INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

 Prior to the industrial revolution, a working person would be lucky to have one or two shirts. To have
fabric, there would be people who had to manually turn the spinning wheels and turn cotton, wool, and
etc. into thread that were made into somewhat like fabric.
 Fueled by the game-changing use of steam power, the Industrial Revolution began in Britain and
spread to the rest of the world, including the United States, by the 1830s and ‘40s. Modern
historians often refer to this period as the First Industrial Revolution, to set it apart from
a second period of industrialization that took place from the late 19th to early 20th centuries and
saw rapid advances in the steel, electric and automobile industries.  

 The Industrial Revolution marked a period of development in the latter half of the 18th century that
transformed largely rural, agrarian societies in Europe and America into industrialized, urban ones. 

Goods that had once been painstakingly crafted by hand started to be produced in mass quantities by
machines in factories, thanks to the introduction of new machines and techniques in textiles, iron making and
other industries.

Fueled by the game-changing use of steam power, the Industrial Revolution began in Britain and
spread to the rest of the world, including the United States, by the 1830s and ‘40s. Modern historians often
refer to this period as the First Industrial Revolution, to set it apart from a second period of
industrialization that took place from the late 19th to early 20th centuries and saw rapid advances in the steel,
electric and automobile industries. 

England: Birthplace of the Industrial Revolution

Thanks in part to its damp climate, ideal for raising sheep, Britain had a long history of
producing textiles like wool, linen and cotton. But prior to the Industrial Revolution, the British textile
business was a true “cottage industry,” with the work performed in small workshops or even homes by
individual spinners, weavers and dyers.

Starting in the mid-18th century, innovations like the flying shuttle, the spinning jenny, the water
frame and the power loom made weaving cloth and spinning yarn and thread much easier. Producing
cloth became faster and required less time and far less human labor.

More efficient, mechanized production meant Britain’s new textile factories could meet the
growing demand for cloth both at home and abroad, where the nation’s many overseas colonies
provided a captive market for its goods. In addition to textiles, the British iron industry also adopted
new innovations. 

Chief among the new techniques was the smelting of iron ore with coke (a material made by
heating coal) instead of the traditional charcoal. This method was both cheaper and produced higher-
quality material, enabling Britain’s iron and steel production to expand in response to demand created
by the Napoleonic Wars (1803-15) and the later growth of the railroad industry. 

Impact of Steam Power 

An icon of the Industrial Revolution broke onto the scene in the early 1700s, when Thomas
Newcomen designed the prototype for the first modern steam engine. Called the “atmospheric steam
engine,” Newcomen’s invention was originally applied to power the machines used to pump water out
of mine shafts. 

In the 1760s, Scottish engineer James Watt began tinkering with one of Newcomen’s models,
adding a separate water condenser that made it far more efficient. Watt later collaborated with
Matthew Boulton to invent a steam engine with a rotary motion, a key innovation that would allow
steam power to spread across British industries, including flour, paper, and cotton mills, iron works,
distilleries, waterworks and canals. 

Just as steam engines needed coal, steam power allowed miners to go deeper and extract
more of this relatively cheap energy source. The demand for coal skyrocketed throughout the
Industrial Revolution and beyond, as it would be needed to run not only the factories used to produce
manufactured goods, but also the railroads and steamships used for transporting them.
Transportation during the Industrial Revolution

Britain’s road network, which had been relatively primitive prior to industrialization, soon saw substantial
improvements, and more than 2,000 miles of canals were in use across Britain by 1815.

In the early 1800s, Richard Trevithick debuted a steam-powered locomotive, and in 1830 similar
locomotives started transporting freight (and passengers) between the industrial hubs of Manchester and
Liverpool. By that time, steam-powered boats and ships were already in wide use, carrying goods along
Britain’s rivers and canals as well as across the Atlantic.

Communication and Banking in the Industrial Revolution

The latter part of the Industrial Revolution also saw key advances in communication methods, as
people increasingly saw the need to communicate efficiently over long distances. In 1837, British inventors
William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone patented the first commercial telegraphy system, even as Samuel
Morse and other inventors worked on their own versions in the United States. Cooke and Wheatstone’s system
would be used for railroad signalling, as the speed of the new trains had created a need for more sophisticated
means of communication.

