Chapter 20: The Revolution in Energy and Industry

The Industrial Revolution in Britain

Origins of the British Industrial Revolution

Although many aspects of the origins of the British Industrial Revolution are still matters for scholarly debate, it is generally agreed that industrial changes grew out of a long process of development.
In the economic realm, the seventeenth-century expansion of English woolen cloth exports throughout Europe brought commercial profits and high wages to the detriment of traditional producers in Flanders and Italy.
Agriculture also played an important role in bringing about the Industrial Revolution in Britain.
English farmers were second only to the Dutch in productivity in 1700, and they were continually adopting new methods of farming.
Abundant food and high wages meant that the ordinary English family no longer had to spend almost everything it earned just to buy bread.
Britain also benefited from rich natural resources and a well-developed infrastructure.
In an age when it was much cheaper to ship goods by water than by land, no part of England was more than fifty miles from navigable water.
A final factor favoring British industrialization was the heavy hand of the British state and its policies, especially in the formative decades of industrial change.
All these factors combined to initiate the Industrial Revolution, a term first coined in 1799 to describe the burst of major inventions and technical changes under way.
The great economic and political revolutions that shaped the modern world occurred almost simultaneously, though they began in different countries.
It spread beyond Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Technological Innovations and Early Factories

The pressure to produce more goods for a growing market and to reduce the labor costs of manufacturing was directly related to the first decisive breakthrough of the Industrial Revolution: the creation of the world’s first machine-powered factories in the British cotton textile industry.
The putting-out system that developed in the seventeenth-century textile industry involved a merchant who loaned, or “put out,” raw materials to cottage workers who processed the raw materials in their own homes and returned the finished products to the merchant.
Many a tinkering worker knew that a better spinning wheel promised rich rewards.
It proved hard to spin the traditional raw materials— wool and flax— with improved machines, but cotton was different.
After many experiments over a generation, a gifted carpenter and jack-of-all-trades, James Hargreaves, invented his cotton-spinning jenny about 1765.
At almost the same moment, a barber-turned-manufacturer named Richard Arkwright invented (or possibly pirated) another kind of spinning machine, the water frame.
Hargreaves’s spinning jenny was simple, inexpensive, and powered by hand.
In early models from six to twenty-four spindles were mounted on a sliding carriage, and each spindle spun a fine, slender thread.
Arkwright’s water frame employed a different principle.
It quickly acquired a capacity of several hundred spindles and demanded much more power than a single operator could provide.
These revolutionary developments in the textile industry allowed British manufacturers to compete successfully in international markets in both fine and coarse cotton thread.
Families using cotton in cottage industry were freed from their constant search for adequate yarn from scattered parttime spinners, since all the thread needed could be spun in the cottage on the jenny or obtained from a nearby factory.
Despite the significant increases in productivity, the working conditions in the early cotton factories were atrocious.
Apprenticed as young as five or six years of age, boy and girl workers were forced by law to labor for their “masters” for as many as fourteen years.
The creation of the world’s first machine-powered factories in the British cotton textile industry in the 1770s and 1780s, which grew out of the puttingout system of cottage production, was a major historical development.
By 1831 the largely mechanized cotton textile industry accounted for fully 22 percent of the country’s entire industrial production.

The Steam Engine Breakthrough

Human beings have long used their toolmaking abilities to construct machines that convert one form of energy into another for their own benefit.
By the eighteenth century wood was in ever-shorter supply.
Processed wood (charcoal) was the fuel that was mixed with iron ore in the blast furnace to produce pig iron.
To produce more coal, mines had to be dug deeper and deeper and were constantly filling with water.
Mechanical pumps, usually powered by animals walking in circles at the surface, had to be installed.
Thomas Savery in 1698 and Thomas Newcomen in 1705 invented the first primitive steam engines.
In 1763 a gifted young Scot named James Watt (1736–1819) was drawn to a critical study of the steam engine. Watt was employed at the time by the University of Glasgow as a skilled craftsman making scientific instruments.
To invent something is one thing; to make it a practical success is quite another.
Watt needed skilled workers, precision parts, and capital, and the relatively advanced nature of the British economy proved essential.
The coal-burning steam engine of Watt and his followers was the Industrial Revolution’s most fundamental advance in technology.
The steam engine was quickly put to use in several industries in Britain.
It drained mines and made possible the production of ever more coal to feed steam engines elsewhere.
Coal and steam power promoted important breakthroughs in other industries.
The British iron industry was radically transformed.
Strong, skilled ironworkers— the puddlers— “cooked” molten pig iron in a great vat, raking off globs of refined iron for further processing.
In 1844 Britain produced 3 million tons of iron.
Once expensive, iron became the cheap, basic, indispensable building block of the economy.

