transportation of raw materials and finished goods greatly aided in the process of industrialisation. In addition, cotton imports from British colonial trade from India and the Caribbean Sea also spurred the development of the cotton processing industry in Britain.
          Britain appeared to provide an optimal setting for producing individuals inclined to taking risks in business. Good market opportunities and an extensive pre-industrial manufacturing system formed part of this framework. New ideas about science and material progress spread more rapidly in Britain than in most other European countries as one of the leading centres of the Scientific Revolution. A relatively small government meant limited chances for success by seeking bureaucratic positions. Furthermore, Britain tolerated a number of Protestant religious minorities, such as the Quakers, although this indulgence was incomplete: Protestants who were not members of the established Anglican church could not attend universities or gain government employment. This ambivalent situation encouraged members of these minorities, eager to demonstrate God’s favour, to seek opportunities in business. Certainly the Protestant minorities produced a disproportionate number of early manufacturers, who were stimulated by a belief that disciplined work, frugality, and economic drive were pleasing in the sight of God and who were eager to get ahead where the chances lay – through entrepreneurial initiative.
          The process of industrialisation began with replacing human or animal muscle power with machines driven by energy from other sources, which was followed by the organisation of production in larger units, and the increasing specialization in manufacturing. This process initially grew out of the textile industry, which was originally a cottage industry in which industrial production was actually done by individual families who produced cloth in their homes. The process of producing cotton was broken down into two parts: spinning and weaving. In the past, several yarn spinners were necessary to keep one weaver occupied on the loom. Then in 1733, John Kay invented the flying shuttle that was a device that allowed weavers to easily produce wider pieces of cloth at faster speeds than ever before.
                This invention created a need for more thread and yarn than ever before, which in turn led to new technical innovations. Spinning, or making thread, became faster with the invention of the “spinning jenny” by James Hargreaves in 1768, which allowed spinners to mechanically produce yarn that the weavers could use. Industrialisation began after Richard Arkwright invented the water frame in 1771, which was a machine that was used to spin yarn or thread and made stronger yarn faster than the spinning jenny. Since the water frame was too large to be operated by hand, it was to be powered by water. These textile machines could no longer be operated out of homes, as they were so large that they had to be constructed in special buildings that became known as the first factories, where workers operated the new machines outside of their homes.
Britain’s nascent industry was first mobilised with new forms of energy for production at newly unprecedented scales, as the steam engine marked a turning point in modern history by mobilising coal as a source of primary fossil fuel energy. Food production soared as it was used to produce chemical fertilisers, along with producing steel, transportation equipment, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, textiles, among other modern manufacturing sectors. The first steam-powered factories in Britain were established in the 1780s, using machinery where an urban-based capitalist purchased the necessary raw materials and, usually, arranged for sale of the product. Output expanded because of the sheer growth of worker numbers, not because of technical advancement. Indeed, the low wages paid generated little incentive for technical change while workers had little choice but to take factory jobs in order to sustain themselves and their households.
          Although many early industrial factories were small, they promoted the grouping of greater numbers of people for the production process. They also increased the amount of employment specialisations. Tasks were subdivided, which increased the total production even aside from new technology. There was then the water powered loom invented by Edmund Cartwright in 1787, which mechanised its production. After cotton mills emerged near streams and rivers across Britain. Apart from benefiting from low cost sea based trade with all of Europe, extensive navigable waterways for internal trade, Britain also enjoyed the benefits of a highly favourable environment for agriculture The perfection of the efficient steam engine by James Watt meant looms and machinery could be set up for industrial use anywhere. Moreover, natural resources, such as coal and iron that were used to fuel the Industrial Revolution were also abundant and easy to acquire in Britain. The key invention of the steam engine meant coal could be mined in large quantities and thereby harnessing its energy potential for production in different industries using the new machinery.