Banks and industrial financiers rose to new prominent during the period, as well as a factory system
dependent on owners and managers. A stock exchange was established in London in the 1770s; the New York
Stock Exchange was founded in the early 1790s.

In 1776, Scottish social philosopher Adam Smith (1723-1790), who is regarded as the founder of
modern economics, published The Wealth of Nations. In it, Smith promoted an economic system based on free
enterprise, the private ownership of means of production, and lack of government interference.

Working Conditions
Though many people in Britain had begun moving to the cities from rural areas before the Industrial
Revolution, this process accelerated dramatically with industrialization, as the rise of large factories turned
smaller towns into major cities over the span of decades. This rapid urbanization brought significant
challenges, as overcrowded cities suffered from pollution, inadequate sanitation and a lack of clean drinking
water.

Meanwhile, even as industrialization increased economic output overall and improved the standard of
living for the middle and upper classes, poor and working class people continued to struggle. The
mechanization of labor created by technological innovation had made working in factories increasingly tedious
(and sometimes dangerous), and many workers were forced to work long hours for pitifully low wages. Such
dramatic changes fueled opposition to industrialization, including the “Luddites,” known for their violent
resistance to changes in Britain’s textile industry.

Did you know? The word "luddite" refers to a person who is opposed to technological change. The term
is derived from a group of early 19th century English workers who attacked factories and destroyed machinery
as a means of protest. They were supposedly led by a man named Ned Ludd, though he may have been an
apocryphal figure.

In the decades to come, outrage over substandard working and living conditions would fuel the
formation of labor unions, as well as the passage of new child labor laws and public health regulations in both
Britain and the United States, all aimed at improving life for working class and poor citizens who had been
negatively impacted by industrialization.
The Industrial Revolution in the United States

The beginning of industrialization in the United States is usually pegged to the opening of a textile
mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, in 1793 by the recent English immigrant Samuel Slater. Slater had
worked at one of the mills opened by Richard Arkwright (inventor of the water frame) mills, and despite
laws prohibiting the emigration of textile workers, he brought Arkwright’s designs across the Atlantic. He
later built several other cotton mills in New England, and became known as the “Father of the American
Industrial Revolution.”

The United States followed its own path to industrialization, spurred by  innovations “borrowed”
from Britain as well as by homegrown inventors like  Eli Whitney. Whitney’s 1793 invention of the cotton
gin revolutionized the nation’s cotton industry (and strengthened the hold of slavery over the cotton-
producing South).

By the end of the 19th century, with the so-called  Second Industrial Revolution underway, the
United States would also transition from a largely agrarian society to an increasingly urbanized one, with
all the attendant problems. By the mid-19th century, industrialization was well-established throughout the
western part of Europe and America’s northeastern region. By the early 20th century, the U.S. had
become the world’s leading industrial nation.

Historians continue to debate many aspects of industrialization, including its exact timeline, why it
began in Britain as opposed to other parts of the world and the idea that it was actually more of a gradual
evolution than a revolution. The positives and negatives of the Industrial Revolution are complex. On one
hand, unsafe working conditions were rife and pollution from coal and gas are legacies we still struggle
with today. On the other, the move to cities and inventions that made clothing, communication and
transportation more affordable and accessible to the masses changed the course of world history.
Regardless of these questions, the Industrial Revolution had a transformative economic, social and
cultural impact, and played an integral role in laying the foundations for modern society.  
Socialism

Socialism describes any political or economic theory that says the community, rather than
individuals, should own and manage property and natural resources.

The term “socialism” has been applied to very different economic and political systems
throughout history, including utopianism, anarchism, Soviet communism and social democracy. These
systems vary widely in structure, but they share an opposition to an unrestricted market economy,
and the belief that public ownership of the means of production (and making money) will lead to
better distribution of wealth and a more egalitarian society.

How Socialism Emerged

The intellectual roots of socialism go back at least as far as ancient Greek times, when the
philosopher Plato depicted a type of collective society in his dialog,  Republic  (360 B.C.).  In 16th-
century England, Thomas More drew on Platonic ideals for his Utopia, an imaginary island where
money has been abolished and people live and work communally.

In the late 18th century, the invention of the steam engine powered the Industrial Revolution,
which brought sweeping economic and social change first to Great Britain, then to the rest of the
world. Factory owners became wealthy, while many workers lived in increasing poverty, laboring for
long hours under difficult and sometimes dangerous conditions.