The Coming of the Railroads

The coal industry had long used plank roads and rails to move coal wagons.
Rails reduced friction and allowed a horse or a human being to pull a much heavier load.
The first steam locomotive was built by Richard Trevithick after much experimentation.
George Stephenson acquired glory for his locomotive named Rocket, which sped down the track of the just completed Liverpool and Manchester Railway at a maximum speed of 24 miles per hour in 1829.
The significance of the railroad was tremendous. It dramatically reduced the cost and uncertainty of shipping freight over land.
Water travel was also transformed by the steam engine. French engineers completed the first steam ships in the 1770s, and the first commercial steam ships came into use in North America several decades later.
The Clermont began to travel the waters of the Hudson River in New York State in 1807, shortly followed by ships belonging to brewer John Molson on the St. Lawrence River.

Industry and Population

In 1851 London hosted an industrial fair called the Great Exhibition in the newly built Crystal Palace.
The more than 6 million visitors from all over Europe marveled at the gigantic new exhibition hall set in the middle of a large, centrally located park.
Britain’s claim to be the “workshop of the world” was no idle boast, for it produced two-thirds of the world’s coal and more than half of all iron and cotton cloth.
Rapid population growth in Britain was key to industrial development.
More people meant a more mobile labor force, with many young workers in need of employment and ready to go where the jobs were.
Economist David Ricardo (1772–1823) spelled out the pessimistic implications of Malthus’s thought.
Ricardo’s depressing iron law of wages posited that over an extended period of time, because of the pressure of population growth, wages would always sink to subsistence level.
Malthus, Ricardo, and their followers were proved wrong in the long run, largely because industrialization improved productivity beyond what they could imagine.
We will turn to this great issue after looking at the process of industrialization beyond the British Isles.

Industrialization Beyond Britain

National and International Variations

Comparative data on industrial production in different countries over time help give us an overview of what happened.
One set of data, the work of a Swiss scholar, compares the level of industrialization on a per capita basis in several countries from 1750 to 1913.
Table 20.1 (see page 662) presents a comparison of how much industrial product was produced, on average, for each person in a given country in a given year.
What does this overview tell us? First, one sees in the first column that in 1750 all countries were fairly close together, including non-Western nations such as China and India.
Second, the table shows that Western countries began to emulate the British model successfully over the course of the nineteenth century, with significant variations in the timing and in the extent of industrialization.
Finally, the late but substantial industrialization in eastern and southern Europe meant that all European states as well as the United States managed to raise per capita industrial levels in the nineteenth century
Different rates of wealth and power-creating industrial development, which heightened disparities within Europe, also greatly magnified existing inequalities between Europe and the rest of the world.

Industrialization in Continental Europe

Throughout Europe the eighteenth century was an era of agricultural improvement, population increase, expanding foreign trade, and growing cottage industry.
They faced significant challenges. In the newly mechanized industries, British goods were being produced very economically, and these goods had come to dominate world markets.
Nevertheless, western European nations possessed a number of advantages that helped them respond to their challenges.
These governments would use the power of the state to promote industry and catch up with Britain.

Agents of Industrialization

Western European success in adopting British methods took place despite the best efforts of the British to prevent it.
Many talented, ambitious workers, however, slipped out of the country illegally and introduced the new methods abroad.
One such man was William Cockerill, a Lancashire carpenter.
He and his sons began building cotton spinning equipment in French-occupied Belgium in 1799.
Cockerill’s plants in the Liège area became a center for the gathering and transmitting of industrial information across Europe.
Thus British technicians and skilled workers were a powerful force in the spread of early industrialization.
A second agent of industrialization consisted of talented entrepreneurs such as Fritz Harkort (1793– 1880), a pioneer in the German machinery industry.
Lacking skilled laborers, Harkort turned to Britain for experienced, though expensive, mechanics. Getting materials was also difficult.
Entrepreneurs like Harkort were obviously exceptional. Most continental businesses adopted factory technology slowly, and handicraft methods lived on.
Many historians now emphasize that focusing on artisanal luxury production made sense for French entrepreneurs given their long history of dominance in that sector; rather than being a “backward” refusal to modernize, it represented a sound strategic choice that allowed the French to capitalize on their know-how and international reputation.

