United Kingdom

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Early Stages of Industrialization

The development of industry in Britain was a long and gradual process. Industrialization took place earlier and more rapidly in Britain than anywhere else because existing conditions were favorable in England. A system of internal waterways and canals and the absence of physical barriers to trade made the transport of goods less difficult than in other nations. Coalfields and thick forests, located conveniently close to large deposits of metal ores, provided fuel to power the furnaces that produced iron. Thriving commercial banks provided financing for investments in industrial plants and machinery.

Advances in agriculture also contributed to the industrialization process. Beginning in the mid-17th century, England underwent a process of agricultural improvement that enabled fewer farmers to feed more people while cultivating the same amount of land. Between 1750 and 1800, grain yields rose 50 percent; this increase sustained the steadily rising population, which in England grew from 5.5 million in 1750 to around 9 million in 1801, to over 16 million by 1851. Agricultural improvement not only produced more food at cheaper prices, it also allowed farms to produce more food with fewer workers. Workers who could no longer find work on farms migrated to the towns in search of employment. As a result, there was a dramatic shift in population during the 19th century from the agricultural southeast to the Midlands and the north, where industry was located.

The first phase of industrialization centered on the production of cotton clothing. At the beginning of the 18th century Britain still imported finished cotton cloth from India. Soon domestic manufacturing reversed this flow, and England became the world’s primary supplier of cotton cloth. Two developments made this possible: the availability of cheap raw cotton from Egypt and America, and the invention of new machines that enabled workers to spin more thread and weave more cloth.

One of these new machines was known as the spinning jenny. It used foot pedals to control the spinning of multiple threads. This device allowed a worker to spin 200 times as much thread in 1815 as could be spun 50 years earlier. Another mechanical device, the flying shuttle, quickly and automatically passed thread through a loom, the device on which cloth is woven. This flying shuttle enabled one person to operate a loom, whereas previously it had taken an entire team of workers.

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The operation of machinery became more efficient and profitable with the addition of waterpower and later the perfection of the rotary steam engine by Scottish inventor James Watt. Cotton production soared. By 1815 Britain was exporting 100 times the amount of cotton it had exported half a century earlier. Cotton became its most important product.

With the introduction of machinery, factories became the site of organized production of textiles, replacing small-scale manufacture in the home. At first most factories were comparatively small, employing fewer than 100 workers. They were efficient and initially allowed families to remain together, husbands weaving, wives spinning, and children fetching and carrying. Ultimately, however, factories disrupted family life. Women and children easily operated the power-driven machines, and they worked the same 12-hour days as men. Since factory owners could pay women and children lower wages, men were driven out of the industry. The craft of handloom weaving disappeared amidst great hardship. An occupation that employed about 250,000 men in 1820 sustained fewer than 50,000 by 1850.

In some communities, displaced workers attacked factories and factory owners. In others, rioters known as Luddites attacked the machines themselves. Luddites attempted to defend their communities and their way of life, but they were unable to stop the development of new factories. Factory owners grew rich by producing cheap, durable cottons with the new machines.

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Iron and Railroads

Iron was the miracle product of industrialization. Engineers used it to build the machines that powered production and ultimately the rails and engines that powered distribution. Iron had long been refined in England in furnaces that used charcoal as fuel. This process, known as smelting, involved heating iron ore to high temperatures to remove most of the impurities. However, charcoal left some impurities in the iron, which made it difficult to cast the iron into bars. Abraham Darby, an English iron manufacturer, discovered that smelting with coke, a purified form of coal, made possible the production of a better product. Newly developed techniques allowed the iron to be heated and stirred in great vats until impurities had burned off. Factory workers then fed the cooling iron through rolling machines that formed it into bars. By 1850 English manufacturers were producing more than half of the world’s iron.

The most important use of this enormous output of iron was in building railroads. The railroads developed as a result of the technological advances made during the Industrial Revolution. The iron factories produced high-grade material suitable for constructing train engines and tracks. Skilled ironworkers provided machine parts of exact sizes. Inventors put Watt’s steam engine to use, first to pump water from mines, then to drive pistons up and down, and finally to generate the rotary motion that propelled the wheels of trains.

Systems of rails and carriages had long existed to move coal from the mines to the barges on which it was shipped. Humans or horses pulled these carriages. After 1800 inventors began experimenting with Watt’s steam engine as a means of powering carriages. In 1829 engineer and inventor George Stephenson created an engine that could pull three times its weight and outrun a horse. The following year the first important railway opened, carrying coal and bulk goods between Manchester and Liverpool. It soon carried more people than products. Passenger travel by rail was faster, cheaper, and more comfortable than travel by coach. The introduction of the railroad changed forever concepts of speed and distance that were centuries old. Hundreds of independent railway companies sprang up. They invested millions of pounds to employ hundreds of thousands of laborers to lay thousands of miles of iron track. All railroad lines ultimately connected to London, the commercial center of the nation.

