INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION. 
To the end of the early modern period, Europe remained a preindustrial society. Its manufactured goods came from small workshops, and most of its machinery was powered by animals, wind, falling water, or human labor. These two facts reinforced each other, and together they constricted Europe's economic development. Water-powered manufacturing, for instance, could develop only in favored regions and remained constantly subject to weather-related interruptions; with limited supplies of power, there was little reason to concentrate manufacturing processes in large workshops. By 1850, however, these descriptions no longer applied to large areas of western Europe, and by 1914 the European economy as a whole was dominated by large factories, many of them employing thousands of workers. Both manufacturing and transportation now relied on steam power, and gasoline and electric motors were becoming common. The quantity and variety of goods manufactured rose accordingly, a transformation suggested by the development of the British iron industry:Britain produced about 30,000 tons of pig iron in 1760, about one million tons in 1810. Contemporary awareness of change advanced even more quickly than the reality. In his 1848Manifesto of the Communist Party, written at a time when most Europeans still worked in agriculture and when even British manufacturing was still evenly divided between factories and small workshops, Karl Marx (18181883) presented industrialization as the obvious destiny of all European society. The rapidity of these changes and their far-reaching effects amply justify historians' designation of the period as the "industrial revolution." In the century after 1780, European life was transformed.
Industrialization thus numbers among the most important processes that brought the early modern period to a close, and as such it raises important questions about the period itself. Signs of dramatic economic and technological change were already apparent in later eighteenth-century Britain, prompting historians to ask how this phase of rapid change could have emerged from the relatively stable early modern economy and why it emerged first in Britain. More broadly, historians have asked why Europe industrialized ahead of other regions of the globe, and what contributions Europe's empires in the Americas and elsewhere made to its industrialization. Answers to these questions have been varied and surprising. Though the concept of industrialization itself remains unchallenged, recent historical research has overturned much conventional wisdom about how the process took place.

MANUFACTURING BEFORE INDUSTRIALIZATION

Though it lacked factories and steam engines, pre-industrial Europe did not have a static economy, and manufacturing counted for a significant share of its total economic activityabout one-fourth of France's gross national product and almost 40 percent of Britain's in the early eighteenth century, one historian has estimated. In some regions, such as the Netherlandsand northern Italy, the percentages might have been even higher, but the difficulties of early modern transportation meant that manufacturing was widely dispersed; with transportation costs high, producers had a strong incentive to establish their workshops near the sources of their raw materials and to focus on meeting the needs of regional markets. Despite this fragmentation, early modern producers regularly introduced new products and adopted new techniques. In the thirteenth century, for instance, Italian craftsmen learned how to make silk cloth, and their techniques spread north of the Alps in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, so that by the eighteenth century the French city of Lyon numbered several thousand silk weavers. The technology of silk weaving changed as well, most dramatically with the invention of the Jacquard loom in the 1720s. The new loom had mechanical codes that governed the weaving process, allowing a relatively unskilled weaver to produce a complex product. In an early version of a process that would be frequently repeated during the industrial revolution, the balance between machine and worker had shifted; knowledge could be embedded in the machine, rendering differences among workers less important. Likewise, calico cloths fromIndia created a sensation when first introduced in later seventeenth-century England. They were quickly imitated by British manufacturers, who effectively established an altogether new industry.
A stream of inventions thus changed manufacturing over the early modern period, but the most important changes that the period witnessed had to do with the organization of work rather than its technology. Most European cities restricted manufacturing work, limiting access to some trades so that those already established in them could continue to enjoy respectable incomes and controlling the amounts that workshops might produce to prevent any one manufacturer from acquiring too dominant a position. Impatient with such restrictions, from the seventeenth century on, merchants in many regions organized new forms of production in the countryside. Labor there was cheap and abundant since contemporary agriculture left many peasants underemployed, and economic restrictions were weak. Cloth merchants were especially well placed to take advantage of this opportunity. They supplied villagers with raw materials, transported goods from one stage of production to the next, and finally marketed the finished product, taking as well the largest share of the profits. Other goods too could be manufactured in this way: in eastern France and Switzerland, merchants organized clock making on these lines. By the mid-eighteenth century, the balance between agriculture and manufacturing had shifted in many regions; for most villagers, farm work had become a supplemental source of income, and they relied mainly on spinning, weaving, and other artisanal activities for their livelihoods.
