The Shaping of the "Second Europe" by Revolutions 1750 - 1914

The Industrial and Technological Revolution

Outline of Lecture

I. Introduction
II. Conditions for Industrial Revolution
III. The Industrial Revolution in England and France
IV. The Impact of the Revolution
V. Looking Ahead

Introduction

The second great revolution affecting the course of the 19^th century was the Industrial Revolution. Because the effects of this event are still evident today, some have questioned whether there was an Industrial "Revolution" in the strict sense of the term. Is another term better suited to describe the change from human to machine power and the transformations it wrought in the economy and society? Revolution usually defines a sudden, radical change. This one has been going on, in different phases perhaps, right up to today. Some historians have proposed two or more revolutions instead of one. Some scholars believe that the information technology revolution in the late 20^th century was an integral part of the earlier industrialization and mechanization of the economies of the West. Others believe that it is a successor to the industrialization revolution, perhaps as one of three major economic-technological events in human history: the beginnings of agriculture, the beginnings of industry, and the beginnings of information technology. In any event, this Industrial "Revolution" (yes, we need the term) deeply affected the 19^th century and helped produce, or affected, several isms.

Conditions for Industrial Revolution: Ideas and Factors Prerequisite to Industrialization

Many ideas and events were responsible for industrialization, several of them centuries old by 1750. Let me just mention without going in to a lot of detail, three broad events which helped set the stage for industrialization:

(1) The rise of capitalism. Capitalism as a practice of using money to make money had started by the 15^th century in Italy and the Low Countries. It was not yet formulated as a theory but in practice it existed. (A simple statement of the theory: resources, goods, and services are owned by private individuals and corporate organizations of individuals; free markets set the prices and guide the production of goods, products, and services; profits acquired by such activities belong to the individuals and corporations which conduct them; ideally profits flow to those individuals and corporations which best respond to the needs created by markets and which anticipate future needs.) Businessmen created a banking system, methods of financing business ventures such as trade, methods of accounting to track the progress of these ventures and without calling it capitalism, began a new type of economic activity. Profits were to be made by using money to make money. The theory and justification of what they were doing came later in thinkers such as Adam Smith. The success of the capitalist attitude would come later with industrialization, as investors figured out that the biggest profits lay in making goods a new way in factories. So capitalism laid the groundwork for the Industrial Revolution.

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We are so accustomed to capitalism and free enterprise that we think these ideas and the practices which accompany them have always been around. But they haven't. Why not? They seem the only logical way to conduct economic activity, do they not? Or do they?

(2) The rise of a competitive state system. In the 14^th, 15, 16^th and 17^th centuries modern states emerged and struggled with each other for economic as well as military superiority. Mercantilism and the settling of colonies overseas were two parts of this competitive system. The Industrial Revolution would be assisted by this competitive state system as nations sought to industrialize as a matter of national economic policy.

(3) The tradition shattering effects of the Enlightenment prepared society in many ways for industrialization and gave an impetus to that development. Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and the physiocrats of the Enlightenment articulated a rational approach to economic activity which made men think afresh about the most efficient use of resources and the best use of profits.

More immediately important to industrialization were six factors fundamental to the creation of a machine economy. These would have to exist for industrialization to occur:

(1) the existence of capital itself and a commercial credit or banking system through which it might be deployed.

(2) the capitalist spirit or the urge to make a profit.

(3) the availability of markets and the means of transportation to and from those markets.

(4) the existence of a labor supply of wage-workers.

(5) the availability of raw materials.

(6) the availability of machines and the knowledge of machine technology.

These factors were in 1750 all found first primarily in England. Thus England because of possessing favorable conditions would lead the way in industrializing and would quickly become the workshop of Europe. Then, after about 1850, industrialization would spread to most other countries in Europe and by 1900 Europe would be the workshop of the world.

(1) In the possession of capital and a commercial credit system England led the way in 1750. Her monetary system and national banking system centering on the Bank of England (1694) were unique in Europe in 1750. Private associations for investment were common in England, unlike other countries. So capital for business was plentiful and profits for commercial activity were greater in England than in other countries.

(2) Because the opportunity was greater, the urge to make a profit was also greater in England than elsewhere.

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Does this statement beg the question?

(3) In the existence of markets, England also led the way. The purchasing power of the lower classes was higher than in other countries. Also, transportation was much more advanced: in the roadway and canal system England was far ahead of the rest of Europe. England's merchant marine which was the largest in the world also gave her better markets at home. Imported goods stimulated new tastes and styles which led to a demand for more goods.

