The New Stock Exchange in a painting by Thomas Rowlandson (1756-1827). The term ‘Industrial Revolution’ was first used in the 1820s by some French publicists and became a common expression after 1884 when a book appeared with that ttle. We all know basically what thisrevolution brought about: the end of a world predominated by thestow rhythms of agriculture and the beginning of a world dominated by the fast and unceasing changes of machines. Let usnowsee what factors broughtabout this revolution and why it occurred first in England. Machines. are the main characteristic ofindustry. Butwhy do wwe use machines? Basically, we use machines to cut down the cost of production so we can make more money. Butifwemakemore products to make more money we need customers. When people produced for a strictly local market there was little need to produce more. A pin maker knew that his particular walled city needed a certain number of pins. Ifheproduced more pins than needed, his efforts were wasted. Once, how- ever, trade expanded, the need to provide goods for more than just the local market was feltand new ways of producing more goods were sought: Inaddition, trade created competition. The person who could produce more goods for the least amount of money would dominate the market, There- fore, we can see that the expansion of ‘radcand its consequences was the first step towards the Industral Revolution, It was during the reign of Elizabeth I that English trade began to flourishand England began to compete with Spain and Holland. It was in this period that many chartered companies were established. A charter was the grantgivenby the Queen toacompany totradeinaparticularregionorproduct. Obviously, this meant that these chartered companies were to give part of their profits to the crown. The most important were Eastland Company which traded in Scandinavia and the Baltic; the Levant Company which traded with the Ottoman Empire; the Affica Company which tradedin Affican slaves and the East India Company which traded with India. Throughout the late sixteenth century these companies grew in wealth and power. Besides the growth of these trading companies, the methods. of trade themscives improved: Perhaps the most important of these improvements was the founding of the BankofEngland in 1694. Initially, the Bank of England was founded by some rich men to lend money to the government; in return for this loan they received £8. yearin interest for every £100 lent. In addition, these rich men were given the right to lend money to others. The Bank could lend money to the government only with Parliament’s permission, and since many members of Parliament (MPs) also had money in the Bank, they made sure that Parliament levied the taxes necessary to pay the interest thatthe governmentowed. The Bank of England facilitated trade greatly. Inaddition to the expansion of trade with the rest of the world, by 1707, after the union of England and Scotland, England had the largest internal market in Europe. England had eliminated most of the internal barriers to trade within its boarders, such as tolls and tariffs, which still blocked trade on the “Continent. England added to this internal market with its colonial conquests of the seventeenthrand ighieenth centuries ‘These colonies supplied raw materials and also provided a market for England’s manufactured goods. Lord Chatham, one of the architects of England’s empire, said that the colonies in America were ‘a double ‘market: market of consumption and a market of supply”. Finally, trade brought wealth. Beforethe Industrial Revolution, trade ‘wasconsidered the source ofall wealth “The morea country exported and the less it imported, the wealthier it was. ‘This was the idea behind the British Empire. In any case, this wealth from trade provided the capital needed to develop the first industries. Britain’s overseas companies brought in large amounts of wealth, a large part of which came from the slave trade During the last 20 years of the seven- teenth century, British ships brought nearly 300,000 slaves from Africa to its colonies. With the"Asiento Treaty (1713), which opened up South America to the British slave trade, Britain had almost a monopoly in the trade ofhuman beings. Liverpool, the principal port of Lancashire and the birthplace of the modern factory system, obtained most of its wealth from the slave trade. England also camedlargeamountsofmoney selling manufactured goods to its colonies. 55‘Trade, therefore, stimulated technical innovation. But, once new machines that improved production were put into use, trad itself was stimulated to grow in order to find markets for the great numbers of goods produced. In fact, one of the most important characteristics of the industrial revolutionisthe mutual stimulation oftechnology and trade, which led to the search for more and more markets for the products produced and better and better ways to produce those goods needed, ‘The first industry to feel the full effects of improved technology was the cotton industry. Infact, the beginnings ofthe industrial revolutionare often and correctly associated with the first great cotton mills of Lancashire. Cotton cloth \was first imported from India. Soon, however, the woolen industry began to feel threatened by this new product, so, in 1700, itforced Parliament to passa law prohibiting the importation of cotton cloth. This new law had just the opposite effect to the one intended: it stopped the importation of cotton cloth, but it stimulated the growth of the native cotton industry in Lancashire. The cotton manufactures were forced to become asefficientas possible tocompete against the older and heavily protected woolen industry. Efficiency, as we have noted above, comes mostly from machines, and the cotton industry grew as more and more inventions appeared. The first of these inventions was the ‘flying shuttle” invented by John Kay in 1733 ‘which improved greatly the production ofthe weaver. This, in turn stimulated another invention, which allowed the spinners to catch up with the weavers. Initially, five or more spinners (those people who make threads from the cotton fibres) were needed to supply one weaver