Historians have applied several names to this process. The term cottage industry accurately captures the fact that this system of manufacturing left unchanged the basic conditions of its workers' lives. Spinners, weavers, and others continued to live in small villages and continued to work according to their own preferences, as independent contractors who owned their equipment. But historians have also spoken of this process as proto-industrialization, a term that emphasizes the new economic relationships and expectations, as well as the demographic consequences, created by this system. Though they set their own pace of work, those involved in cottage industry nonetheless depended on far-flung economic networks; their goods were produced for national and international markets, and the workers were subject to the economic power of the merchants who sold what they produced. The proto-industrial workforce was in some sense a proletariat, whose economic fate rested with others; some historians have suggested that these workers were in effect learning the habits that they would eventually need to work in the factories of the nineteenth century.
But as important as its implications for work discipline were, the rise of cottage industry also changed European buying. As the historian Jan de Vries has argued, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century families were working harder than they had in the past in exchange for the ability to buy more goods: cottage industry allowed women and children to earn cash incomes, and it converted what had been the family's leisure timeespecially the slow phases of the agricultural cycleinto cash as well. Well before the onset of industrialization, European manufacturers thus had available to them a large consumer market, one eager for small luxury goods. Historians have turned to probate inventories to demonstrate the breadth of the consumer revolution that these centuries brought to England, the Netherlands, France, and Germany. Even backward areas showed the effects of these changes, with families buying mirrors, clocks, brightly printed clothing, prints, and a variety of other manufactured goods. But the effects were most visible in the developing cities of the age. The largest city of early modern Europe, London, by itself concentrated about 16 percent of England's populationan enormous, conveniently centralized and accessible market for manufactured goods. Paris was smaller in absolute numbers and much smaller relative to total French population, but it too offered manufacturers an enormous, fashion-conscious market for new goods.

TOWARD THE NEW ECONOMY

A critical aspect of the industrial revolution was the effort of manufacturers to take advantage of these markets, most visibly in the clothing industry. By the early eighteenth century, a fundamental step had already been taken: clothing manufacturers increasingly devoted their attention to lightweight, cheap, easily-colored fabrics, rather than the high-quality woolens that had dominated the medieval textile industry. In the early seventeenth century, they shifted to producing the lightweight woolen fabrics known in Britain as "new draperies"; later in the century, the arrival of cotton calicoes and muslins from India produced enormous enthusiasm among consumers and led to efforts both to exclude such imports and to replace them with British-made cotton goods. Over the eighteenth century, manufacturers produced a variety of fabrics that mixed cotton with other fibers, because British thread was usually too weak for producing all-cotton cloths. Throughout, popular demand played a crucial role, and in mid-eighteenth-century Britain cotton producers could not keep up with the demand for their products. In response they introduced a series of technological innovations designed to speed up the manufacturing process and to create other attractive new cotton products. Improvements in weaving starting in the 1730s created pressure on the spinning process, which produced cotton thread; at this point it took eight spinners to produce enough thread to supply one weaver, and several inventors sought to produce machines that could do the job more quickly. Solutions came in the 1760s and 1770s, with the spinning jenny, the water frame, and the spinning mule, all devices that allowed a single operator to manage multiple spindlesand that produced a higher-quality, more even thread than hand spinning. Contemporaries immediately recognized the value of these machines, and they spread rapidly, transforming the relationship between spinning and weaving. With spinning increasingly mechanized, there was now pressure to mechanize weavinga more difficult task, with a first power loom invented in 1787 but not widely used until the early nineteenth century. But though handloom weaving remained dominant, a revolution in the cotton industry had already occurred by the end of the eighteenth century: between 1770 and 1800 imports of raw cotton to Britain increased twelvefold.