                New machines and procedures were introduced into beer brewing; the big factories established included the great Guinness brewery in Dublin. Pottery manufacturing concentrated important developments in industrial chemistry during the late eighteenth century, while new methods reduced the work required in processes such as glazing and cutting. In the 1830s new printing presses were developed that could be powered by steam engines, which greatly expanded production in such fields as daily newspapers. The most striking mechanical strides outside the growing textile sectors occurred in metallurgy and mining. During the eighteenth century British manufacturers learned to produce coke from coal (by heating and concentrating it in special ovens) and to use coke instead of wood-derived charcoal for smelting iron ore. Coke production in turn depended on advances in furnace design and steam blasting, introduced by John Wilkinson in 1776. As coke supplies grew, furnace design for smelting and refining iron was also reconsidered; the result was larger furnaces and higher output per worker. Henry Cort’s reverberatory furnace for refining iron developed in 1784 saved fuel, but above all, increased productivity by 1,500 percent. Steam-powered machines to roll metal, replacing manual hammering, soon followed. The iron industry began to expand rapidly as the demand for iron increased to keep up with the demands of the growing industries. Britain had produced 25,000 tons of pig iron in 1720; by 1796 the figure was 125,000 and by 1804 was 250,000 tons.
The growth of the iron industry had two further consequences. Iron was used to build the tools and machines of the mills, mines and factories, and this industrial production also depended on coal mining. Thus, coal mining expanded across Britain to supply industrial demands, as it surged to provide the fuel for iron smelting and for steam engines generally. Wooden and metal rails were laid down to facilitate carts of coal being pulled by horses or people. Soon after 1800, experiments with steam-driven engines to pull the carts began. At the same time, the number of miners increased rapidly because this vital industry remained extremely labour intensive.
    Moreover, machine building expanded steadily. Before 1800, machine building was scattered in small shops and was performed with hand methods, and even after this date, the industry long demanded highly skilled workers laboring with relatively little sophisticated equipment of their own. However, attention in France and the new United States to the manufacturing of guns led to the development of precise patterns for designing machine parts, such that these parts could be interchangeably used on a given machine. Several machines were designed to bore and turn the machine pieces, and their industrial use gradually spread in Britain (and the United States and western Europe) during the early decades of the nineteenth century. With the expanding production and demand for cotton, coal and iron, transportation became a priority. As a result, in 1804, the first steam-powered locomotive appeared on an industrial rail line. By the mid-nineteenth century, there were over 5000 miles of railroad in Britain that replaced horse-drawn transportation and operated over long distances while burning coal for fuel, and transported goods at lower cost than before. New industrial areas followed the rail lines, from which the railway could carry goods to distant markets, including overseas after the first steamship was launched in 1809, which made the real costs of shipping a fraction of what it had been.
   Hence, the two central features of industrialization – revolutions in technology and in the organization of production – yielded one clear result: a great increase in the total output of goods and in individual worker output. This result propelled manufacturing over agriculture as the industrial society’s greatest source of wealth and employment. By industrializing first, Britain was producing one half of the world’s coal and manufactured goods by the time it came to have the only mature industrial economy by about 1850. As a result, it became one of the richest and most powerful nations of the nineteenth century, and was to be followed in similar self-sustained economic growth in Germany, France, Switzerland, Belgium and the United States composed  a “second industrial revolution” in the late nineteenth century, after businesses and governments began to see the possibility of copying British machine design and factory organization, realizing they had to take similar action, or else become engulfed in a British industrial tide. The industrial revolution thus began to spread.
          There were principal stages in the wider western effort to copy Britain’s mechanical advances. European governments sent over a few observers to learn about British technology before 1789. The French in 1764 dispatched a scientist to study British metallurgy, and on his return he used the new methods to develop one of France’s great iron manufacturing firms, the de Wendel company. The French government also paid a British metallurgist to set up a cannon foundry. Various German and Swiss states also sent students, and some of them brought back new textile equipment. Such transfers of technology were unusual, however, partly because British law forbade the export of new technology, or the emigration of skilled workers, along with facilitating the immigration of impoverished peoples from the countryside to overseas colonies.
The outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789, and its turmoil and the ensuing European war interrupted major developments for over two decades, whereas Britain remain sovereign and at a far greater risk of military invasion, which contributed to modern economic growth. Yet, the revolution also introduced important new legislation that helped pave the way for industrialisation in Western Europe. In France and also neighbouring territories, including in Belgium and western Germany, guilds were abolished, which removed restrictions on the movement of labor and technical innovation. Western Europe in this way became more like Britain. Internal trade barriers were removed in countries like France, and commercial law was regularized. Other laws prohibited combinations of workers-these too emulated the British lead and inhibited labor protest against change. Although those who launched the French Revolution did not intend to promote industrialization, and the ensuing disorder actually delayed it, the new laws and a general enhancement of the power of the middle classes, along with Britain’s display of industrial success during the fighting against Napoleon, completed the causation for western Europe’s economic transformation.
          When war ended in 1815, Europeans intensified their study of British ways, seeking to circumvent British laws prohibiting technology transfer. In 1819, the Prussian government sent a locksmith to study British machine building, and he returned to form a major plant in Berlin. The French and Dutch governments bribed British entrepreneurs to set up modern metallurgical factories directly; the French steel industry took shape under James Jackson as a result, and it was a Jackson grandson who in 1861 set up the first Bessemer converter in France. Belgian businessmen smuggled British machinery out of the country in rowboats, and in a few cases literally kidnapped skilled British workers. Francis Cabot Lowell, an American, visited Britain in 1810-1812 and two years later, established the first power looms in the United States and the first major textile plant that combined mechanical spinning and weaving. French and Swiss metallurgists also visited frequently. Alfred Krupp, a German, made his study trip in 1838, by which time Germans and others were also studying British railroads and mining engineering. The Belgian government directly hired George Stephenson to set up railroads there, and all the European states, plus the United States, imported British locomotives. European and American businesses also hired British workers. By 1830, there were at least 15,000 British workers in France, serving mainly as skilled technical personnel in textile and metallurgical plants. Employers offered huge bonuses and wages sometimes double the local rate to induce the vital British workers to emigrate. Also important was the direct emigration of British industrialists. Coal rich Belgium was one of the first countries on the European continent to experience a rapid economic transformation, followed by three follow-up industrial revolutions in Western society. France, Germany, and the United States joined the industrialised nations between 1820 and 1840.
          Industrialisation before 1850 was confined chiefly to coal, iron, and textiles, with steam engines supplying the motive power. Factory methods and new technologies gradually penetrated to other industries, but even in Britain, much so-called manufacturing still took place under the putting-out (domestic) system or in small workshops with little or no mechanical power. As technology became increasingly scientific in the second half of the century — that is, based upon the findings as well as the methods of science — the flow of technical innovations quickened dramatically. New industries arose, existing industries adopted new techniques, the factory system spread, and an ever-larger proportion of an increasing population became involved in the industrial system. Among the most important if not most dramatic technological innovations of the second half of the century were new methods for making steel. Steel as a special variety of iron had been made for several centuries, but only in small quantities at high cost. As a result, its use was limited to such quality products as watch springs, surgical instruments, and fine cutlery. Henry Bessemer, an English inventor, announced a new method in 1856 for producing steel directly from molten iron, eliminating the puddling process and yielding a product harder and more durable than puddled iron. The output of Bessemer steel increased rapidly and soon displaced ordinary iron in a variety of uses. The Bessemer process did not always yield a uniformly high grade of steel, however, and could not be used with phosphorus-bearing iron ores. To remedy the former defects, a father and son team of French metallurgists, Pierre and Émile Martin, and the Siemens brothers, Ernst in Germany and William in England, developed in the 1860’s the “open hearth,” or Siemens-Martin, furnace. In 1878 two English cousins, Thomas and Gilchrist, patented a process to permit the use of the plentiful phosphorus bearing iron ores. As a result of these and other innovations, the annual world production of steel rose from less than half a million tons in 1865 to more than fifty million tons on the eve of World War I.
          The expansion of the steel industry had a profound impact on other industries, both those that supplied the steel industry (such as coal) and those that used steel. Steel rails for railroads lasted longer and provided greater safety than iron ones. Steel plates for shipbuilding resulted in larger, lighter, faster ships and could also be used as heavy armor for warships. The use of steel beams and girders made it possible to build skyscrapers and a variety of other structures. Steel replaced iron and wood in tools, toys, and hundreds of other products ranging from steam engines to hairpins. Steam remained the major source of mechanical energy throughout the nineteenth century, but new forms of power developed to supplement, and in some cases, to replace it. The steam engine itself underwent further developments, which made it a more powerful and efficient prime mover. Charles Parsons, a British engineer, patented the steam turbine in 1884, which found its principal uses in driving ocean liners and warships and in generating electricity that powered information and communication technology by the beginning of the twentieth century. The early reciprocating steam engines built by James Watt developed between 10 and 25 horsepower; in the 1860s large compound marine engines produced more than 1,000 horsepower; in the early twentieth century huge steam turbines could generate more than 100,000 horsepower.