Government Support and Corporate Banking

Just as the British government provided crucial support for the growth of industrialization, so did national governments in other parts of Europe.
After 1815 western European states adopted a set of largely successful policies similar to those in Britain.
Tariff protection was one such support.
The French, for example, responded to a flood of cheap British goods in 1815 after the Napoleonic Wars by laying high tariffs on imported goods.
After 1815 continental governments also bore the cost of building roads, canals, and railroads to improve transportation.
German journalist and thinker Friedrich List (1789–1846) was a strong proponent of government support for industrialization.
He wrote that the “wider the gap between the backward and advanced nations becomes, the more dangerous it is to remain behind.”
The practical policies that List focused on were railroad building and the tariff.
Finally, banks also played an important role in supporting development on the continent, more so than in Britain.
In the 1830s two important Belgian banks pioneered in a new direction.
They received permission from the growth-oriented government to establish themselves as corporations enjoying limited liability.
Similar corporate banks became important in France and the German lands in the 1850s and 1860s.
The combined efforts of governments, skilled workers, entrepreneurs, and industrial banks meshed successfully after 1850.
Western European countries— along with the United States— thus became technological innovators in their own right and enjoyed sustained economic growth that made them the wealthiest nations in the world.

The Situation Outside of Europe

The Industrial Revolution did not have a transformative impact beyond Europe prior to the 1860s, with the exception of the United States and Japan, both early adopters of British practices.
Egypt similarly began an ambitious program of modernization in the first decades of the nineteenth century, which included the use of imported British technology and experts in textile manufacture and other industries.
Such examples of faltering efforts at industrialization could be found in many other regions of the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America.
Latin American countries were distracted from economic concerns by the early-nineteenth-century wars of independence.
The rise of industrialization in Britain, western Europe, and the United States thus resulted in other regions of the world becoming increasingly economically dependent and, in turn, ever more vulnerable to political domination.
Instead of industrializing, many territories underwent a process of deindustrialization due to imperialism and economic competition.

New Pattern of Working and Living

Work in Early Factories

The first factories of the Industrial Revolution were cotton mills, which began functioning in the 1770s along fast-running rivers and streams and were often located in sparsely populated areas.
Cottage workers were not used to that way of life. In the putting-out system, all members of the family worked hard and long, but in spurts, setting their own pace.
Also, early factories resembled English poorhouses, where destitute people went to live at public expense.
Some poorhouses were industrial prisons, where the inmates had to work in order to receive food and lodging.
Attitudes began to change in the last decade of the eighteenth century, as middle-class reformers publicized the brutal toil imposed on society’s most vulnerable members.

Working Families and Children

By the 1790s the early pattern had begun to change. The use of pauper apprentices was in decline, and in 1802 it was forbidden by Parliament.
In some cases, workers were able to accommodate to the system by carrying over familiar working traditions.
Ties of kinship were particularly important for newcomers, who often traveled great distances to find work.
Many urban workers in Great Britain were from Ireland.
The preservation of the family as an economic unit in the factories helped people accommodate to the new surroundings during the early stages of industrialization.
Some enlightened employers and social reformers in Parliament argued that more humane standards were necessary, and they used widely circulated parliamentary reports to influence public opinion.
These efforts resulted in a series of Factory Acts from 1802 to 1833 that progressively limited the workday of child laborers and set minimum hygiene and safety requirements.
One unintended drawback of restrictions on child labor, however, was that they broke the pattern of whole families working together in the factory because efficiency required standardized shifts for all workers.
After 1833 the number of children employed in industry declined rapidly.

The New Sexual Division of Labor

With the restriction of child labor and the collapse of the family work pattern in the 1830s came a new sexual division of labor.
This new pattern of separate spheres had several aspects.
First, all studies agree that married women from the working classes were much less likely to work full-time for wages outside the house after the first child arrived, although they often earned small amounts doing putting-out handicrafts at home and taking in boarders.
Second, when married women did work for wages outside the house, they usually came from the poorest families, where the husbands were poorly paid, sick, unemployed, or missing.
Third, these poor married or widowed women were joined by legions of young unmarried women, who worked full-time but only in certain jobs, of which textile factory work, laundering, and domestic service were particularly important.
Fourth, all women were generally confined to low-paying, dead-end jobs.
Evolving gradually, but largely in place by 1850, the new sexual division of labor constituted a major development in the history of women and of the family.
Several factors combined to create this new sexual division of labor.
First, the new and unfamiliar discipline of the clock and the machine was especially hard on married women of the laboring classes.
Second, running a household in conditions of primitive urban poverty was an extremely demanding job in its own right.
Third, to a large degree the young, generally unmarried women who did work for wages outside the home were segregated from men and confined to certain “women’s jobs” because the new sexual division of labor replicated long-standing patterns of gender segregation and inequality.
Investigations into the British coal industry before 1842 provide a graphic example of this concern.
The Mines Act of 1842 prohibited underground work for all women and girls as well as for boys under ten.
Some women who had to support themselves protested against being excluded from coal mining, which paid higher wages than most other jobs open to working-class women.
A final factor encouraging working-class women to withdraw from paid labor was the domestic ideals emanating from middle-class women, who had largely embraced the “separate spheres” ideology.
Middle-class reformers published tracts and formed societies to urge poor women to devote more care and attention to their homes and families.