New machinery encouraged new ways of organizing work. The spinning jenny was designed as a hand-operated device, and could be adapted to the needs of cottage industry. But the water frame was larger and from the beginning required an external power source to drive it. Richard Arkwright (17321792), who held the patent on it, immediately established a set of water-driven mills to exploit the new invention, and the economies of scale that these factories enjoyed meant that by 1800 cottage spinning had largely disappeared. The larger machinery also required a new approach to managing labor. Necessarily centralized around a single source of power, the new machines required close management in order to repay their heavy costs. The factory thus encouraged a new degree of labor discipline, with workers required to report to work at exact hours and labor at a pace set by the factory's managers. The Arkwright mills and their competitors made an immediate impression on contemporaries; the artist Joseph Wright of Derby (17341797) painted them, and the poet William Blake (17571827) in about 1805 already spoke of "dark Satanic Mills" transforming the British landscape.
Blake found the mills "Satanic" partly because by his time a growing number of them relied on steam power. The development of steam technology represented a second critical strand in the industrial revolution, and, as with the development of cotton manufacturing, its origins lay in the seventeenth century, in a combination of scientific, technological, and ecological developments. As late as the mid-seventeenth century, scientists such as René Descartes (15961650) doubted that a vacuum was even possible, but his contemporary, the Italian physicist Evangelista Torricelli (16081647), and others demonstrated both the possibility and its practical implications. Inventors developed a series of pumps based on this idea, and in 1698 the Englishman Thomas Savery (c. 16501715) developed the first working steam engine, essentially a machine for creating a vacuum and using its suction to lift water. A much-improved version was developed by the Englishman Thomas Newcomen (16631729), and in 1712 a Newcomen engine was set to work pumping out coal mines in northern England; by the 1730s such engines were in operation in several European countries. As the economic historian Joel Mokyr has observed, this was the world's first economically viable mechanism for transforming heat into regular motion, the artificial power that would be at the center of industrialization. The Newcomen engine performed its task very inefficiently, though, and in 1776 the first of James Watt's (17361819) engines was put into commercial operation, allowing a fourfold improvement in efficiency. By 1800, about 2,500 steam engines had been built in Britain, most of them used in mines, but many powering iron foundries, cotton-spinning machines, and other industrial processes. Contemporaries understood that a technological revolution was underway, and despite the inefficiency of the early engines, inventors immediately began exploring new ways to use them. Steam hammers, rolling mills, and bellows revolutionized the British iron industry from the 1760s on; in 1783 a first steamboat was constructed (in France), and in 1803 a first steam locomotive. By the 1820s, railway construction had begun, and a steam-powered ship had crossed the Atlantic.
This sequence of inventions and applications was closely bound up with the availability of cheap fuel, yet another element of the early modern economy that came to full development during the industrial revolution. Coal had long been known as a fuel, but contemporaries disliked its smoke and smell. By the mid-seventeenth century, however, Britons had little choice but to make use of it, for the country was running short of wood and it was becoming too expensive to use as fuel for even the basic needs of heating, let alone for novel industrial uses. The enormous size of seventeenth-century London, over half a million people within easy reach of cheap water transport, and its insatiable demand for fuel ensured that coal mining could be profitable even in the face of technological obstacles. As mines became deeper, for instance, there was the problem of removing the water that seeped into themthe problem that steam-driven pumps eventually answered. Steam-driven vehicles and carts that moved along rails (radically reducing friction) were first employed in the British coal fields as well. The economics of coal-mining made even the inefficiencies of early steam power acceptable; operating in the coal fields themselves, the first steam engines had a readily available supply of cheap fuel and could even use some of the waste from the mining process. With a fully developed coal-mining industry, and increasingly sophisticated means of using the energy that coal contained, Britain suddenly increased its supply of power many times over. The historian Kenneth Pomeranz has argued that only with this step did Europe move clearly ahead of Asian technology, setting the stage for Europe's domination of the world economy during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This interpretation probably understates the significance of other differences, but it accurately captures an important aspect of the industrial revolution: during the eighteenth century, Britain acquired a seemingly limitless supply of power.