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The Impact of Industrialization

Industrialization transformed nearly every aspect of British life. Glasgow came to rival Edinburgh as a center of wealth in Scotland. Ireland, which had grown faster than Scotland throughout the 18th century, failed to industrialize and remained largely agricultural, with dire consequences. Famine devastated Ireland in 1845 after a fungus destroyed the potato crop, which had become a staple of the Irish diet.

In 1851, for the first time, manufacturing employed more workers than agriculture. The growth of industrial cities was staggering. While the population as a whole grew by 100 percent between 1801 and 1851, the population of towns such as Liverpool and Manchester grew by 1,000 percent. Town authorities found it impossible to regulate the explosion in the population. Landlords constructed ramshackle housing simply to provide shelter. In Liverpool thousands of people lived in basements without light or heat. Sanitary conditions were appalling; in one Manchester district there were 215 people for every toilet. London, which had about 1 million inhabitants by 1801, grew to more than 2.3 million by 1850, many of them living in poverty. More remarkably, 9 towns had populations of more than 100,000, and more than 50 had populations of more than 20,000. Urbanization, with its costs and benefits, came to Britain all at once.

At one level, industrialization consolidated Britain’s position as the greatest power in the world. By 1830 Britain produced half of Europe’s iron and cotton, three-quarters of its coal, and nearly all of its steam engines. The English supplied the technological expertise for engineering in other countries, and they planned the railway systems for nearly all of Europe. In 1851 the Great Exposition, a public exhibition that highlighted Britain’s industrial achievements, took place in London. Architects and iron manufacturers constructed the Crystal Palace of iron and glass to showcase Britain’s accomplishments.

Britain’s vast overseas empire was now as much a consumer of British manufactured goods as it was a supplier of Britain’s raw materials. Steam-powered ships made the world a smaller place in the same way that railroads had shrunk the British Isles. Bulk cargoes were now easily moved around the globe, and wealth poured into London and the commercial ports in western Britain. By rough estimates, the per capita wealth of England tripled from 1801 to 1851, a remarkable growth considering that the population doubled.

This increase in wealth, however, did not benefit everyone. If the standard of living rose for some, the quality of life declined for others. Agricultural labor was performed to seasonal rhythms by the light of the sun, but the clock governed factory production, 12 hours a day, 6 days a week. Factory work was dangerous, dirty, and unhealthful, but those who could get it were considered lucky compared to those who begged or starved in the streets.

In the first phase of industrialization, workers were unprotected by social legislation—even efforts to eliminate child labor met serious opposition. Few safety regulations existed. There was no relief for those who could not afford food until, in 1795, a group of local justices in Berkshire inaugurated what was known as the Speenhamland System, after the British parish in which it was pioneered. This system offered wage supplements pegged to the price of bread and the size of a worker’s family. Local governments in other regions instituted similar programs. This did little to help the unemployed, however, and had the unintended effect of lowering wages. Employers discovered that, with relief available to workers, they could offer less in wages. In years of poor harvests, low investment, or economic slump, there was great misery among the poor.

Workers attempted to organize to force better conditions, but without protection against dismissal, their efforts were sporadic and violent. In 1819 one of Britain’s largest public demonstrations was held in Manchester. Between 50,000 and 60,000 people appealed for political and economic reform. Government cavalry troops attacked the crowd. Eleven people died, and more than 400 sustained injuries in what came to be known as the Peterloo Massacre. This event was critical in the early history of labor organization in Britain; many moderate Britons were outraged at the government’s action and gave their support to the emerging labor movement.

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British Politics under the Conservatives

Both the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the development of industrialization placed stress on the British government. High taxes, bad harvests, and tens of thousands of former soldiers returning to the labor market overwhelmed the government of Tory prime minister Robert Banks Jenkinson, 2nd earl of Liverpool, who became head of government in 1812. A severe economic downturn occurred in 1815. Interest payments on the national debt were so high that the government could do little to alleviate the suffering of the working poor. During the early decades of the 19th century, the poor frequently rioted.

Because the Tories continued to fear the radicalism that had developed in the wake of the French Revolution, protest movements met a forceful response. In 1819 Parliament passed the Six Acts in response to rioting. These acts curtailed civil liberties by limiting the freedom of the press, restricting public meetings, and increasing penalties for those who advocated action that might cause public disturbances. Other laws prohibited political rallies and the formation of labor organizations.

To protect the interests of landlords, Parliament passed the Corn Laws of 1815, which placed taxes on imported grain. The repeal of the income tax in 1817 benefited merchants and manufacturers. At the same time, however, Parliament shifted the major burden of taxes onto commercial and industrial businesses, whose owners were largely unrepresented in Parliament. The poor resented new taxes passed on consumption goods such as tea, beer, tobacco, and sugar, which were the few luxury items in their lives.