Relations Between Capital and Labor

In Great Britain, industrial development led to the creation of new social groups and intensified longstanding problems between capital and labor.
Individuals experienced a growing sense of class-consciousness, or awareness of belonging to a distinct social and economic class whose interests might conflict with those of other classes.

The New Class of Factory Owners

Early industrialists operated in a highly competitive economic system.
Most early industrialists drew upon their families and friends for labor and capital, but they came from a variety of backgrounds.
As factories and firms grew larger, opportunities declined, at least in well-developed industries.
It became considerably harder for a gifted but poor young mechanic to start a small enterprise and end up as a wealthy manufacturer.
Just like working-class women, the wives and daughters of successful businessmen found fewer opportunities for active participation in Europe’s increasingly complex business world.
Rather, a middle-class lady should concentrate on her proper role as wife and mother, preferably in an elegant residential area far removed from ruthless commerce and the volatile working class.

Debates over Industrialization

From the beginning, the British Industrial Revolution had its critics. Among the first were the romantic poets.
William Blake (1757–1827) called the early factories “satanic mills” and protested against the hard life of the London poor.
William Wordsworth (1770– 1850) lamented the destruction of the rural way of life and the pollution of the land and water.
Some handicraft workers— notably the Luddites, who attacked factories in northern England in 1811 and later— smashed the new machines, which they believed were putting them out of work.
This pessimistic view was accepted and reinforced by Friedrich Engels (1820–1895), the future revolutionary and colleague of Karl Marx.
And if the new class interpretation was more of a deceptive simplification than a fundamental truth for some critics, it appealed to many because it seemed to explain what was happening.
Despite the criticism unleashed over industrial working conditions and the broader concerns about new class structures, some observers believed that conditions were improving for the working people.
Nevertheless, those who thought— correctly— that conditions were getting worse for working people were probably in the majority

The Early British Labor Movement

Not everyone worked in large factories and coal mines during the Industrial Revolution.
In 1850 more British people still worked on farms than in any other occupation, although rural communities were suffering from outward migration.
Within industry itself, the pattern of artisans working with hand tools in small shops remained unchanged in many trades, even as others were revolutionized by technological change.
Working-class solidarity and class-consciousness developed both in small workshops and in large factories.
The classical liberal concept of economic freedom and laissez faire emerged in the late eighteenth century, and it continued to gather strength in the early nineteenth century in opposition to the rising tide of working-class anger.
In 1799 Parliament passed the Combination Acts, which outlawed unions and strikes.
The capitalist attack on artisan guilds and work rules was bitterly resented by many craftworkers, who subsequently played an important part in Great Britain and in other countries in gradually building a modern labor movement.
Unions sought to control the number of skilled workers, to limit apprenticeship to members’ own children, and to bargain with owners over wages.
In the face of such widespread union activity, Parliament repealed the Combination Acts in 1824.
The next stage in the development of the British trade-union movement was the attempt to create a single large national union.
When Owen’s and other ambitious schemes collapsed, the British labor movement moved once again after 1851 in the direction of craft unions.
British workers also engaged in direct political activity in defense of their own interests.

The Impact of Slavery

Another mass labor force of the Industrial Revolution consisted of the millions of enslaved men, women, and children who toiled in European colonies in the Caribbean and in North and South America.
Most now agree that profits from colonial plantations and slave trading were a small portion of British national income in the eighteenth century and were probably more often invested in land than in industry.
The British Parliament abolished the slave trade in 1807 and freed all slaves in British territories in 1833, but by 1850 most of the cotton processed by British mills was supplied by the labor of enslaved people in the southern United States.
Thus the Industrial Revolution was deeply entangled with the Atlantic world and the misery of slavery.