THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

■ The Industrial Revolution was a global phenomenon marked by the transition to new manufacturing processes
in the period from about 1760 to 1840. Though the United States borrowed significantly from Europe’s
technological advancements during the Industrial Revolution, American inventors contributed to this
international period of economic and industrial growth.
■ Increased automation and mechanization, facilitated by new machine tools and interchangeable parts,
revolutionized manufacturing, particularly in the textile industry.
■ Improved transportation networks and swelling urban populations also allowed for the expansion of domestic
markets.
■ The unprecedented levels of production in domestic manufacturing and commercial agriculture during this
period greatly strengthened the American economy and reduced dependence on imports.
■ The Industrial Revolution resulted in greater wealth and a larger population in Europe as well as in the United
States.
■ Of all the changes, perhaps the most revolutionary came at the very root of human endeavor: new forms of
energy. Over the space of two or three generations, a society and an economy that had drawn on water, wind,
and wood for most of its energy needs came to depend on machines driven by steam engines and coal. In
1800, the world produced ten million tons of coal. In 1900, it produced one billion: a hundred times more. The
Industrial Revolution brought the beginning of the fossil-fuel age, altering as it did so the balance of humanity
and the environment.
■ This revolution did not lie solely in machines but in a new economic system based on mobilizing capital and
labor on a much larger scale. The industrious economy redistributed wealth and power, creating new social
classes and producing new social tensions.
■ The dramatic changes of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries emerged out of earlier
developments. Overseas commercial exploration opened new territories to European trade. India, Africa, and
the Americas had already been brought into the web of the European economy. Expanding trade networks
created new markets for goods and sources for raw materials, and the need to organize commerce over long
distances fostered financial innovations and sophisticated credit schemes for managing risk. These
developments paved the way for industrialization.
■ Because these earlier developments did not affect all areas in Europe the same way, industrialization did not
always follow the same pattern across the Continent. It happened first in Great Britain, and that is where we
will begin.
The Industrial Revolution in Great Britain, 1760–1850
■ Great Britain in the eighteenth century had a fortunate combination of natural, economic, and cultural
resources. It was a small and secure island nation with a robust empire and control over crucial lanes across
the oceans. It had ample supplies of coal, rivers, and a well-developed network of canals.
■ In addition, agriculture in Britain was already more thoroughly commercialized than elsewhere. British
agriculture had been transformed by a combination of new techniques, new crops, and by the “enclosure” of
fields and pastures, which turned small holdings, and in many cases commonly held lands, into large fenced
tracts that were privately owned and individually managed by commercial landlords.
■ A key precondition for industrialization, therefore, was Britain’s growing supply of available capital, in the
forms of private wealth and well-developed banking and credit institutions. London had become the leading
center for international trade, and the city was a headquarters for the transfer of raw material, capital, and
manufactured products throughout the world.
■ The British possessed a merchant marine capable of transporting goods around the world and a navy practiced
in the art of protecting its commercial fleets. By the 1780s, Britain’s markets, together with its fleet and its
established position at the center of world commerce, gave its entrepreneurs unrivaled opportunities for trade
and profit.
The Industrial Revolution: Textile Industry
■ The Industrial Revolution began with dramatic technological leaps in a few industries, the first of which was
cotton textiles.
■ In 1733, John Kay’s invention of the flying shuttle speeded the process of weaving. The task of spinning
thread, however, had not kept up. A series of comparatively simple mechanical devices eliminated this
spinning-to-weaving bottleneck.
■ The most important device was the spinning jenny, invented by James Hargreaves, a handloom weaver, in
1764. The spinning jenny was a compound spinning wheel capable of producing sixteen threads at once—
though the threads were not strong enough to be used for the longitudinal fibers, or warp, of cotton cloth.
■ The invention of the water frame by Richard Arkwright, a barber, in 1769, made it possible to produce both
warp and woof (latitudinal fibers) in great quantity. In 1799 Samuel Compton invented the spinning mule,
which combined the features of both the jenny and the frame.
 ■ Last, the cotton gin, invented by the American Eli Whitney in 1793, mechanized the process of separating
cotton seeds from the fiber, thereby speeding up the production of cotton and reducing its price.
■ All of these important technological changes were accomplished by the end of the eighteenth century.
The Industrial Revolution: Coal and Iron
■ A series of innovations (coke smelting, rolling, and puddling) enabled the British to substitute coal (which
they had in abundance) for wood (which was scarce and inefficient) to heat molten metal and make iron. The
new “pig iron” was higher quality and could be used in building an enormous variety of iron products:
machines, engines, railway tracks, agricultural implements, and hardware. Those iron products became,
literally, the infrastructure of industrialization.
■ Rising demand for coal required mining deeper veins. In 1711, Thomas Newcomen had devised a
cumbersome but remarkably effective steam engine for pumping water from mines. Though it was immensely
valuable to the coal industry, its usefulness in other industries was limited by the amount of fuel it consumed.
