Industrial

revolution
Industrial revolution refers to
the vast social and economic
changes that resulted from
the development of steam-
powered machinery and
mass-production methods,
beginning in the late
eighteenth century in Great
Britain and extending through
the nineteenth century
elsewhere in the world.

[Academic Press Dictionary of

Science and Technology]
 When did it actually begin?
Towns and
Britain before Wealth was not
villages were
1750 equally
poorly
Britain was mainly an distributed
agricultural society.
connected
The roads were bad, The class system was
people travelled on foot strict. The aristocrats
People lived in rural or on horses, and that is were less than 1 % of the
areas, grew crops, kept why, they wouldn’t travel population but controlled
livestock, and farming far. 15% of the country’s
was their main economic wealth.
activity. Working day began at
sunrise, and ended at The were not involved in
Tools used were basic dusk. Life expectancy farming, trades and
and weren’t electrically was short. professions. They
powered. invested in land.
The
Enclosur
es
 Crop
rotation
IMPRO
VED
METHO
DS DUE
TO
DEVELOPMENTS IN AGRICULTURE
The Enclosures
Under the Enclosure Acts, land
which was owned by small
farmers was rounded up and given
to private landowners
IMPROVED METH
ODS DUE TO MA
CHINES
Machines ramped up efficiency,
Robert Bakewell began breeding
selective livestock in his property.
Crop ROTATION
Charles Townshend introduced
a four-field crop rotation
system.
AGRICULTURAL
REVOLUTION
All these developments led to an
agricultural revolution. Forests were
cleared large-scale production of food
grains began, and agriculture turned into a
business which only aimed at making
profits.
 It all began in Britain...In Phases:
But when did Other factors
it Actually that catalysed
begin? the
revolution
Colonialism
Why britain? as the
foundation
stone
Manchester, in South-east Lancashire, rapidly rose from obscurity to become the premier
center of cotton manufacture in England.

This was largely due to geography. Its famously damp climate was better for cotton
manufacture than the drier climate of the older eastern English cloth manufacture centers. It
was close to the Atlantic port of Liverpool (and was eventually connected by one of the
earliest rail tracks, as well as an Ocean ship capable canal.

It was also close to power sources - first the water power of the Pennine mountain chain,
and later the coal mines of central Lancashire. As a result, Manchester became perhaps the
first modern industrial city.
 factors that helped Britain (Summary)
High Coal
supplies
Helped power steam engines
explored sea routes, has a strong
Individual freedom
and capitalist spirit
People were free to explore
business prospects and there
was no high government
restriction.
Naval & Trading
power
Britain, an island nation, has
navy and has a strong fleet of
merchant navy.
Stable
government
Before the start of the IR,
Britain had enjoyed a
prolonged period without
much social/political
conflict, compared to many
others in Europe.
Significance of
EIC
The East India Company was
Britain’s largest merchant trading
company. At its peak, the EIC was the
wealthiest among smaller European
powers.
Superior banking system
and capital for
investment
Increased trade led to better banking and
financial systems including investment,
credit, and insurance.
• List at least 3 things you
notice about this painting.

• Based on this painting and

the description above,
describe what pre-industrial
agricultural work was like.

• What was life in Britain

before 1750 like?

• Historians believe that

colonialism proved to be of
huge benefit to Britain and
paved the way for the
Industrial Revolution. Do you
agree with this statement?
Justify your response.
INventions, impact &
Developments
What do you think
changed?
 Major AreAS OF IMPACT

COTTON,
AGRICULTUR WOOL & TRANSPORT
E IRON
PRODUCTION
The Flying Shuttle
Spinning
Jenny
Water frame + Spinning Mule

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7RAlNNgEQQ
BRITAIN’S ‘DARK
SATANIC MILLS’
 Mystery document
https://www.nationalarchives.g
ov.uk/education/families/time-t
ravel-tv/all-work-and-no-play/
Q. Use SOURCE 1 to
identify four dangerous or
unhealthy practices that
occurred in a typical
nineteenth- century textile
factory.
Q. From the sources,
identify two types of injury
or illness that factory
workers could suffer from.
Q. What evidence is there in
the sources that factory
workers were expected to
keep their machines
running at all times?
In 1833 Parliament passed a new Factory Act. Previous Acts had been restricted to the cotton
industry, but the 1833 Act also applied to the older woollen producing communities in and
around Yorkshire which had been ignored in previous legislation.