There was increasing sentiment for radical reform among leading intellectuals. The ideas of British philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who in his philosophy of utilitarianism preached that the aim of government should be the greatest happiness for the greatest number, were particularly influential. Romanticism in poetry—led by William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Lord Byron—stressed natural freedom over the constrictions of the traditional world. There were only two real areas of progress in these years, however. The first was the abolition of slavery in the British colonies in 1833. The second was in matters of religion. In 1828, under increasing pressure from dissenters (Protestants who were not members of the Church of England), Parliament repealed the Test Acts. These acts had barred dissenters from working in government jobs and the professions, and from attending universities. In the following year, after a long struggle in Ireland, Parliament removed the legal restrictions that had prevented Catholics from holding public office in the United Kingdom. The issue of Catholic emancipation was so divisive that it split the Tory Party.

With the Tory Party divided, the Whig government of Charles Grey, 2nd earl Grey, took office in 1830. Grey’s government finally instituted parliamentary reforms that restructured the outdated electoral system. Prior to Grey’s reforms, only voters who owned sizable areas of land in a patchwork of districts created during medieval times could elect members to the House of Commons. This system denied the vote to merchants, manufacturers, and skilled laborers who did not own land. Regions that had been prosperous hundreds of years earlier were overrepresented in Parliament while many new urban centers had no representation at all. Some parliamentary seats were virtually owned by individuals. One town represented in Parliament had disappeared under the sea.

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Agitation for Political Reform

The Reform Bill of 1832 was the first successful attempt to correct these inequities. Although the bill was a moderate compromise, it was defeated twice in the House of Lords; only when King William IV threatened to create a number of new Whig peers in the House of Lords was it allowed to pass. The act decreased the amount of land one had to own to qualify to vote, especially in towns. It redistributed nearly one-quarter of the seats in the House of Commons, mainly from the agricultural southwest to the industrial northwest, but this was still far too few seats to reflect the redistribution of population. More than 250,000 adult males were added to the electoral rolls, but still only 20 percent now had the vote in England; the figure was 12 percent in Scotland, and 5 percent in Ireland.

The Reform Act of 1832 was a bitter disappointment to many radicals who had hoped for fundamental change. Social discontent in Britain came to mirror the country’s emerging class structure. The wealthy, who had been divided between landowners and capitalists, gradually merged into a single ruling class that dominated the government, the church, and the military. Birth and family connections combined to define its members, who attended elite public schools and universities. The middle classes, which had expanded greatly in the 18th century, now participated in the political process as a result of the Reform Act. Their values of tight-knit families, religious observance, and moral personal conduct were to characterize the coming Victorian era.

The working class became the outsider looking in. By far the biggest class, workers had few rights and little security. The ruling and middle classes looked upon the working class with suspicion and feared their numbers and their potential for violence. However, they also provided the leaders who agitated for reforms in working conditions, political rights, and economic justice that ultimately improved the lives of British workers.

Two important political parties emerged during the 1830s. The Whig faction in Parliament combined with a group of radicals to create the Liberal Party, which devoted its energy to government reform, free trade, and the extension of voting eligibility to a larger percentage of the population. The Conservative Party evolved as the successor to the Tory Party. The Conservatives were staunch supporters of the monarchy and championed the cause of imperialism.

In the mid-19th century two significant reform groups presented their programs to government: the Anti-Corn Law League and the Chartists. The Anti-Corn Law League championed free trade and advocated the removal of high taxes on imported grains. The Chartists hoped to expand political participation to members of the working class.

Agitation for repeal of the Corn Laws came from middle-class radicals who believed in free trade rather than protection. They argued that the Corn Laws only benefited rich landowners whose profits came at the cost of expensive bread for everyone else. The terrible potato famine in Ireland, which began in 1845 and killed nearly 1 million people, finally convinced Prime Minister Robert Peel to repeal the laws in 1846. The repeal split the Conservative Party, but it made Britain the world’s leading advocate of the principle of free trade.

Chartism championed the cause of workers by demanding that they receive full political rights. In imitation of the Magna Carta, which had secured the rights of the nobility from the crown in 1215, the Chartists produced a People’s Charter. The charter advocated the extension of the vote to all adult males, the redistribution of parliamentary seats on the basis of population, and the use of the secret ballot. The Chartists presented their program to Parliament in 1839, 1842, and 1848. Each time Parliament decisively rejected it.

Eventually nearly all of the Chartist demands were met. The male electorate was doubled by the Reform Bill of 1867, which extended the vote to many men working in urban areas, and then tripled by the Reform Bill of 1884, which extended the vote to agricultural workingmen. Both bills furthered the redistribution of parliamentary seats, and the bill of 1884 virtually conceded that further reform must be made on the basis of population. The secret ballot was introduced in 1872. It was not until 1918 that all men and women received the vote.