          The steam turbine applied the expansive powers of steam to the principle of the hydraulic turbine, which had been perfected by French engineers in the 1820s and 1830s. The hydraulic turbine had first been used in various milling operations as a more efficient substitute for its ancestor, the old-fashioned water wheel. It soon came to have a much greater use in the production of electricity. The possibility of generating electricity mechanically had been known since the decisive experiments of Faraday with electromagnetism in 1831, but no economically feasible means of generating power in large quantities had been discovered. In 1873 a paper maker in southeastern France attached his turbine, which drew water from the Alps, to a dynamo for the production of electricity. This apparently simple innovation had important long-range consequences, for it enabled regions poor in coal but rich in waterpower to supply their own energy requirements. The invention of the Parsons steam turbine in the following decade freed the generation of electricity from waterpower sites and shifted the energy balance back toward coal and steam, which remain today the most important sources of electrical energy. Nevertheless, the development of hydroelectric power became tremendously important for countries previously in the backwaters of industrial development, such as Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, and Italy.
          A host of practical applications for electricity were developed contemporaneously. Electricity had been used in the new electroplating industry and in telegraphy from the 1840s. Lighthouses began to utilize electric arc lamps in the late 1850s, and by the 1870s they were being used in a number of factories, stores, theaters, and public buildings. The perfection of the incandescent electric lamp between 1878 and 1880 almost simultaneously by Joseph Swan in England and Thomas Edison in the United States made arc lighting obsolete and inaugurated a boom in the electrical industry. For several decades electricity competed fiercely with two other recently perfected illuminants: coal gas and kerosene. Electricity had many uses other than illumination. It is one of the most versatile sources of power available that had ever been in existence. When Edison patented the electric lamp in 1879, another of the Siemens brothers invented the electric streetcar, which had revolutionary consequences for mass transportation in the burgeoning cities of the time. Within a few years, electric motors had found dozens of industrial applications and household appliances.
          Petroleum is another major energy source that came into prominence in the second half of the nineteenth century. Although it was known and used earlier through accidental discoveries, its commercial exploitation began with the drilling of Drake’s well at Titusville, Pennsylvania, in 1859. Like electricity, liquid petroleum and its byproduct, natural gas, were at first used primarily as illuminants. Concurrently with their growth in production, several French and German inventors perfected the internal combustion engine. By 1900, a variety of such engines were available, most of which used as fuel one of the several distillates of liquid petroleum, such as gasoline or diesel oil. By far the most important use for the internal combustion engine was in light transport facilities, such as automobiles, motor trucks, and busses, but it also had industrial applications and made possible the development of the airplane in the twentieth century. Apart from its use in engines, petroleum competed with traditional energy sources in household and industrial heating. All of these developments relied much more than earlier technological innovations on the application of science to industrial processes. The electrical industry in particular required a high degree of scientific knowledge and training. In other industries scientific advance became more and more the prerequisite of technological advance.
   The science of chemistry proved especially prolific in giving birth to new products and processes. It had already created artificial soda, sulfuric acid, chlorine, and a number of other heavy chemicals of particular importance in the textile industry. While seeking a synthetic substitute for quinine in 1856, William Perkin, an English chemist, accidentally synthesized mauve, a highly prized purple dye. This was the beginning of the synthetic dyestuffs industry, which within two decades had practically driven natural dyestuffs off the market. Synthetic dyestuffs proved to be the opening wedge of a much larger complex of organic chemical industries, whose output included such diverse products as drugs and pharmaceuticals, explosives, photographic reagents, and synthetic fibers. Coal tar, a byproduct of the coking process previously regarded as a costly nuisance, served as the principal raw material for these industries. Chemistry also played a vital role in metallurgy. In the early nineteenth century, the only economically important metals were those known from antiquity: iron, copper, lead, zinc, tin, mercury, gold, and silver. After the chemical revolution associated with Antoine Lavoisier, the great French chemist of the eighteenth century, many new metals including aluminum, nickel, magnesium, and chromium were discovered. All of these developments relied much more than earlier technological innovations on the application of science to industrial processes. The electrical industry in particular required a high degree of scientific knowledge and training. In other industries scientific advance became more and more the prerequisite of technological advance.
