Chapter 25 - The Industrial Revolution
25.1 - The Beginnings of Industrialization
Wealthy landowners encircled their land with fences or hedges after purchasing the land of village farmers.
- Their landholdings grew, allowing them to develop larger fields.
- Landowners experimented with more effective sowing and harvesting methods to enhance crop yields within these larger fields, known as enclosures.
The development of one invention led to the development of another. John Kay, a machinist, created a shuttle that sped back and forth on wheels in 1733.
For two years, James Watt, a mathematical instrument builder at the University of Glasgow in Scotland, contemplated the problem.
- Watt devised a method for making the steam engine function quicker and more efficiently while using less fuel in 1765.
The roads in the United Kingdom have also improved, thanks in great part to the efforts of John McAdam, a Scottish engineer.
- McAdam, who worked in the early 1800s, added a layer of huge stones to road beds to help with drainage.
- He then added a layer of crushed rock on top, which he meticulously smoothed out.
Richard Trevithick, an English engineer, won a bet of several thousand dollars in 1804. In a steam-powered locomotive, he hauled ten tons of iron across nearly ten miles of track.
- Trevithick's locomotive was quickly improved by other British engineers.
25.2 - Industrialization
Most Europeans had lived in rural areas for generations.
The balance shifted toward cities after 1800. The growth of the factory system, which concentrated goods manufacturing in a single site, triggered this transition.
Because of the fast growth of England's cities, there were no development plans, sanitary rules, or building codes in place.
- Furthermore, they lacked enough housing, schooling, and police protection for the influx of people seeking work from the countryside.
- The majority of the dirt roadways lacked drainage, and waste piled up in heaps.
Factory owners sought to keep their machines operating for as long as possible in order to enhance production.
- As a result, the average worker worked 14 hours per day, six days per week. Unlike on the farm, work did not alter with the seasons.
- Week after week, year after year, job stayed the same.
Laborers, or the working class, had little improvement in their living and working conditions between 1800 and 1850.
- They saw their livelihoods vanish as machines took their place.
- Some people were so angry that they shattered the machines that they thought were putting them out of work.
The Industrial Revolution's long-term impacts can still be seen today. Consumer products that would have been regarded luxuries 50 or 60 years ago are now affordable to the majority of people in industrialized countries.
- Furthermore, their living and working conditions are far superior to those of employees in the nineteenth century.
25.3 - Industrialization Spreads
Industrialization in the United States originated in the textile sector, as it did in the United Kingdom.
- Britain had barred engineers, mechanics, and toolmakers from leaving the country, eager to retain the secrets of industrialization to itself.
In the early 1800s, the Northeast saw a lot of industrial development. Nonetheless, until the Civil War ended in 1865, the United States was predominantly agrarian.
- The country enjoyed a technical boom in the last third of the 1800s. A number of factors, similar to those in the United Kingdom, contributed to this surge.
Large companies, such as railroads, took a lot of money to build. Entrepreneurs raised funds by selling shares of stock or certain ownership rights.
- As a result, persons who purchased shares became shareholders in these businesses, which were referred to as corporations.
In the early 1800s, Germany was politically split. The country's modernization was limited by its economic isolation and dispersed resources.
- Instead, pockets of industry emerged, such as in west central Germany's coal-rich Ruhr Valley. Germany began to imitate the British model from 1835.
Even as it expanded their economic linkages, industrialization widened the wealth disparity between industrialized and nonindustrialized countries.
- Industrialized countries needed a regular supply of raw materials from less-developed countries to keep factories running and people nourished.
25.4 - Reforming the Industrial World
French Enlightenment economists were the originators of laissez-faire economics. They slammed the notion that countries become affluent by imposing high taxes on foreign goods.
- Government rules, they believed, merely hampered the production of wealth.
Jeremy Bentham, an English philosopher, amended Adam Smith's theories. Bentham brought utilitarianism to the world in the late 1700s.
Bentham's most influential publications were written in the late 1700s. People should judge ideas, institutions, and acts based on their utility, or usefulness, according to Bentham's view.
Other reformers were considerably more active in their efforts. A British factory owner named Robert Owen improved working conditions for his employees after being shocked by the misery and poverty of the working class.
- Owen erected houses near his cotton mill in New Lanark, Scotland, and rented them out at affordable prices.
The capitalist system, which gave birth to the Industrial Revolution, Marx predicted, would inevitably destroy itself in the following way.
- Small craftspeople would be driven out of business by factories, leaving a small number of manufacturers to control all of the wealth.
A union represented all workers in a specific trade. Collective bargaining, or discussions between workers and their employers, is carried out by unions.
- They negotiated for better working conditions as well as a raise in salary.
For women, the Industrial Revolution was a mixed blessing. On the one hand, factory job paid better than work done at home.
- Women who worked as spinners in Manchester, for example, made significantly more money than women who spun cotton thread at home.
- Women manufacturing employees, on the other hand, typically earned one-third of what males did.
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