Socialism emerged as a response to the expanding capitalist system. It presented an

alternative, aimed at improving the lot of the working class and creating a more egalitarian society. In
its emphasis on public ownership of the means of production, socialism contrasted sharply with
capitalism, which is based around a free market system and private ownership.

Utopian Socialism

Early socialists like Henri de Saint-Simon, Robert Owen and Charles Fourier offered up their own
models for social organization based on cooperation rather than competition. While Saint-Simon argued
for a system where the state controls production and distribution for the benefit of all society’s members,
both Fourier and Owen (in France and Britain, respectively) proposed systems based on small collective
communities, not a centralized state.

Owen, who had owned and operated textile mills in Lanark, Scotland, headed to the United States
in 1825 to launch an experimental community in New Harmony, Indiana. His planned commune was based
on the principles of self-sufficiency, cooperation and public ownership of property. The experiment soon
failed, and Owen lost much of his fortune. More than 40 small cooperative agricultural communities
inspired by Fourier’s theories, were founded across the United States. One of these, based in Red Bank,
New Jersey, lasted into the 1930s.

Influence of Karl Marx

It was Karl Marx, undoubtedly the most influential theorist of socialism, who called Owen, Fourier
and other earlier socialist thinkers “utopians,” and dismissed their visions as dreamy and unrealistic. For
Marx, society was made up of classes: When certain classes controlled the means of production, they
used that power to exploit the labor class.
 In their 1848 work The Communist Manifesto, Marx and his collaborator, Friedrich Engels, argued
that true “scientific socialism” could be established only after a revolutionary class struggle, with the
workers emerging on top.

Though Marx died in 1883, his influence on socialist thought only grew after his death. His ideas
were taken up and expanded upon by various political parties (such as the German Social Democratic
Party) and leaders like Vladimir Lenin and Mao Zedong.

Marx’s emphasis on the revolutionary clash between capital and labor came to dominate most
socialist thought, but other brands of socialism continued to develop. Christian socialism, or collective
societies formed around Christian religious principles. Anarchism saw not just capitalism but government
as harmful and unnecessary. Social democracy held that socialist aims could be achieved through gradual
political reform rather than revolution.

Socialism in the 20th Century

In the 20th century—particularly after the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the formation of the
Soviet Union—social democracy and communism emerged as the two most dominant socialist movements
throughout the world.

By the end of the 1920s, Lenin’s revolution-focused view of socialism had given way to the
foundation of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and its consolidation of absolute power
under Joseph Stalin. Soviet and other communists joined forces with other socialist movements in
resisting fascism. After World War II, this alliance dissolved as the Soviet Union established communist
regimes across Eastern Europe.

With the collapse of these regimes in the late 1980s, and the ultimate  fall of the Soviet Union itself
in 1991, communism as a global political force was greatly diminished. Only China, Cuba, North Korea,
Laos and Vietnam remain communist states.

Meanwhile, over the course of the 20th century, social democratic parties won support in many
European countries by pursuing a more centrist ideology. Their ideas called for a gradual pursuit of social
reforms (like public education and universal healthcare) through the processes of democratic government
within a largely capitalist system.

In the United States, the Socialist Party never enjoyed the same success as in Europe, reaching its
peak of support in 1912, when Eugene V. Debs won 6 percent of the vote in that year’s presidential
election. But social reform programs like Social Security and Medicare, which opponents once denounced
as socialist, became over time a well-accepted part of American society.

Some liberal politicians in the United States have embraced a variation on social democracy known
as democratic socialism. This calls for following socialist models in Scandinavia, Canada, Great Britain
and other nations, including single-payer health care, free college tuition and higher taxes on the wealthy.

On the other side of the political spectrum, conservative U.S. politicians often label such policies
as communist. They point to authoritarian socialist regimes such as that of Venezuela to raise concerns
about big government.

The wide range of interpretations and definitions of socialism across the political spectrum, and the
lack of a common understanding of what socialism is or how it looks in practice reflects its complicated
evolution. Nonetheless, socialist parties and ideas continue to influence policy in nations around the
world. And socialism’s persistence speaks to the enduring appeal of calling for a more egalitarian society.