Industrial Revolution

Industrial Revolution . The change that occurs in the Modern History of Europe which triggers the transition from an agrarian and artisan economy to one dominated by industry and mechanization.

Summary

[ disguise ]

• 1 Economic development
• 2 Causes
  • 1 Political factors
  • 2 Social and economic factors
• 3 Social changes
  • 1 Demographic growth
• 4 19th century
• 5 External links
• 6 Bibliography
• 7 Sources

Economic development

The term was coined by the historian Arnold Toynbee to refer to British economic development between 1760 and 1840 , although it has later been given a broader meaning. The main features of the Industrial Revolution should be classified as technological, socioeconomic and cultural. Technological changes include the following: the use of new materials such as iron and steel ; of new energy sources such as coal and new driving forces such as the Steam Engine . New machines will be invented for spinning (spinning jenny) or for weaving (the power loom) that allow an enormous increase in production with a minimum expenditure of human energy.

A new form of work organization (factory system) will emerge that involves the division of labor and greater specialization of the workforce. The important improvements in transportation ( trains and steamships ) and the growing interaction between science and industry should also be highlighted. These technological changes will mean a dizzying increase in the use of natural resources and the mass production of manufactured goods.

Outside the industrial field, important changes will also occur: improvements in agriculture that will make possible the supply of food for a growing urban population, decline of land as the main source of wealth with the growing role that industry and international trade will take on. Among the social and cultural changes, the growth of the urban population, the development of the so-called working class and its protest movements (the labor movement), and the spectacular growth of scientific and technical knowledge are notable. Industrialization has brought about the greatest change for humanity since the so-called “Neolithic Revolution”.

This page is not intended to be an exhaustive approach to the industrialization process, but rather a general overview that is useful for those who are dealing with or interested in this capital issue of our contemporary world for the first time. An attempt has been made to give a general vision of the Old Regime, above all so that the magnitude of the changes that industrialization entails can be understood. The causes of industrialization, a very controversial aspect among current and past scholars of the phenomenon, are treated in a synthetic and integrative way.

The agricultural and transport revolution aims to be a brief catalog of the main technical innovations in these sectors without exposing a too precise calendar or evaluating the economic and social impact of these new technologies. On the page dedicated to industrial sectors, a very classic approach is followed, dealing first with the textile sector and then with the steel sector. The section dedicated to social changes pays special attention to the birth of a new social group of industrial workers, their problems and the beginning of the labor movement. In the glossary section, an attempt has been made to expand information on social and economic concepts, as well as on some of the most influential technical innovations in this First Industrial Revolution.

Causes

The so-called Industrial Revolution had its origins in Great Britain in the mid- 18th century . One of the most discussed aspects of the study of this process lies in the explanation of why it took place first in Great Britain and not in other countries. It is therefore a matter of briefly reviewing the main features of this country at the time of the “takeoff” of the industrialization process. Below, some of the factors that explain this fact are presented schematically, seeking to establish comparisons with the situation of other countries in the European environment that will not begin their industrialization until well into the 19th century .

Political factors

A stable political regime, the liberal monarchy, which has been the prevailing political system since the 17th century (while in other European countries the absolute monarchy is reinforced), and which remains free of the revolutions that afflict other European countries. The numerous wars in which the United Kingdom was involved during the 18th and 19th centuries did not cause damage to British territory. Insularity acted in this sense as a protective barrier to which was added the development of a powerful war fleet that would maintain its world hegemony during the 18th and 19th centuries. The existence of a stable currency and an organized banking system: the Bank of England was created as early as 1694 . These conditions would not occur in other European countries until the end of the 18th century.

Social and economic factors

Abundance of capital, coming, in part, from the British commercial domain, since since the 17th century the British merchant navy, in tough competition with the Dutch, has taken control of a good part of the commercial exchanges of other continents with Europe. The trade in products such as tea or tobacco, and the slave trade, had allowed the creation of enormous fortunes, in the hands of merchants and bankers. This colonial trade provided Britain with raw materials and markets in which to sell its manufactured goods. Sustained increase in the capacity to produce food by British agriculture, which is experiencing an important development, the so-called agrarian revolution, since the approval of laws that allow the enclosure of properties. An abundant existence of hand work.

