II.

Great Britain Leads the Way

Ever since the Renaissance (14th century to 17th century), Europeans had been inventing and using ever more complex machinery. Particularly important were improvements in transportation, such as faster ships, and communication, especially printing. These improvements played a key role in the development of the Industrial Revolution by encouraging the movement of new ideas and mechanisms, as well as the people who knew how to build and run them.

Then, in the 18th century in Britain, new production methods were introduced in several key industries, dramatically altering how these industries functioned. These new methods included different machines, fresh sources of power and energy, and novel forms of organizing business and labor. For the first time technical and scientific knowledge was applied to business practices on a large scale. Humankind had begun to develop mass production. The result was an increase in material goods, usually selling for lower prices than before.

The Industrial Revolution began in Great Britain because social, political, and legal conditions there were particularly favorable to change. Property rights, such as those for patents on mechanical improvements, were well established. More importantly, the predictable, stable rule of law in Britain meant that monarchs and aristocrats were less likely to arbitrarily seize earnings or impose taxes than they were in many other countries. As a result, earnings were safer, and ambitious businesspeople could gain wealth, social prestige, and power more easily than could people on the European continent. These factors encouraged risk taking and investment in new business ventures, both crucial to economic growth.

In addition, Great Britain’s government pursued a relatively hands-off economic policy. This free-market approach was made popular through Scottish philosopher and economist Adam Smith and his book The Wealth of Nations (1776). The hands-off policy permitted fresh methods and ideas to flourish with little interference or regulation.

Britain’s nurturing social and political setting encouraged the changes that began in a few trades to spread to others. Gradually the new ways of production transformed more and more parts of the British economy, although older methods continued in many industries. Several industries played key roles in Britain’s industrialization. Iron and steel manufacture, the production of steam engines, and textiles were all powerful influences, as was the rise of a machine-building sector able to spread mechanization to other parts of the economy.

A.

Changes in Industry

Modern industry requires power to run its machinery. During the development of the Industrial Revolution in Britain, coal was the main source of power. Even before the 18th century, some British industries had begun using the country’s plentiful coal supply instead of wood, which was much scarcer. Coal was adopted by the brewing, metalworking, and glass and ceramics industries, demonstrating its potential for use in many industrial processes.

A.1.

Iron and Coal

A major breakthrough in the use of coal occurred in 1709 at Coalbrookedale in the valley of the Severn River. There English industrialist Abraham Darby successfully used coke—a high-carbon, converted form of coal—to produce iron from iron ore. Using coke eliminated the need for charcoal, a more expensive, less efficient fuel. Metal makers thereafter discovered ways of using coal and coke to speed the production of raw iron, bar iron, and other metals.

The most important advance in iron production occurred in 1784 when Englishman Henry Cort invented new techniques for rolling raw iron, a finishing process that shapes iron into the desired size and form. These advances in metalworking were an important part of industrialization. They enabled iron, which was relatively inexpensive and abundant, to be used in many new ways, such as building heavy machinery. Iron was well suited for heavy machinery because of its strength and durability. Because of these new developments iron came to be used in machinery for many industries.

Iron was also vital to the development of railroads, which improved transportation. Better transportation made commerce easier, and along with the growth of commerce enabled economic growth to spread to additional regions. In this way, the changes of the Industrial Revolution reinforced each other, working together to transform the British economy.

A.2.

Steam

If iron was the key metal of the Industrial Revolution, the steam engine was perhaps the most important machine technology. Inventions and improvements in the use of steam for power began prior to the 18th century, as they had with iron. As early as 1689, English engineer Thomas Savery created a steam engine to pump water from mines. Thomas Newcomen, another English engineer, developed an improved version by 1712. Scottish inventor and mechanical engineer James Watt made the most significant improvements, allowing the steam engine to be used in many industrial settings, not just in mining. Early mills had run successfully with water power, but the advancement of using the steam engine meant that a factory could be located anywhere, not just close to water.

In 1775 Watt formed an engine-building and engineering partnership with manufacturer Matthew Boulton. This partnership became one of the most important businesses of the Industrial Revolution. Boulton & Watt served as a kind of creative technical center for much of the British economy. They solved technical problems and spread the solutions to other companies. Similar firms did the same thing in other industries and were especially important in the machine tool industry. This type of interaction between companies was important because it reduced the amount of research time and expense that each business had to spend working with its own resources. The technological advances of the Industrial Revolution happened more quickly because firms often shared information, which they then could use to create new techniques or products.

Like iron production, steam engines found many uses in a variety of other industries, including steamboats and railroads. Steam engines are another example of how some changes brought by industrialization led to even more changes in other areas.

A.3.