Coal played an especially important role in the iron industry, which constituted the fourth strand of industrialization. Iron and steel had been important to European technology since theMiddle Ages, but expensive production processes limited their uses. Like other early modern manufacturing, iron-making relied on the experience and skill of a mass of individual artisans, whose small foundries permitted close inspection of each piece that they produced. Steel was even more clearly a specialized product, requiring superior iron ore found mainly in Sweden; forged by hand, it was reserved for such uses as weaponry, and was much too expensive for more mundane products. But starting in the early eighteenth century, the availability of coal and steam engines to power blowers (to create very high temperatures) and hammers (to remove impurities) stimulated a sequence of new iron-making processes, and these dramatically changed the industry's economics. Because expensive machinery was essential to these techniques, iron production was increasingly concentrated in huge enterprises, most dramatically that of the ironmaster John Wilkinson (17281808); but once the machinery was in place, it allowed the use of lower-grade, cheaper ores. Costs fell accordingly, and by the late eighteenth century, the availability of cheap iron made it possible to envision an entirely new range of uses for it.
This enthusiasm for spreading innovations to new economic domains was a further characteristic of the later eighteenth century, and it meant that the industrial revolution transformed numerous areas of the British economy, not just cotton, iron-making, and steam power. Cheap iron, for instance, allowed for the creation of new machine tools, and when combined with steam power, these made possible mechanized production of numerous products that once had been made by hand. Steam power and coal fuel allowed the potter Josiah Wedgwood (17301795) to establish mass production processes in making porcelain, until then a luxury good. Inventors began to think about the possibilities of using iron in buildings and ships. Economic transformations of these kinds did not mean the end of small workshops or skilled artisans. On the contrary, the development of machine making required more workshops and highly skilled laborers, and many consumer products lent themselves to small-scale production. Even after the advent of power looms, handloom weavers remained numerous and prosperous well into the nineteenth century. But by 1800 it was clear to all that dramatic change was likely to affect all domains of the economy; technological advances had become normal, and contemporaries expected that it would transform new areas of economic activity.

GEOGRAPHIES

Overwhelmingly, the technological innovations that marked eighteenth-century industrialization took place in Britain. Understanding this British dynamism has been an enduring historical problem, producing both classic answers and intense debate among historians. Geographical accidents offer one explanation for British success. Britain had abundant supplies of coal of a quality especially well suited to iron production, and its lack of wood forced it to exploit this resource from the seventeenth century on; in contrast, France had plenty of wood and relatively little coal, and Holland had only peat, which could not produce the high temperatures needed for large-scale iron production. As a relatively small island with numerous navigable rivers, Britain also enjoyed the advantages of cheap water transportation, which allowed the development of an unusually well-integrated national market. The remarkable development of seventeenth-century London offered further economic advantages; as the British historian Anthony Wrigley pointed out a generation ago, London offered a large, concentrated market for industrial products, far more important as a share of the nation's population than contemporary Paris, and it provided a laboratory for new social practices, encouraging both producers and consumers to try out new products. Historians have also noted the chronological accidents that aided British industrial development. During most of the eighteenth century, French economic growth roughly equaled British, but the generation of political chaos that followed the French Revolution of 1789 gave British manufacturers a chance to establish themselves in new markets, with little competition from continental industry. By the end of the Revolutionary Wars, in 1815, Britain had fully established its economic supremacy in Europe.