(4) In the availability of a labor force England also led the way. A revolution in agriculture preceding the Industrial Revolution which had thrown large numbers of farm workers off the land meant that there was a large pool of workers willing and able to work for a daily wage in industry. Population growth in the 18^th century had added to this pool. By contrast, France's population had not increased so fast and there had been no similar agricultural revolution. So France's labor pool for factory employment was much more limited.

(5) In raw materials England was also more favored than other European countries. With the largest merchant marine and the greatest trade in Europe, England had a virtual monopoly on shipping. From her colonies she had an abundant supply of cotton. She led Europe in the production of wool. Her coal supply was enormous and located near the iron mines, so again perhaps the best word to describe the English advantage is favored. Other countries suffered in comparison.

(6) In machines and knowledge of machine technology England had a decided advantage. Knowledge of water wheels, of how to transmit power through arrangements of gears, of air power and steam power were generally known by the 19^th century. But the application of this knowledge was more advanced in England because of the other advantages England enjoyed and because the demand for machines and machine knowledge was greater there.

The Industrial Revolution in England and France

Because England possessed the pre-requisites for creating a machine economy, the Industrial Revolution began there first. It started with the manufacturing of cotton textiles about 1750 and then extended to other areas. The story is the need and discovery for one innovation leading to the need and search for another.

Cotton textile production before 1750 was limited to what historians have called "the domestic system." Cotton was spun and woven in the home. The household received raw cotton from an entrepreneur or middle man who collected the finished product and sold it. There were no large working establishments; goods were made mainly for the local market. But around 1750 power-driven machines were adapted to the spinning and weaving process to speed up production to meet a growing demand. Five inventions were important in mechanizing textile production:

(1) John Kay's flying shuttle in 1733 sped up the weavingprocess;

(2) James Hargreaves spinning jenny in 1770 sped up the production of spun thread;

(3) Richard Arkwright's water frame in 1769 which produced a stronger thread;

(4) Samuel Crompton's spinning mule in 1779 which improved on the jenny and water frame and produced even stronger, finer thread to be used in all kinds of textiles;

(5) Edmund Cartwright's power loom in 1785 which sped up weaving.

Arkwright's, Crompton's, and Cartwright's machines were large, heavy and complex. A factory was necessary. And that meant siting the mill near a power source and labor supply, a town near a stream. Richard Arkwright was the first to build such an establishment, bringing workers to a large mill next to the River Derwent in Cromford, Derbyshire. Soon steam engines produced by James Watts and Matthew Boulton were fitted to the new spinning and weaving machines. So location near a coal mine was desirable. Thus the factory system was born. And with it the expansion of towns in which these mills were built. And with the factories and growing cities came a new class of capitalist manufacturers. These men were country gentlemen, wealthy farmers, rich shopkeepers with capital or the ability to borrow it. They bought the machinery and built the factories and as they prospered and spread their factories and attracted others like themselves they constituted a new economic class.

Very quickly England had a monopoly of textile production. By the end of the 18^th century English cotton goods were flooding Europe, prompting Napoleon to try to cripple the British economy by his Continental System of excluding English goods and trade. France and other countries wanted to develop their own textile industries and tried to learn how the machines worked by spying and attempting to copy machines. The secrets were guarded like nuclear technology is today. Eventually, of course, technological knowledge always spreads and the French and other European countries were able to learn by spying and by hiring Englishmen away. By 1815 industrialization was not limited to England alone.

Advances in cotton textiles spurred changes in the manufacturing of wool, silk, and linens. But this did not happen in any significant way until the mid 19^th century. Cotton because of its low cost and durability outstripped all other cloth manufacturing for a long time. Other industries, however, developed in response to the needs of the textile industry. Better iron was necessary for the heavier and heavier machines built for manufacturing textiles. At first wrought iron, first produced in 1783, sufficed. But a harder material was needed, leading to Sir Henry Bessemer's discovery in 1857 of the blast furnace process for making steel. Large and larger quantities of coal were needed, both for steam power and for iron and steel production. This led to better mining techniques and mine safety devices to increase production and make it safer to mine deeper veins of coal. Virtually every industry felt the impact of textiles, need being the mother of invention as they say, innovation following innovation with increasing rapidity. At the end of the century electricity began to be used as a safer and more readily available source of power than coal.

From 1850 to the end of the century mechanization moved steadily toward mass production in all areas. Machines were being steadily improved and becoming more and more intricate. The goal became automation to the greatest degree possible. The impact of that trend is visible even today, even in textiles, the earliest of industries and yet one of the most highly automated in the U. S. economy.