   Chemistry likewise came to the aid of such old, established industries as food processing and preservation. Canning and artificial refrigeration produced a revolution in dietary habits and, by permitting the importation of otherwise perishable foodstuffs from the New World and Australia, allowed Europe’s population to grow far beyond what its own agricultural resources would support. At the same time the scientific study of the soil that was initiated in Germany in the 1840’s led to greatly improved agricultural practices and the introduction of artificial fertilizers. Scientific agriculture thus developed along with scientific industry.
The nineteenth century witnessed a marked acceleration in the tempo of human life resulting from major innovations in the field of communications. The railroad and steamship inaugurated the process. Their major contribution was the increased volume and reduced cost of transportation. The most important innovation affecting the speed of communications was the electric telegraph, developed to a practical stage in the 1840’s. By 1850, most major cities of Europe had been linked by telegraph wires, and in 1851 the first successful underwater telegraph cable was laid under the English Channel. In 1866, Cyrus W. Field succeeded in laying a telegraph cable under the North Atlantic Ocean, providing nearly instantaneous communication between Europe and North America. The telephone, patented by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876, made distant communication even more personal, but its principal use was in facilitating local communications.
In the area of mass communications, improvements in printing and typesetting culminated in the Linotype machine, invented by the German-American Ottmar Mergenthaler in 1885, further extending the influence of the daily newspaper. One of America’s great inventive geniuses, Thomas Edison, invented both the phonograph in 1877 and the motion picture camera in 1887. The Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi invented wireless telegraphy or radio in 1895. As early as 1901 a wireless message was transmitted across the Atlantic.
          The combination of industrial revolutions in the western world essentially completed the industrialisation of the western world by the 1870s, increasing the worldwide impact of the industrial revolution while cutting into Britain’s pre-eminence, where a convergence of underlying factors enabled initiating industrial production increases that became converted into est.
The spread of rapid industrial revolutions to Belgium, France, Germany, and the United States effectively converted the bulk of Western society to an industrial economy by the 1870s. Industrial revolutions were also under way in Scandinavia, northern Italy, and the Netherlands. Overall, industrial output continued to increase. The expansion of railroads and the focus on heavy industry in Germany and the United States also prompted strong growth in metallurgy and related branches, such as armaments. New electrical and chemicals industries also took off, the latter on the basis of new manufacturing needs and techniques in dyes, chemical fertilizers, and explosives. The organizational thrust of the industrial revolution took on new contours with the rise of big business and the development of new methods of disciplining and arranging the factory labour force.
New methods and organisations for producing goods also led to social consequences. There was the spread of wage dependency among producers. With Britain’s economic boom, factories for different industries emerged across the country that created new jobs and a new labour system. Workers were forced to work in shifts based on set hours and duties. British society began to change as a result of this population shift. An industrial middle class emerged – the people who built and managed the factories and bought the machines. The working class emerged at the same time. Men, women and children typically worked in the factories. Factory owners often hired entire families to work for them, with husbands receiving a wage for the entire family that had previously worked in the cottage industries. The biggest jolt the industrial revolution administered to the Western family was the progressive removal of work from the home. Families were no longer centers of production, and with this came the excessive abuse of child labour as children began to assist the family economy from an early age.