Efforts to explain British economic successes in terms of culture, politics, and social organization have stimulated more debate among historians. In its social structure, Britain was as aristocratic as other European countries, and its merchants were as eager as merchants elsewhere to achieve acceptance among the landed gentry. But the British aristocracy was probably unusual in the respect that it accorded commerce and manufacturing, and the gentry-dominated British Parliament energetically defended commercial and manufacturing interests against foreign competition. British law was certainly unusual in the protections it gave inventors and property holders. Between 1624 and 1791, Britain was the only European nation with a system of patent laws, designed to give inventors the profits of their achievements. The system both encouraged innovation and expressed British society's admiration for it. In other respects, however, differences between Britain and other countries were less significant. Acquisitive, profit-oriented economic attitudes characterized most of eighteenth-century Europe; and Britain was like other Protestant countries of the early modern period in having a relatively well-educated working class. As for advanced education in the sciences and engineering, eighteenth-century Britain lagged well behind France.
By the late eighteenth century, Britain was also Europe's leading imperial power, holding territories in North America, the Caribbean, and India, and benefiting from the trade in African slaves. Many historians have seen in this global power a further important explanation for British industrialization. Colonies, they have argued, offered raw materials at a discount and ready markets for industrial goods, and the high profits generated by colonial trade permitted British merchants to make expensive investments in machines and factories. But recent scholarship has tended to present colonial markets and materials as only a secondary cause of British economic successes. Few historians would deny the rapacity of eighteenth-century imperialism or the determination of British governments to use any means that might advance the country's economic interests; to protect domestic cotton manufacturers, for instance, importation of Indian cloth was rigorously prohibited. As the Spanish empire of the sixteenth century had demonstrated, however, colonial possessions were no guarantee of industrial development; and the profits of colonial trade were not especially high in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The critical fact in Britain's economic development seems to have been the demand for goods within the country itself and the readiness of manufacturers to use novel means to meet that demand. Colonialism perhaps mattered less as a source of capital than as a source of economic novelties, encouraging Europe as a whole and Britain in particular to undertake business innovations. Such colonial products as tea, coffee, tobacco, and sugar were among the early mass-market luxuries that became the model for later industrial production. More substantial goods like Chinese ceramics and Indian cotton fabrics stimulated determined, and eventually successful, efforts at imitation. The eighteenth-century global economy thus helps to explain Britain's industrialization; indeed, based on a product that did not grow in Europe, the cotton industry itself was only conceivable in the setting of a global economy. But the critical fact was manufacturers' readiness to respond to opportunities that the global economy presented.

THE EXPERIENCE OF WORK AND THE ORGANIZATION OF SOCIETY

"Everything that is solid melts into air," wrote Karl Marx to describe the changes that he saw accompanying the industrialization of Europe. Until well after World War II, most historians of the industrial revolution shared Marx's sense of the period as one of overwhelming social change, both positive and negative. Like contemporaries, historians have been dazzled by the wave of new products and processes that the period brought forth during what Mokyr has called "the age of miracles." Historians have also been struck by the new kinds of work organization that machines required. Preindustrial work tended to be individualistic, with workers setting their own pace; in cottage industry, moments of intense activity alternated with moments of relaxation, and as independent contractors, workers could take on as much work as they chose. Factory work allowed for no such freedoms. Work had to be continuous and coordinated if investments in steam engines, machinery, and buildings were to pay off. Labor discipline thus represented an important aspect of the transition to the factory system; for many ordinary people, this was the point at which clock time became an essential component of daily life and the pocket watch the sign of one's responsibility. The role of skill also diminished in the factory setting. What was needed was someone to tend machines, and this could just as easily be children as adults. Deskilling of this kind represented a loss of both status and income to workers who had been used to the freedom of working on their own. Having reduced the role of skill, factory owners could effectively control the wages they paid; an unskilled worker dissatisfied with his income could easily be replaced by another.