What about France? France lagged behind England in industrial development, hampered by a lack of the favorable conditions England possessed. But French textile manufacturing did by 1850 grow to the point that it began to challenge the British industry. Though limited at first by a lack of transportation and capital, France by 1850 had developed a cotton industry that was second only to England. The French also made progress in developing other industries. Her iron and steel industries began to grow rapidly after 1850 because of improved railways and waterways which made possible the shipping of cheap coal to factories. But the French never succeeded in overtaking England and by the 1880's and 90's were being overtaken by Germany as the dominant industrial economy on the continent.

The 19^th century, then, saw England become the undisputed industrial leader of Europe and only in the latter part of the century were there signs that Germany and the United States were going to challenge her supremacy. From the English came many of the ideas and techniques which enabled other nations successfully to industrialize.

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1. Does every society want what we call development? Why? Why not? For instance, there is a revolt among many people today who follow what have been called Islamist principles against technological development. They want to turn the clock back to early medieval days and establish theocratic societies based on their version of Islam. Your reaction?

2. Have you heard the line that we Americans use far more than our fair share of the world’s resources and that for various reasons we should learn to use fewer of those resources? Do you agree with this? What are the likely consequences of doing this?

The Impact of the Industrial Revolution

What kinds of changes did the Industrial Revolution produce? First, there was a general economic effect, some aspects of which we have already alluded to. Machinery and factories created the need for increasing numbers of workers, capital, and raw materials, the latter of which was an impetus to imperialism which we will be looking at later. The revolution caused the spectacular success of capitalism. Industrialization gave the capitalistic enterprise greater meaning and purpose than any earlier form of economic activity.

Second, was the fundamental physical change in society. Factories sprang up around advantageous sites, leading to the rapid growth of cities which sprawled over the countryside for miles. Industrial countries became predominantly urban rather than rural, with far-reaching social and psychological consequences. Men had never faced the phenomenon of the industrial city before and were fearful of it. Cities new and old had to struggle with vastly larger populations and disease caused by overcrowding.

Third, was the social change produced by the revolution. Industry produced a new class, an industrial working class, and tended to force into its ranks not only displaced farm workers, but independently employed craftsmen as well. Relationships between workers and employers in the factories tended to become distant and impersonal. The nature of nature of industrial work itself was another change. Jobs which had formerly been a source of meaning as well as a livelihood now became routine, repetitive, and monotonous. Tedious motions which produced only a part of a finished product gave few people meaning: this had to be found somewhere else. So one of the effects of the Industrial Revolution was to create a new class and then to subject it to the stress of impersonality and anonymity.

Besides this, the working conditions in the factories were appalling by later standards. Workers labored for subsistence-level wages during 16 hour work days. Women and children worked alongside men in man-killing conditions. Factories were generally poorly constructed, poorly ventilated, badly lighted, unsafe, dirty and without any sanitary arrangements. Disciple was strict. Workers were fined for any acts which cost time and production: tardiness, talking, opening windows, and the like. "Drudgery" is a word which accurately describes industrial work, that and "monotony."

The towns which grew up around manufacturing sites were generally slums. Houses were flimsy structures, thrown up back to back in an effort to get the maximum number on the available lots. Crowding was normal: in one British industrial town there was an average of 36 persons to a house. David Livingstone, the famous 19^th century missionary and explorer, spent his early years in an industrial village owned by Blantyre Mills in Glasgow, Scotland. The tenement his family occupied was typical, perhaps even slightly better than others in Glasgow:

Built in 1775, it housed twenty-four families, eight on each of its three floors. Every family had a single kitchen apartment... which consisted of a single room fourteen feet by ten, with two bed recesses: one for the parents and one for the children. Truckle beds were pulled out at night to cover the whole floor space. Cooking, eating, reading, washing, and mending all went on in the one room. There was no piped water, and slops and garbage were sloshed down crude sluice-holes cut into the sides of the communal circular staircases. The earth closets at the back of the building stank, and while regulations for refuse collection and a tenants' rotation for cleaning stairs and passages were observed. recently dispossessed crofters found it hard to break rural habits and ignored the company's orders forbidding the keeping of poultry and other animals in their rooms. Shuttle Row, Blantyre, was not as bad as many tenement blocks in Glasgow, but that did not make it any more adequate for satisfactorily housing over a hundred people.⁽¹⁾

Small wonder critics of the industrial society complained of the low moral tone in industrial cities. Conditions such as these aroused a number of social responses which your text discusses and some of which we will take up in later sessions.