The British population is growing at a high rate mainly due to changes in agriculture: the constant and growing supply of food is ending demographic crises. Part of this growing population will migrate to the cities and form the mass of industrial workers. The greater economic freedom due to the relative weakness with respect to other countries of organizations such as guilds that represented a brake on any innovation in industrial activities. It is no coincidence that it was a British man, the Scotsman Adam Smith , author of The Wealth of Nations, who made the most outstanding and influential defense of economic freedom: the best way to use capital to create wealth is one in which Government intervention is as minimal as possible. The invisible hand of the market always allocates a country’s economic resources in the most efficient way. Abundance of entrepreneurs among merchants and large landowners.

An aristocracy that allows and rewards innovations and the creation of wealth, in contrast to the nobility of other countries, more traditional, attached to the land and which despises any form of productive work. Less weight of taxes on trade in the internal market: in Great Britain the weight of internal taxes was very low compared to other European countries where it was very common to find internal customs every few kilometers, which turned trade into an unproductive activity. It can be said that in Great Britain there was already a national market that in other countries will only exist when internal customs are eliminated and an important railway network is created. Geographic factors Abundance of iron and, above all, coal. Iron was found in the Pennine Mountains, while coal was abundant in England, Wales and Scotland . In fact, after three centuries of exploitation, Britain still has enormous coal reserves.

Much of the British industrial potential will be concentrated in the vicinity of the coal mines, especially with the birth of a strong basic steel industry to provide cheap metals for the construction of machines, railways , and infrastructure. Easy and constant supply of water as a source of energy, since the rainy climate, exceeding an average of 1,000 mm per year and without a dry season, provides numerous and constant water currents. Hydraulic power will play an important role in the years prior to the spread of the steam engine. The “insular” factor: abundance of ports that facilitate national and international trade. This factor, together with the existence of many navigable rivers (and canals that will be built), favored the very early creation of a national market with the advantages of having a large market when undertaking investments.

Changes in agriculture

For a long time the countryside was worked with very basic tools, most of the processes on the land were done almost manually and what was collected from the fields was for the farmers’ own consumption. The land had been exploited on an unfenced plot of common use, many lands were also used for livestock farming and how were the crops treated? With fairly basic tools that require a lot of labor, a significant number of people were involved in a single process in the field to be able to harvest the crops.

The Industrial Revolution arrived and transformed everything, it changed the way the countryside was worked until then, it brought with it important innovations that helped the development of the countryside and better agriculture. Let’s look at some more important innovations… The fields approached and what we call today as private property was established, the lands intended for free livestock farming disappeared, since livestock began to be raised in stables, in this way it became more efficient the processes in the field and began to get more benefits from agriculture .

Another very important improvement of the industrial revolution towards the countryside was that they introduced technical innovations that made the farmer’s work easier and more profitable; A job that was previously done by 10 people went to being done by just one person thanks to improvements in the tools that became more advanced.

Social changes

Population growth

Although industrialization will produce enormous transformations in British society such as the growth of the so-called bourgeois class , or the rural exodus as a result of the agrarian revolution, perhaps the two social phenomena most worthy of study are the spectacular demographic growth and the birth of a new and massive working class formed by the workers of the new industries. Industrialization will cause population growth unprecedented in the history of humanity known as the Demographic Revolution . Changes in industry, agriculture and transportation produced a spectacular increase in wealth (which fundamentally translates into better nutrition) which was reflected in a notable growth in the population that will serve to multiply the inhabitants of Europe in a very few years. and even to populate other continents with emigrants.

The reduction of some of the most fearsome epidemics that had plagued Europe for centuries, certain sanitary and hygienic improvements (such as the discovery of the first vaccine by Dr. Edward Jenner in 1796 that protected against smallpox ) and, above all, better nutrition with the end of subsistence crises, are among the causes of this demographic growth. This strong and sustained population increase explains the enormous growth of British cities throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. The living conditions of the workers. Precisely in some of these cities, with rapid, disorderly and uncritical growth, huge overcrowded, dirty and conflictive suburbs will emerge where typhus or cholera epidemics become commonplace. These suburbs often arose around a factory: they were made up of the barracks where the workers of that factory lived.

Without entering into the well-known debate of whether industrialization improved or worsened the living conditions of the workers, we can try to describe the situation in which these workers lived, which can generally be described as very bad, just as their working conditions would have been They have to be described as horrible: dirty, humid, dark, poorly ventilated and noisy factories (conditions caused by the presence of steam engines and the employers’ lack of concern for the working conditions of their employees). In these unhealthy and dangerous factories, it was common for workers to spend twelve to fourteen hours a day, even working full-time on Saturdays, and until noon on Sundays. The concentration of workers in factories is what makes it possible for these workers to become aware of their situation and see that through collective actions they could try to improve their living conditions. The factory system is therefore at the origin of the labor movement.