In 1763, James Watt improved on Newcomen’s machine, and by 1800, Watt and his partner, Matthew
Boulton, had sold 289 engines for use in factories and mines.
■ Steam power was still energy consuming and expensive and so only slowly replaced traditional water power.
Even in its early form, however, the steam engine decisively transformed the nineteenth-century world with
one application: the steam-driven locomotive. Railroads revolutionized industry, markets, public and private
financing, and ordinary people’s conceptions of space and time.
The Coming of Railways
■ Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway (1844)  is one of JMW Turner’s masterpieces in which
water, land, sky and a man-made symbol of industrialization come together in a tight frame. A hazy
atmosphere caused by lashing rain over foggy clouds of steam from the speeding train presented an
intimidating scenario at the time. The vanishing perspective employed by Turner provides an interesting view
to the painting. All the elements in the painting blend and merge into one another – except for the train that
stands out like an iron beast in yellow-blue-gray background.
■ Transportation had improved during the years before 1830, but moving heavy materials, particularly coal,
remained a problem. It is significant that the first modern railway, built in England in 1825, ran from the
Durham coal field of Stockton to Darlington, near the coast. Coal had traditionally been hauled short distances
via tramways, or tracks along which horses pulled coal carts. The locomotives on the Stockton-Darlington line
traveled at fifteen miles per hour, the fastest rate at which machines had yet moved goods overland. Soon they
would move people as well, transforming transportation in the process.
■ Throughout the world, a veritable army of construction workers built the railways. In Britain, they were called
“navvies,” derived from navigator, a term first used for the construction workers on Britain’s eighteenth-
century canals. Navvies were a rough lot, living with a few women in temporary encampments as they
migrated across the countryside. Often they were immigrant workers and faced local hostility. Later in the
century railway building projects in Africa and the Americas were lined with camps of immigrant Indian and
Chinese laborers.
■ Steam engines, textile machines, new ways of making iron, and railways—all these were interconnected.
Changes in one area endorsed changes in another. Pumps run by steam engines made it possible to mine
deeper veins of coal; steam-powered railways made it possible to transport coal. Mechanization fueled the
production of iron for machines and the mining of coal to run steam engines. The railway boom multiplied the
demand for iron products: rails, locomotives, carriages, signals, switches, and the iron to make all of these.
Building railroads called for engineering expertise: scaling mountains, designing bridges and tunnels. Railway
construction, which required capital investment beyond the capacity of any single individual, forged new
kinds of public and private financing. The scale of production expanded and the tempo of economic activity
quickened, spurring the search for more coal, the production of more iron, the mobilization of more capital,
and the recruitment of more labor. Steam and speed were becoming the foundation of the economy and of a
new way of life.
The Industrial Revolution in Continent
■ Continental Europe followed a different path. Eighteenth-century France, Belgium, and Germany did have
manufacturing districts in regions with raw materials, access to markets, and long-standing traditions of craft
and skill. Yet for a variety of reasons, changes along the lines seen in Britain did not occur until the 1830s.
■ France was far larger than England: its rivers more difficult to navigate; its seaports, cities, and coal deposits
farther apart. Much of central Europe was divided into small principalities, each with its own tolls and tariffs,
which complicated the transportation of goods over any considerable distance. The Continent had fewer raw
materials, coal in particular, than Britain.
■ Capital, too, was less readily available. Early British industrialization was underwritten by private wealth; this
was less feasible elsewhere. Different patterns of landholding formed obstacles to the commercialization of
agriculture. In the East, serfdom was a powerful disincentive to labor-saving innovations. In the West,
especially in France, the large number of small peasants, or farmers, stayed put on the land.
 ■ The wars of the French Revolution and Napoleon disrupted economies. During the eighteenth century, the
population had grown and mechanization had begun in a few key industries. The ensuing political upheaval
and the financial strains of warfare did virtually nothing to help economic development. Napoleon’s
Continental System and British destruction of French merchant shipping hurt commerce badly.
■ After 1815, a number of factors combined to change the economic climate. In those regions with a well-
established commercial and industrial base—the northeast of France, Belgium, and swaths of territory across
the Rhineland, Saxony, Silesia, and northern Bohemia —population growth further boosted economic
development.
■ In what other ways was the continental model of industrialization different? Governments played a
considerably more direct role in industrialization. France and Prussia granted subsidies to private companies
that built railroads. After 1849, the Prussian state took on the task itself, as did Belgium and, later, Russia. In
Prussia, the state also operated a large proportion of that country’s mines. Governments on the Continent
provided incentives for industrialization. Limited liability laws, to take the most important example, allowed
investors to own shares in a corporation or company without becoming liable for the company’s debts—and
they enabled enterprises to recruit investors to put together the capital for railroads, other forms of industry,
and commerce.
