Making of Industrial Society

Betty Harris

• coal cart that she pulled through the mine shafts, even when she was pregnant, miners took sexual liberties with the women and girl drawers.

• Machine production raised worker productivity, encouraged economic specialization, and promoted the growth of large-scale enterprise.

Geography

• Geographic luck had placed some of western Europe's largest coal deposits in Great Britain,

• Consumer demand for cotton products drove the development of a British cotton textile industry.

• Ecological relief

  • Americas lifted European land constraints by supplying European societies with a growing volume of primary products

  • sugar and cotton from the America’s kept the industries going

Iron and Steel

• Deforestation in England made wood scarce

• Iron and steel was cheaper and high quality

• nineteenth century was an age of steel

Transportation

• railroads and steamships dramatically lowered transportation costs.

• Steamships: advancing up rivers

• seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, new and larger units of production supplemented the putting-out system

Working conditions

• Industrial workers depended on their employers for their livelihood.

• artisans became obsolete

• Industrial workers commonly labored six days a week for twelve to fourteen hours daily.

Industrial protest

• Luddites went on a rampage and destroyed textile machines that they blamed for their low wages and unemployment.

Exportation

• British entrepreneurs and government officials forbade the export of machinery, manufacturing techniques, and skilled workers.

• North American entrepreneurs did not hesitate to bribe or even kidnap British engineers,

  • smuggled advanced machinery out of the British isles.

Industrial capitalism

• 1913 Henry Ford: the assembly line to automobile production.

• Cotton textiles were the major factory made products

• Corporations controlled most business

Population and society

• Populations rose sharply

• Medical advances: control disease and reduce mortality.

• Edward Jenner Created the vaccine

• Better diets and improved disease control

• Improved sanitation and creation of male condom

• Fertility and death rates dropped

Environment

• Water and air pollution

• Epidemics of cholera and typhus

Social classes

• Middle class was the principal beneficiary of industrialization; began to influence political affairs

• factory owners sought to persuade workers to adopt middle-class norms of respectability and morality.

Women

• married women were unable to work unless they left their homes and children in someone else's care. society neither expected nor wanted women to engage in labor

• Working-class women were expected to work at least until marriage

• most women in the cities went into domestic service in middle-class households,

• early manufacturers employed women in greater numbers than men.

• women (and also children were best suited to operate the new machines because their small hands and fingers

• Middle-class women

• stringent confinement to the domestic sphere and pressure to conform to new models of behavior revolving around their roles as mothers and wives. something unfeminine in independence."

Child labor

• forced children to work from dawn until dark and beat them to keep them awake.

• industrial society was responsible for removing children from the labor process altogether

• Education became mandatory in England in 1881

Socialist challenge

• Socialists deplored economic inequalities

• condemned the system that permitted the exploitation of laborers, especially women and children.

• Early socialists sought to expand the Enlightenment understanding of equality

• large-scale organization of working people = best means to bring about a just and equitable society.

Marx and Engels

• Problems in 19th century were because of capitalist economies

• Capitalist owned the means of production, the proletariat (wage workers) had their labor to sell

• Entertainment and religion served as capitalists supporters

• Abolition of private property and institution of a radically egalitarian society

• socialist revolution would result in a "dictatorship of the proletariat,"

• Revolutionary socialists urged workers to seize control of the state, confiscate the means of production, and distribute wealth equitably throughout society.

Trade unions

• both employers and governments considered trade unions illegal associations whose purpose was to restrain trade.

• violence frequently broke out, When workers went on strike

• trade unions sought to make employers more responsive to their employees needs and interests.

International division of labor

• the world's peoples provided raw materials while others processed and consumed them, increased the volume of world trade and led to increased transportation on both sea and land.