On the other hand, much recent scholarship has drawn attention to continuities between the pre-industrial world and what followed, and to the complexities of industrial development itself. As a result, this line of scholarship has offered more nuanced views of the society that early industrialization produced than were previously available. One reason for this caution has been historians' growing knowledge of preindustrial economies, both in Europe and in the world at large. These economies were capable of considerable growth, and they offered their inhabitants considerable material abundance. Rather than a complete break with the past, therefore, the industrial revolution in significant ways represented a culmination of earlier developments. Historians have also given more attention to the survival of small workshops and skilled work during the industrial revolution. Because the factory system relied so heavily on complex machinery, it created whole new forms of skilled labor in the trades that built and maintained machinery. Small workshops thrived in many other developing trades as well, notably those that produced small metal goods like buttons, buckles, cheap jewelry, guns, and so on, trades that employed about half the workforce of Birmingham, one of Britain's most important industrial cities. The historian Maxine Berg has shown that even the introduction of steam power did not bring the factory system to these trades; instead, several small workshops could share the power of a single steam engine, for instance by renting space in a large building. Even the early textile factories retained some aspects of preindustrial work organization. Family relations continued to count in the factory, and for many manufacturing processes small groups needed to work closely together.
In one respect, however, traditional depictions of industrialization retain their full force: already in late eighteenth-century Britain, early industrialization had created zones of intensive industrial activity that grouped together mining, metallurgy, and a variety of related trades, creating a new kind of physical environment and new social relations. Coal was expensive to transport, and breakage during shipment made it useless in the blast furnaces that produced wrought iron. It thus proved economical to concentrate iron making near the coal fields, and other industrial processes tended to follow. Cotton textiles tended to concentrate also, around the fast-growing city of Manchester, while metal working developed in the city of Birmingham. With the expansion of these highly developed industrial centers, the more evenly dispersed industrial activity of the early eighteenth century tended to disappear. A number of regions that had been important manufacturing centers in the early modern period returned to purely agricultural pursuits, while the new industrial zones became crowded with manufacturing activities, reducing any mixture with agriculture to mere vestiges. Contemporaries found these new industrial regions appalling. As rapidly growing new towns, they lacked basic services and traditional forms of social organization. The combination of haphazard development, inadequate water supplies, coal smoke, and industrial wastes made them unhealthy, and contemporaries believed that the social conditions of industrial life added to the problem. Young people, for instance, earned wages that freed them from the controls that parents earlier exercised over them, and allowed them to indulge in a variety of unwholesome pastimes; they had little or no time for school. Industrial zones like these were genuine challenges to the established order of European society. They offered the spectacle of new disorder among laborersand of new wealth among factory owners. From a modest background, Richard Arkwright became extremely wealthy from his cotton-spinning mills, and made a point of displaying his wealth in conspicuous ways. He was only one of many industrialists to do so.
But historians have become cautious in interpreting descriptions of this sort, and more alert to the ideological commentaries they contained. If observers were impressed at the forms of misbehavior that characterized the new industrial towns, this to some extent reflected their fears of social change and their inability to see the social relationships that in fact characterized them. It also reflected their limited attention to the evils of preindustrial work, which was altogether ready to employ women and children. Despite their unhealthy conditions, the new industrial centers paid high wages and attracted workers. In the same way, the dramatic rise of new fortunes from industry to some extent obscured from contemporary observers the ability of old elites to profit from economic innovation. Britain's great aristocrats were especially well placed to benefit from the development of mining and metallurgy, controlling as they did many of the country's coal deposits; during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, they showed themselves alert and inventive in profiting from these opportunities, so that their wealth rose in tandem with that of the new industrialistsallowing them to continue dominating Britain's politics down to the eve of World War I. Historians have demonstrated similar adaptations in continental Europe, with old ruling groups effectively profiting from industrialization. If the industrial revolution helped bring the early modern period to a close, it thus also preserved some of that period's characteristic forms of social organization.

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Jonathan Dewald