         The early industrial revolution in Britain was thus built on the backs of cheap labour driven mercilessly hard. The standard of living fell for many workers in rural regions, who were pressed both by population growth and by competition from machine-made goods that cut into branches of domestic manufacturing. Many rural women, for example, lost their manufacturing income when spinning was mechanized. With less land available for small farmers, less supplementary employment, and competitive pressure on agricultural wages, stark misery spread in many agricultural districts. While hand weavers enjoyed some real prosperity before 1800, when thread production soared but mechanized weaving had yet to take hold, their pay began to plummet thereafter. By 1811 wages were down one-third from their 1800 levels, and by 1832, when hand weaving in cotton was dying out in Britain, they had fallen by a full 60 percent. As a result, increasing numbers of people were forced to move to the cities. Although the worst misery was centered in areas remote from the factories, the widespread deterioration also cut into the standard of living of industrial workers, who faced a growing amount of potential competition for jobs.
         Cities grew rapidly to handle factory manufacturing and related functions while industrial machines began to take over some of the production previously performed in the countryside. Approximately half of Britain’s population lived in cities by 1850, which was the first such urban achievement in human history, for even the most effective agricultural societies had never been able to free up more than 20 percent of a population from the rural economy. Manchester, Britain’s cotton capital, grew from a modest town of 25,000 in 1772 to a metropolis of 367,232 by 1851. Leeds, Birmingham, and Sheffield, centers of textiles or metalwork, grew by 40 percent between 1821 and 1831 alone. With the rapid growth of cities without planning or supervision, living conditions were also often harsh and terrible for poor workers while the elementary services of city life, such as street cleaning, water supply, sanitation and working class housing, failed to keep pace with it. As a consequence of urban deterioration was the appearance of mainly waterborne diseases, such as typhus and cholera, as well as other signs of demoralization among the urban poor, including excessive drinking, infanticide, prostitution, suicide and mental derangement. Another problem was urban housing often was costlier than the preindustrial rural counterpart. Meanwhile, the gap between the rich class of factory owners and the poor factory workers grew wider and more visible as few workers were able to afford much above a bare subsistence.
    Other pressures added to the burdens on the new factory workers. Factory workers sometimes faced an increase in poverty, as wages were kept low and prices of some goods rose. The new working class had slightly marginal income levels over subsistence, and various crises, such as illness, an economic recession, or old age had potential to bring extreme misery. No regular provision for illness or old age cushioned industrial life, and factory workers, unlike many small farmers, had no plot of land to fall back on for at least a modest food supply if their strength began to fail. The frequent economic slumps often caused unemployment rates, even for skilled workers, to soar as high as 60 percent for several months or even a year, and food prices often went up in these time periods. Not surprisingly, many workers, even those capable of improving their earnings, found industrial life extremely unpredictable, even nerve-wracking, and in the worst slumps, death rates rose in the factory centers. Furthermore, and again even for workers whose pay might have increased modestly, the industrial revolution cut into leisure time. The labor force was prodded to work harder than its pre-industrial counterpart, and work hours inched up as employers sought to maximize use of the expensive machinery. Some textile factories drove their workers sixteen hours a day, Saturdays included. Traditional festival days, when rural workers had taken time off, came under attack as the new factories fined workers for unauthorized absences as increased work time contributed to growing output along with the machines. Moreover, hours of work were very long, and many workers had neither time nor energy for much entertainment off the job.
New shop rules attempted to bring a new pace of work to the factory hands. Workers had to arrive when the factory whistle blew; if they were late, they would be locked out, lose half a day’s pay, and be fined as much in addition. The typical unevenness in the former work pace was explicitly attacked: Work was meant to be steady as well as fast, with no whimsical interruptions, for if one worker stopped, a whole machine might shut down. Rules, fines, and layers of supervisors were devices aimed at imposing an unfamiliar sense of time and coordination on the factory hands. Finally, factory jobs exposed many workers to new physical dangers: dust from textile fibers, accidents in the coal mines, and maimings from the fast-moving – usually unprotected – machinery.
The development of factory supervision followed from the struggle to reshape a whole labour force. Thus most factories after a decade or two introduced foremen designated to hire and fire workers and to keep the work going properly. Many of these foremen were drawn from the worker ranks, but they were expected to represent management interests and to drive their workers hard. With this innovation, the factory system not only introduced a new pace and discipline but also a new experience of being bossed. For the first time in Western history, a growing minority of people were working under the daily control of someone else and not simply for a few years of youthful apprenticeship, but for a lifetime. Industrial work also became steadily more specialised. As more procedures were carried on by machines, a growing number of workers did small, repetitious tasks. There were important demands for considerable skill, but the semiskilled ranks grew most rapidly overall, particularly as the industrial revolution wore on. These semiskilled workers required training but of a limited sort, and they had little sense of contributing much to a final product that they might see as their own. This was one reason many factory workers worried about their demeaned status in society, while their sense of achievement at work became limited.
