The Industrial Revolution in Britain
Focus question: Why did the IR begin in Britain, and how did it develop between 1780 and
1850?
Number of factors came together to give rise to the IR:
1. The Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment had fostered a new world view that
embraced progress and the importance of research and innovation.
Britain’s intellectual culture supported and encouraged the sharing of knowledge.
2. The expanding Atlantic economy and trade with India and China served Britain well. their
economic empire enforced a strong trading position and provided a growing market for
British goods.
3. Agriculture was prosperous, leading to an abundance of crops.
4. The average family could afford more, because food prices went down. This increased
demand for luxury goods and allowed children to enjoy education.
5. Britain benefited from rich natural sources and a well-developed infrastructure.
6. The British state adopted aggressive tariffs, in order to accommodate mercantilism.
Cotton factories
First decisive breakthrough: invention of the world’s first machine-powered factories in the
cotton industry.
Brits could not compete with the cotton textiles from India and China, so they had to find a
way to make the production process cheaper.
Spinning Jenny (Hargreaves in 1765) and water frame (Arkwright in 1765) revolutionized
the textile making process. The spinning jenny was an inexpensive spinning machine that
could be powered by a single person. The water frame needed water power and required a
specialized water mill.
Because adults were reluctant to work in the poor conditions of a cotton factory, its owners
often turned to young children and saved money on wages.
Steam power
Along with all the innovation, a dependence on energy from wood remained.
Wood was needed to produce iron, and with cast woods, Russia was the leading producer.
James Watt made an already existing model of the steam engine a practical success. The
application of the steam engine on the iron production made iron much more malleable and
increased its commercial value.
The first locomotive (Rocket by George Stephenson) went from Liverpool to Manchester.
The cost and uncertainty of shipping over land was dramatically reduced this way. Markets
could grow larger.The growing demand for unskilled labour to build train tracks grew and
with it a class of urban workers.
Population growth
,The population, wages and production output grew dramatically during the IR. This
development was essential to maintaining economic success, because it ensured a labour
force and constant demand.
This growth was not always considered good. Malthus: “Population increases beyond the
means of subsistence. This subjects the lower classes of society to distress and prevents
any permanent improvement to these conditions.”
Iron law of wages: because of the pressure of population growth, wages would always sink
to the subsistence level (=how much a worker needs to keep from starvation).
These theories were eventually proven wrong, due to the amazing force of industrialization.
However, it did seem that population and economic growth were both racing neck and neck,
with no clear winner.
A problem that did clearly emerge was with the distribution of the newfound wealth.
Industrialization in Europe and the World
Focus question: How did countries in Europe and around the world respond to the challenge
of industrialization?
As GB was industrializing, many other countries followed and emulated the British model.
Europe was closely following GB, until the political tremor of the Napoleonic wars, after
which continental Europe lost its position.
Their advantages were the rich tradition of putting-out-industry and the fact that they did not
need to invent any new technology, since GB had already done that. Western countries also
had strong independent governments.
GB tried to prevent this by forbidding the transport of skilled mechanics and equipment to
leave the country. This did happen however and so the industrialization was spread
throughout Europe.
To protect continental economies from the flood of British goods, governments used tariff
protection.
Belgian banks were offered limited liability by the government, allowing them to make riskier
investments, such as in industrialization, which hadn’t been done before.
In the 1870s, some countries had been closing the gap between GB and the continent.
In the rest of the world, imperial control, independence wars and rural servitude made
industrialization an impossible task.
New patterns of working and living
Focus question: How did working evolve during the IR and how did daily life change for
working people?
LIving conditions usually stagnated or deteriorated around 1850.
Workers were not excited to work in factories, with long hours, strict demands, corporal
punishment and no freedom to work in their own way. This reluctance caused factory owners
to turn to pauper children to substitute his workforce. In1802, the use of children was
regulated by Parliament in the Factory Acts. After this, familied did not work together as a
,unit anymore, causing a new sexual division of labour. Men became the family’s earner,
because women were denied high wages. They had to look after the household. These
separate spheres had various consequences:
● Married women were less likely to work a full-time job.
● When married women did work, they usually came from the poorest families, where
the husbands were underpaid, sick, unemployed or missing.
● These poor married women were joined by unmarried women to work in underpaying
jobs in the textile industry or laundering.
● All women were generally confined to low-paying, dead-end jobs.
Because conditions in factories were so bad, women with small children or pregnant women
had strong incentives to stay home if they could. The clock and machinery could not be
combined with childcare.
Secondly, the household was an enormous task back then.
Third, because of emerging gender segregation and inequality, women could only work jobs
deemed women’s jobs. Usually low-paying. This sexual division was an effort to control the
baby boom that emerged from young people working alongside each other with little
supervision in the mines.
There was a lot of sexual aggression in the coal industry, because many people worked
without clothing, due to the heat.
The Mines Act of 1842 prohibited underground work for all women and girls and boys under
10.
Workers had to work more and received very little extra pay. The pay raises were also offset
by the decline in labor for children and married women, causing the actual purchasing power
to not grow.
The child mortality rate rose after 1825.
Many rural communities were destroyed as young people moved away to the cities to find
jobs.
Relations Between Capital and Labor
Focus question: How did the changes brought about by the IR lead to new social classes
and how did people respond to the new structure?
As factories and firms grew larger, opportunities declined, because it became harder to start
a small enterprise. In 1860, leading industrialists were more likely to have inherited their
enterprise. The wives and daughters of these entrepreneurs were not valued for their
contributions to the family business, but for their ladylike gentility.
Critics of the IR
Romantic poets William Blake protested the London way of life. Wordsworth lamented the
destruction of rural life.
The Luddites attacked factories and opposed industrialization, which was putting them out
of work. According to Engels and Marx, the new poverty was worse than the rural poverty,
and the culprit was industrial capitalism.
, People began to be aware of the different classes and their position among them. This
class-consciousness was often determined by their relationship to the means of
production.
Rural employment was still the most common. Domestic service was the second largest
category, with mostly women in it. Familiar jobs lived on and provided alternatives to factory
work.
Protests to capitalism became more frequent and the Combination Acts were passed,
outlawing strikes and unions. This capitalist attack on working traditions and rules were
resented by artisan workers. The Acts were widely ignored, and eventually repealed by
Parliament.
Robert Owen was a cotton manufacturer who maintained strict rules, with regard to safety,
health and humane hours. He tried to organize a national union.
After the collapse of his efforts, many workers started their own unions or engaged in
political activity, trying to limit work days, make cheap bread available and allowing universal
suffrage.
Slavery
The impacts of slavery in the British colony were bigger than its direct profits. The demand
for British goods in the Caribbean rose, so they could be traded for luxury items. The slave
trade also led to the development of finance and credit institutions. Slave trade had also
provided necessary infrastructure for industrial trade. Most of the cotton processed by GB
was farmed by slaves in South America, even though GB abolished slave trade in 1807.