Textiles

The industry most often associated with the Industrial Revolution is the textile industry. In earlier times, the spinning of yarn and the weaving of cloth occurred primarily in the home, with most of the work done by people working alone or with family members. This pattern lasted for many centuries. In 18th-century Great Britain a series of extraordinary innovations reduced and then replaced the human labor required to make cloth. Each advance created problems elsewhere in the production process that led to further improvements. Together they made a new system to supply clothing.

The first important invention in textile production came in 1733. British inventor John Kay created a device known as the flying shuttle, which partially mechanized the process of weaving. By 1770 British inventor and industrialist James Hargreaves had invented the spinning jenny, a machine that spins a number of threads at once, and British inventor and cotton manufacturer Richard Arkwright had organized the first production using water-powered spinning. These developments permitted a single spinner to make numerous strands of yarn at the same time. By about 1779 British inventor Samuel Crompton introduced a machine called the mule, which further improved mechanized spinning by decreasing the danger that threads would break and by creating a finer thread.

Throughout the textile industry, specialized machines powered either by water or steam appeared. Row upon row of these innovative, highly productive machines filled large, new mills and factories. Soon Britain was supplying cloth to countries throughout the world. This industry seemed to many people to be the embodiment of an emerging, mechanized civilization.

The most important results of these changes were enormous increases in the output of goods per worker. A single spinner or weaver, for example, could now turn out many times the volume of yarn or cloth that earlier workers had produced. This marvel of rising productivity was the central economic achievement that made the Industrial Revolution such a milestone in human history.

B.

Changes in Society

The Industrial Revolution also had considerable impact upon the nature of work. It significantly changed the daily lives of ordinary men, women, and children in the regions where it took root and grew.

B.1.

Growth of Cities

One of the most obvious changes to people’s lives was that more people moved into the urban areas where factories were located. Many of the agricultural laborers who left villages were forced to move. Beginning in the early 18th century, more people in rural areas were competing for fewer jobs. The rural population had risen sharply as new sources of food became available, and death rates declined due to fewer plagues and wars. At the same time, many small farms disappeared. This was partly because new enclosure laws required farmers to put fences or hedges around their fields to prevent common grazing on the land. Some small farmers who could not afford to enclose their fields had to sell out to larger landholders and search for work elsewhere. These factors combined to provide a ready work force for the new industries.

New manufacturing towns and cities grew dramatically. Many of these cities were close to the coalfields that supplied fuel to the factories. Factories had to be close to sources of power because power could not be distributed very far. The names of British factory cities soon symbolized industrialization to the wider world: Liverpool, Birmingham, Leeds, Glasgow, Sheffield, and especially Manchester. In the early 1770s Manchester numbered only 25,000 inhabitants. By 1850, after it had become a center of cotton manufacturing, its population had grown to more than 350,000.

In preindustrial England, more than three-quarters of the population lived in small villages. By the mid-19th century, however, the country had made history by becoming the first nation with half its population in cities. By 1850 millions of British people lived in crowded, grim industrial cities. Reformers began to speak of the mills and factories as dark, evil places.

B.2.

Effects on Labor

The movement of people away from agriculture and into industrial cities brought great stresses to many people in the labor force. Women in households who had earned income from spinning found the new factories taking away their source of income. Traditional handloom weavers could no longer compete with the mechanized production of cloth. Skilled laborers sometimes lost their jobs as new machines replaced them.

In the factories, people had to work long hours under harsh conditions, often with few rewards. Factory owners and managers paid the minimum amount necessary for a work force, often recruiting women and children to tend the machines because they could be hired for very low wages. Soon critics attacked this exploitation, particularly the use of child labor.

The nature of work changed as a result of division of labor, an idea important to the Industrial Revolution that called for dividing the production process into basic, individual tasks. Each worker would then perform one task, rather than a single worker doing the entire job. Such division of labor greatly improved productivity, but many of the simplified factory jobs were repetitive and boring. Workers also had to labor for many hours, often more than 12 hours a day, sometimes more than 14, and people worked six days a week. Factory workers faced strict rules and close supervision by managers and overseers. The clock ruled life in the mills.

By about the 1820s, income levels for most workers began to improve, and people adjusted to the different circumstances and conditions. By that time, Britain had changed forever. The economy was expanding at a rate that was more than twice the pace at which it had grown before the Industrial Revolution. Although vast differences existed between the rich and the poor, most of the population enjoyed some of the fruits of economic growth. The widespread poverty and constant threat of mass starvation that had haunted the preindustrial age lessened in industrial Britain. Although the overall health and material conditions of the populace clearly improved, critics continued to point to urban crowding and the harsh working conditions for many in the mills.