   Laws also began to be implemented to protect women and children labourers. For example, the twelve hour work day law passed in Britain in 1847 with the avowed purpose to protect women from strain, to safeguard the home, and to limit labour competition from women. Humanitarian concerns and workers’ desire to regain family control led to a series of child labor laws, initiated in Britain in 1833. These laws limited the use of children under twelve, and reduced the hours even for younger teenagers. Nevertheless, the social ills of industrialization remained more visible in the new cities and in new and unfamiliar forms. One outcome of the changed circumstances in social and economic life was the organisation of labour movements, in which the labouring class or workers faced the employers, or capitalists, beginning with the attempts to establish trade unions in Britain in 1818 and thereafter.
   Another consequence was the emergence of a new ideology of social criticism, and new political terms as the industrial revolution established the conditions for recurrent class conflict on both ideological and material grounds. Two of them were socialism and communism. Socialists opposed a society run on capitalist principles, of which they thought the main beneficiaries were the wealthy, while advocating social and economic equality. Communists advocated the outright abolition of property. Karl Marx published the most important document in the history of socialism, The Communist Manifesto, in 1848, in which he proclaimed what he called the “utopian socialism” of his predecessors was false, and advanced his own theories for social transformation. Marx was the first political philosopher to argue for achieving socialism through a working class struggle to achieve genuine democratic liberties, while believing that political restrictions on democracy resulted from the economic structure of society, as not any society that was divided into exploitative employer and exploited worker could ever achieve full democracy, particularly when capitalists maintained the bulk of economic power in society, and thereby dominated political life. He therefore argued that achieving full democracy required overcoming class divisions in society, which would enable each individual to fully and equally in social and political affairs.
     As early as the 1820s groups of utopian socialists, both in Europe and the United States, urged the establishment of new, cooperative principles of work that would replace class divisions with a new harmony. Utopian socialists, such as Charles Fourier, Pierre Proudhon, Robert Owen, and Louis Blanc, attacked industrial capitalism because they thought it was unjust. Marx argued that nothing would be gained from arguments about instituting change. He claimed that the future would be dictated by history, which would lead to the creation of a new ruling class of workers, who he called the industrial proletariat, who would stage a revolution and change society. This theory of socialism was thus adapted to the circumstances of advanced industrialization with a logical historical analysis that pointed to the future. The new future society would be based on social and economic equality, and capitalism would be swept away. In view of the changed economic and social circumstances of the time, workers along with other discontented elements of society would eventually demand a new state and society through revolution in different European countries.
                Unlike the utopian socialists, Marx maintained that socialism needed to represent a higher stage of democracy that anything that had yet been seen based on communal ownership of society’s resources, which was to be achieved through the self-emancipation of the working masses composing the major element of the population seizing the means of production to reorganise the economic basis of society as a workers’ democracy. The Communist Manifesto expressed the following essentials: 1. economic production is the main determinant of the nature of society. 2. The dominant economic class always controls the state in its interests. 3. With economic development, new classes emerge and struggle with the old to gain control of the state. 4. The capitalist industrialist phase was the last great change in economic development, and the concentrating force of the working class would overthrow the ruling middle class. 5. Class conflict would then cease. The new society would be classless, egalitarian and democratic. The absence of the need for repression would mean “the withering away of the state.” As the industrial revolution became consolidated in Western Europe and the United States during the nineteenth century, it also inevitably altered relationships with other parts of the world in addition to social protest theories against the background of unrestricted capitalism. The power of industrial technology fed new power politics on the international scene, and an explosive round of imperialism was a direct consequence of the West’s industrial expansion and internal competition.
 
Round Robin in small groups
 
          Create manageable prompts independently in groups, and then build upon them. Everyone ought to provide a response with their individual input.
 
a) oral or written responses in which every group member adds a new idea.
b) present ideas as a class in complete sentences.