Industrialization also promoted the work of women and very young children, because if before in many jobs the strength of the worker was a key factor, now the strength is provided by machines. Businessmen encouraged child and female labor because women and children received salaries two and three times lower than those of men. Children were employed in the textile industry, in the mines, in the steel industry: during the 18th century there were no regulations regulating child employment. To get an idea of ​​the dimensions reached by this exploitation, it is enough to cite the existence of a law of the British Parliament that in 1833 (The Factory Act, 1833) left the working day of children between nine and thirteen years old at “only” nine hours. daily, and from thirteen to eighteen years old, work was set at ten and a half hours (the day lasted twelve hours for them, but with an hour and a half reserved for meals).

Still in 1891, a law that sought to combat abuses in child exploitation was limited to raising the minimum working age from ten to eleven years. In fact, social concerns were barely detected during the second half of the 18th century because these conditions were accepted as normal. Already in the 19th century, parliamentary investigations, union protests or well-known stories such as Dickens’s in Hard Times revealed the harshness of the life of industrial workers. WORKER PROTESTS . Although since the beginning of industrialization there has been notable opposition from artisan workers to the introduction of machines, the first forms of worker protest were detected in Great Britain in the second decade of the 19th century when the well-known Luddite Movement (or Luddism ) emerged. , a name derived from a real or invented character, a worker , Ned Ludd , leader of this protest movement that was channeled towards the destruction of machinery, and that would soon spread through several counties in England where the textile industry had become in the main manufacturing.

The Napoleonic Wars of later years sparked new Luddite protests on several occasions. The so-called Chartist Movement is a more organized version of the Labor Movement that developed between 1837 and the mid-19th century. It owes its name to the so-called People’s Charter, a document that obtained the signature of hundreds of thousands of workers and which was a petition submitted to Parliament in which Universal Suffrage, the secret vote, equality in the value of the votes. In short, it revealed the desire for democratization of the British political system: the labor movement wants to participate in the political game and from there, by presenting laws in Parliament, improve the living conditions of industrial workers.

From the middle of the century the movement will progressively lose strength, although paradoxically, in later years, the British Parliament will adopt most of the requests included in the People’s Charter. It must be remembered that British legislation (laws passed in 1799 and 1800) strictly prohibited the formation of workers’ associations, since it was considered that these associations clashed with the spirit of economic liberalism: it should be the market that set wages and not pressure from unions. But despite these legal obstacles, various forms of labor associations emerged, supported by the fees paid by workers and which sought, above all, to offer protection for members in the event of an accident or illness.

XIX century

In the second half of the 19th century, a profound transformation of the economic structure began in England, which brought about the transformation of the social and political structure of the country, later spreading to several countries in Europe. We are talking about neither more nor less than the Industrial Revolution, a process that was supported by three major events: population growth, incorporation of raw materials in production and the discovery of new energy sources that facilitated the production of said raw materials. Added to these events are other issues relevant to the revolution: Growth and development of techniques, accumulation of capital to invest, application of new agricultural techniques, growth of investments, emergence of new farming systems, new agricultural machinery such as the seeder. mechanics and new chemical techniques to improve soil composition.

In addition, domestic and foreign trade is growing: agricultural owners begin to project their sales to other regions and countries, English businessmen were very excited by the advances and began to invest more and more, and the appearance of new sources of energy made The revolution is imminent. One of the most important Marxist historians of the 20th century, Eric Hosbawm , stated in his book “The Age of Revolutions” that the immediate driving force of the Industrial Revolution had been the cotton industry. This sector, along with the steel industry, was one of the first to revolutionize its technology at the end of the 18th century . The great changes in the cotton industry meant abundant raw materials, which in turn were more than cheap, and also the renewal of techniques that allowed greater industrial concentration. For this reason, cotton was considered the first raw material of England.

As far as transportation was concerned, there were innovations galore. New railway tracks were created , the steam carriage and the first passenger train appeared in 1830 , which ran through Manchester to Liverpool. In river transportation it also had its advances, building a new network of canals throughout almost the entire country. The Revolution, as we mentioned at the beginning, modified the entire social system of England. The classes changed: class society appeared, whose top would be occupied by the rich: the bourgeoisie and the popular classes would be dominated by the workers, whose working conditions were deplorable. This last point was propaedeutic for the Revolution to reach its most fervent stage, which caused revolts and protests, strikes and disorder in the streets, however that was not enough for years later to constitute monopoly capitalism , which, made up of large businessmen, began to dominate the economy not only in England, but also in Europe.