■ Finally, continental Europeans actively promoted invention and technological development. They were
willing for the state to establish educational systems whose aim, among others, was to produce a well-trained
elite capable of assisting in the development of industrial technology. In sum, what Britain had produced
almost by chance, the Europeans began to reproduce by design.
Industrialization after 1850
■ Until 1850 Britain remained the preeminent industrial power. Between 1850 and 1870, however, France,
Germany, Belgium, and the United States emerged as challengers to the power and place of British
manufacturers. The British iron industry remained the largest in the world (in 1870 Britain still produced half
the world’s pig iron), but it grew more slowly than did its counterparts in France or Germany.
■ The first phase of the Industrial Revolution, one economic historian reminds us, was confined to a narrow set
of industries and can be summed up rather simply: “cheaper and better clothes (mainly made of cotton),
cheaper and better metals (pig iron, wrought iron, and steel) and faster travel (mainly by rail).”
■ The second half of the century brought changes farther afield and in areas where Great Britain’s early
advantages were no longer decisive. Transatlantic cable (starting in 1865) and the telephone (invented in
1876) laid the ground for a revolution in communications. New chemical processes, dyestuffs, and
pharmaceuticals emerged. So did new sources of energy: electricity, in which the United States and Germany
led both invention and commercial development; and oil, which was being refined in the 1850s and widely
used by 1900. Among the early exploiters of Russian oil discoveries were the Swedish Nobel brothers and the
French Rothschilds. The developments that eventually converged to make the automobile came primarily
from Germany and France.
Effects of the Industrial Revolution
■ The Industrial Revolution marked a major turning point in history. During this period, the average income and
population began to exhibit unprecedented, sustained growth. In the two centuries following the 1800s, the
world’s average per capita income increased more than tenfold, while the world’s population increased more
than six fold.
■ The profound economic changes sweeping the United States led to equally important social and cultural
transformations. The formation of distinct classes, especially in the rapidly industrializing North, was one of
the most striking developments. The unequal distribution of newly created wealth spurred new divisions along
class lines.
■ Each class had its own specific culture and views on the issue of slavery. The elite lived and socialized apart
from members of the growing middle class. The middle class valued work, consumption, and education and
dedicated their energies to maintaining or advancing their social status. Wage workers formed their own
society in industrial cities and mill villages, though lack of money and long working hours effectively
prevented the working class from consuming the fruits of their labor, educating their children, or advancing up
the economic ladder.
Industrialization and the Environment
■ During the Industrial Revolution, environmental pollution increased with the use of new sources of fuel, the
development of large factories, and the rise of unsanitary urban centers. The Industrial Revolution brought
enormous advances in productivity, but with steep environmental costs.
■ Fossil Fuels: Fossil fuels powered the Industrial Revolution. In 1790, anthracite coal was first discovered in
what is now known as the Coal Region of Pennsylvania. A harder and high-quality form of coal, anthracite
soon became the primary source of fuel in the United States for domestic and industrial use. It fueled factory
furnaces, steam-powered boats, and machinery. The consumption of immense quantities of coal and other
fossil fuels eventually gave rise to unprecedented air pollution.
 ■ Modern Cities and Sanitation: The environmental effects of industrialization were especially concentrated in
cities. Unsanitary conditions and overcrowding afflicted many American cities, where outbreaks of disease,
including cholera and typhoid, were common. Untreated human waste was a major environmental hazard as
rapidly growing cities lacked sewer systems and relied on contaminated wells within city confines for
drinking water supplies.
■ The Urban Landscape: The growth of cities was one of the most important facts of nineteenth-century social
history, and one with significant cultural reverberations. Over the course of the nineteenth century, as we have
seen, the overall population of Europe doubled. Such rapid expansion was almost necessarily unplanned and
brought in its wake new social problems. Almost all nineteenth-century cities were overcrowded and
unhealthy, their largely medieval infrastructures strained by the burden of new population and the demands of
industry.
The Industrial Revolution and Nineteenth-Century Society
■ Industrialization put Europe on the path to a new form of economic development, based on the concentration
of labor and production in areas with easy access to new sources of energy. This led to rapid growth of new
industrial cities and the development of new transportation links to connect industrial centers to growing
markets.
■ Industrialization created new social groups in society, defined less by their status at birth than by their place in
the new economy. Workers faced new kinds of discipline in the workplace, and women and children entered
the new industrial workforce in large numbers. A new elite, made up of businessmen, entrepreneurs, bankers,
engineers, and merchants, emerged as the primary beneficiaries of industrialization.
■ Population increases in the countryside spurred migration to cities. In the new urban centers, laborers and the
middle classes did not mix socially. They adopted different dress and speech, had different leisure activities,
and also had significantly different opportunities when it came to marriage, sex, family life, and the raising of
children.