What was to be done about the squalid living conditions and the diseases which attended those conditions, now threatening not just the poor crammed into inadequate tenements, but their richer betters? Cholera, a specific problem in the early 19^th century cities, affected the rich as well as the poor and could not be confined to class or location.

London is a good case study of what had to be done. The Thames River running through the heart of the city was the source of drinking water for most. But into that same river went the city’s waste and runoff. By the 1850’s London had suffered several major cholera epidemics causing the deaths of thousands. Few believed that the drinking water was the source of cholera; most thought disease to be air-borne (including Florence Nightingale). But the stench of the river itself led to action. In 1853 Joseph Bazalgette (1819-1891) was appointed Chief Engineer to the Metropolitan Commission for Sewers and charged with designing and constructing a new system of 82 miles of sewers, pumping stations and holding tanks to clean up the river. Technology and engineering set under way by the Industrial Revolution made this possible. Within 30 years other large cities built their own systems, Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle, and Bristol among them. The result was dramatic: deaths from cholera dropped steeply. Technology, it might be said, produced the crowding and unsanitary conditions of the cities. But it also solved them.

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1. Before leaving this topic let me ask you whether you agree with the following statement? Horrible as the effects of the Industrial Revolution were, conditions would have been far worse without that revolution. Indeed, poverty like that seen in the poorest regions of the globe would be the norm everywhere. Do you agree? Disagree?

2. The pumping stations Bazalgette built are a marvel in themselves for anyone interested in technology. One of them, the Abbey Mills station in East London, is still in use today. Housing eight large beam engines with huge flywheels, the station pumped sewage into large tanks where it was eventually released downstream into the Thames at high tide when the flow would carry the waste out to the ocean. By the way he was a friend of Isambard Brunel, another genius engineer, whose contributions I mentioned in the lecture on “Isms”. Do we still have people like Bazalgette and Brunel today?

There was also a political impact from the Industrial Revolution. In addition to creating a new working class, the revolution created a new industrial middle class. Neither class had any political power, as we saw when discussing Liberalism. But both classes moved to secure power as the century wore on. The first to get it was the middle class in the Reform Bill of 1832. Not until 1867 did the working class begin to get a voice in affairs. In 1867 and 1884 reform bills were passed allowing workingmen some participation in political affairs.

What other effects did the Industrial Revolution have? The revolution encouraged nations in the latter 19^th century to pursue imperialist goals. Nations sought high tariffs to protect their own industries. They also strived for international industrial and commercial superiority and sought empires overseas in an effort to secure additional markets and raw materials. We will look later at this trend when we examine imperialism.

Finally, before finishing this brief discussion of the impact of the Industrial Revolution, we need to consider a reaction to the growth of industry which was a natural but irrational one: the rise of Luddism. It is not surprising that those most affected by the mechanization of textile production, hand weavers, should have taken direct action against the machines and their owners. In 1811 in a town near Nottingham, hosiery workers destroyed hosiery-making machines. They took their name from Ned Ludd, whom they called "General Ludd", supposedly a hosiery worker. Although Ludd was probably a fictional leader, those who claimed to follow him widened their attacks on machines, factories, and the houses of mill owners to several parts of the industrial Midlands and North of England. In reaction, the government called in troops who shot rioters, arrested others, hanged dozens and transported more to Australia before the movement died out. In that the Luddite reaction to the Industrial Revolution was an attempt to stop it in its tracks, Luddism became symbolic of a stance on industrial and economic change which has not ended. In recent times, with the rise of a global economy, people can still be mobilized to direct action against those they believe to be responsible for "globalization," ruining the environment, and oppressing workers the world over.

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1. The G8 Summit of 2004 met at Sea Island. One of the features of such meetings for many years has been violent demonstrations aimed at disrupting the meeting. See the plans to disrupt this summit. Are these people Luddites?
2. What do you think about the global economy? About jobs going overseas? About the environmental impact of world-wide industrialization and economic development?

We have now considered the beginnings and progress of the Industrial Revolution and some of its effects. We will be looking at several "isms" which it produced. In many ways it was the most important of the revolutions which caused such important changes in the 19^th century. It still affects us today, changing our lives much as it did the lives of those who lived in the 19^th century. If you doubt this, think about the fate of the southern textile industry which is undergoing a massive challenge from overseas competitors. In little more than three generations textile manufacturing has gone from a position of industrial dominance in the southern U.S. to what appears to be certain doom. In the rise and fall of the textile industry the Industrial Revolution and all its far-reaching implications is being played out before our very eyes.

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Have you been affected by the shifting southern economy?

1. Tim Jeal, Livingstone (New York, 1973), p. 8.