No children were to work in factories under the age of nine (though by this stage numbers
were few). A maximum working week of 48 hours was set for those aged 9 to 13, limited to
eight hours a day; and for children between 13 and 18 it was limited to 12 hours daily. The Act
also required children under 13 to receive elementary schooling for two hours each day.
QUICK SUMMARY OF INDUSTRIAL
REVOLUTION -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLhNP0qp38Q
The start of climate change, and global emissions began to rise with the Industrial Revolution. The
amount of carbon dioxide began to steadily increase throughout the Industrial Revolution, and those
emissions have been on the rise ever since – with the dramatic increase in greenhouse gas and carbon
dioxide emissions showing no signs of slowing down anytime soon. The problem with the Industrial
Revolution’s environmental impact, is that it wasn’t noticed until decades after the Industrial Revolution
had begun. It took years to notice signs of the consequences of industrialization on the planet – such as a
newfound depleting ozone layer, which wasn’t discovered by scientists until the 1980s.

The Industrial Revolution's environmental impact is known to be a bad one – with the increase of
production in wasteful and greenhouse gas emitting industries such as the plastic industry starting to
take flight during the Industrial Revolution. Industries such as the plastics industry have only been
catapulted since the Industrial Revolution, meaning it isn’t just emissions that have risen since the start
of the industrial revolution – the need for mass production and the accumulation of waste have also
increased dramatically since the start of the Industrial Revolution. The rise in single use plastics,
products, and mass production have resulted in excess waste in landfills and ultimately – even more
greenhouse gas emissions.

The industrial revolution’s environmental impact isn’t just limited to an uptick in global emissions – but
has raised the risk of exposure to new health problems with poor air quality due to industrialization, as
well as threatened biodiversity and the natural habitat of wildlife that helps the environment thrive.
As explained earlier, the industrial revolution set off a domino effect for more intensive
technology and mass production. While this can be viewed as a positive, by expanding
society and providing the resources necessary to help developing countries establish
themselves – the problem is that things like industrialization and urbanization weren’t
done sustainably. The industrial revolution’s environmental impact created a dependency
on finite resources like fossil fuel – something that many companies still in present day,
despite the now wide-availability of renewable energy resources, are having trouble
parting with. This new dependency, as well as a lack of awareness on what finite resources
were doing to the problem until the end of the 20th century – is what has encouraged
industrialization to continue at the rate it does today.

The lack of knowledge regarding the impact of industrialization fueled an increase in

emissions. For instance, the steam engine, created by James Watt who was dedicated to
improving the initial model proposed by Thomas Newcomen in the 18th century –
required an abundance of coal to be powered. The more factories that set out to use steam
engines, meant more coal needed to be provided. There was no way for people to realize
the use of a finite resource like coal would later be detrimental to the environment.
 ATTENTION!

In 1831 a terrifying new epidemic arrived in

London, bringing with it fear and panic—and a
sense of urgency about the city's sanitation
problems.
By the 1800s, London was the largest city in the world as a result of the social changes brought about by
industrialisation, such as mass migration from the countryside to the town. But London was a city
overwhelmed by the waste products of its ever-growing population, the majority of whom lived in the squalor of
overcrowded slums. Human waste piled up in courtyards and overflowed from basement cesspits into the
gutters and waterways. In such conditions diseases were inevitable. Outbreaks of diseases such as typhoid and
scarlet fever were common, but the arrival of cholera led to new investigation into sanitation and the causes of
disease.