with all the thread he needed. With the invention of the flying shuttle even more spinners were needed to keep up. In 1764 James Hargreaves invented the ‘spinning jenny” (named in honour of his daughter), a device that could do the work of 16 spinning wheels at once. Five years later a barbernamed Richard Arkwright furtherimproved spinning, ‘with his machine driven by water called the ‘water frame” In 1779 a farmer named Samuel Crompton designed the ‘mule’ which was combination of the spinning jenny and ‘the water frame. Atthispoint the spinners had anadvantage over the weavers. In 1785, Edmund Cartwright, a clergy ‘man, invented a power loom that was so big it needed to bbe kept ina factory. In fac, all these machines, because of their size and cost, required large spaces and large sums of ‘money, and by the end ofthe eighteenth century, mostofthe cotton industry was concentrated in factories. By 1820 cotton had become more important than wool This series of inventions stimulated yet another important invention, which would in turn change the economy of an entire region. This new invention was the cotton gin, invented by Eli Whitney in 1793. The cotton sginwasa machine that separated the cotton seeds from the fibres. Until the invention of this machine, American cotton, a variety with short fibres, wasnot very economical to grow, because the labour needed to obtain the fibres ‘was oo great. Mostofthe cotton that had long fibers came from India, With the cotton gin, America could supply the voracious English cotton industry with all the cotton it needed. Within 20 years after the invention of he cotton gin, American, production rose ftom 1,500,000 to £85,000,000 per year. Inorderto grow and harvest the now-profitable American, cotton, slaves were used. Thus the growth of an industry (on one side of the Atlantic Ocean stimulated the growth, of trade on the other side of the ocean. Ironwasthe next great industry toarisein England, Between 1788 and 1839 the production of pig iron went from 68,000 tons to 1,347,000 tons. The increased production of iron was brought about by a series of inventionsand discoveries, each onestimulating the other; this rapid use and stimulation of technical inventionsis, as we have already noted, one of the most important characteristics of the industrial revolution. Coke, which is akind of purified coal, was the first of these discoveries. Before the discovery of coke in 1709 by Abraham Darby, a Quaker ironmaster, charcoal had been used in the smelting ofiron. Charcoal is derived from wood, and since most of the forests of England had been cut by the eighteenth century, England was forced to import large amounts ofiron from Sweden and Russia, England, on the other hand, had huge coal deposits, and once coke had been discovered, England had all the fuel it needed for smelting iron. Now that coal became such a useful fuel, another problem immediately arose once the surface deposits of coal had been used up: the mines dug deep in the earth flooded easily, so that some kind of pump was, needed. Soon thereafter modern pumps were invented that could take the water out of the deep mines. Early coal mines. Notice the steam engine in the background, described by Charles Dickens as similar to “the head of an elephant in a state ofmelancholy madness”, 56‘The most important of these new pumps was that invented by ‘Thomas Neweomen in 1712. This new pump worked by blowing hot steam into a cylinder which was then cooled down with cold water, thereby creating a vacuum that pulled up a piston, For the first time in history, ‘man had at his disposal power much ‘greater than any horse or oxen could possibly supply. Infact 1712 is some- times given as the date for the beginning ofthe industrial revolution. By 1765 most collieries were using this pump. ‘The Newcomen pump, how: ever, had a number of problems. The firstwas the that the cylinderhad tobe constantly heated and cooled, which wasted alargeamountofenergy. James Watt, amakerofprecisioninstruments, developed a means of cooling the water outside the cylinder so as ‘to lessen the consumption ofteam, and consequently fe!” as he himself said. Later the same Watt developed a way of transforming the simple up and down motion of the piston into a rotary motion. These improvements made Watt’s engine useful in many industries. The first to use it was the iron manufacturer John Wilkinson. But by farthe most fruitful use ofthis new enginewasinthecottonindusty, where it was used to power spinning and weaving machines. Berween 1780 and 1812 the price of cotton yarn fell by 90 percent. Cotton became the first fabric cheaply available ona large scale ‘The next important use of the steam engine was in the area of transportation. Before theintroduction of tains and steamships, travel and the transport of goods was a long and difficult affaic. For example, it took three days fora stagecoach to get from London to Dover, a distance of 75 miles;andit tooktwoweeksto getftom London to Edinburgh, a distance of 450 miles. Some improvement in the transport of goods had been made during the last half of the eighteenth century with the construction of canals Butcanals were extremely expensive to build and could not be built every- ‘where. The railroad overcame all these difficulties. The first really practicable railwayengine, the Rocket, wasbuileby George Stephenson in 1829. The Rocket could pull 13 tons of coal ata speed of 29 miles per hour. In 1849 there were trains running between London and Bristol that travelled at 50 miles an hour. The train changed life considerably. First, itcovered the same distance in half an hour that a stage- coach had travelled in half a day. Second, it lowered the price of transporting goods drastically and consequently helped to climinate local ‘markets in England: the region that could producea product the cheapest would dominate all the others. Regions began to specialize in the production of particular goods Anotheruseofthesteamengine that was to ave similar effects on the economy was the steam boat. The first steam boat was built by Robert Fulton in 1807. [twas nor, however, till the 1870s that steamships began to make ocean voyages.