In the steaming hot summer of 1858, the hideous stench of human excrement rising from the River Thames and
seeping through the hallowed halls of the Houses of Parliament finally got too much for Britain’s politicians –
those who had not already fled in fear of their lives to the countryside. Clutching hankies to their noses and
ready to abandon their newly built House for fresher air upstream, the lawmakers agreed urgent action was
needed to purify London of the “evil odour” that was commonly believed to be the cause of disease and death.
The outcome of the “Great Stink”, as that summer’s crisis was coined, was one of history’s most life-enhancing
advancements in urban planning. It was a monumental construction project that, despite being driven by dodgy
science and political self-interest, dramatically improved the public’s health and laid the foundation for modern
London.
You’ll see no sign of it on most maps of the capital or from a tour of the streets, but hidden beneath the
city’s surface stretches a wonder of the industrial world: the vast Victorian sewerage system that still flows
(and overflows) today. London is, of course, an ancient metropolis, but according to the city’s prolific
biographer Peter Ackroyd, the 19th century “was the true century of change”. And by the mid-1800s,
reform of the capital’s sanitation, like much else in the nation’s political and social life, was long overdue.

For centuries, the “royal river” of pomp and pageantry, the city’s main thoroughfare, had doubled as a
dumping ground for human, animal and industrial waste. As London’s population grew – and it more than
doubled between 1800 and 1850, making it by far the largest in the world – the build-up of waste itself
became a spectacle no one wanted to see, or smell it. The smell was so terrible that Parliament shut down, for
a time. With a lack of planned housing and infrastructure to support the crowded citizenry, increasingly
filthy streams, ditches and antiquated drainage pipes all bubbled into the Thames, where the waste simply
bobbed up and down with the tide. By 1855, the “silver Thames” has become“an opaque pale brown fluid”.
Dropping pieces of white paper into the river, people found that they disappeared from view before sinking
an inch below the surface.

“Through the heart of the town a deadly sewer ebbed and flowed, in the place of ‘Father Thames’” Charles
Dickens wrote in Little Dorrit (1855-57). The fetid fumes alone, it was thought, could strike a man dead.
What made the water lethal, however, was that a great many Londoners were drinking it piped directly
from the Thames. Even water pumped from outside the city risked contamination with sewage when it
reached the squalid streets, and the wells still in use lay dangerously close to leaking cesspools.
Other common
diseases
during the IR:

Dysentry, typhoid,
TB, smallpox,
diphtheria
In 1834, the humorist cleric Sydney Smith vividly described the unpalatable truth: “He who drinks a tumbler of
London water has literally in his stomach more animated beings than there are men, women and children on
the face of the globe.”

The result was successive waves of waterborne diseases such as dysentery, typhoid and,
most feared of all by mid-century, cholera. For this “Victorian plague”, as the historian Amanda J Thomas
characterises it, there was no known cure – whatever quacks claimed – and the wealthy were not immune. The
first major cholera epidemic in Britain, in 1831-32, killed more than 6,000 Londoners. The second, in 1848-49,
took more than 14,000. Another outbreak in 1853-54 claimed a further 10,000 lives.The Thames was the
people’s main source of drinking water but as it got polluted, cholera broke out in 1832 and remained for 22
years, claiming 35,000 lives. In the beginning, nobody was ready to believe that the deaths were happening
because of water. Instead, they blamed “miasma” or the bad smell in the atmosphere. The English physician
John Snow proved that cholera was spread by water, not the air. He traced the contamination to a water pump
at Broad Street in the Soho district and the outbreak was halted.

Up to this point, London had lacked a unified authority with the money required to address such an extensive
problem of sanitation on an effective scale. Now the recently formed Metropolitan Board of Works was
empowered to raise £3m and instructed to start work without further delay. The network included 82 miles of
new sewers, great subterranean boulevards that in places were larger than the underground train tunnels then
under construction.
Labor Unions and Reforms:

During the 1800s, working people began to demand reforms. Workers

joined together in voluntary labor associations called unions. A union
represented workers in a particular trade. Unions engaged in collective
bargaining as well as negotiations between workers and their employers.
Unions would ask for better working conditions, fewer hours, and higher
pay. One of the greatest tools of labor unions was worker-organized
strikes, refusing to work if demands were not met. Unions also lobbied
for laws to improve the lives of workers, including women and children.
By the 1830s and 1840s, U.S. governments began to pass laws protecting
workers. The earliest laws focused on helping child labors. Though it was
a very slow process, eventually laws would help all workers.
Healthcare: Due in part to the Edward Jenner’s invention of the
smallpox vaccine and Louis Pasteur’s discovery of bacteria, health
care increased, and people began to live longer.
Summary