Industrial Revolution

I

Introduction

Industrial Revolution, term first used in the early 19th century to describe major changes in modes of production in Britain since the mid-18th century and their social consequences. However, it was quickly recognized outside as well as inside Britain that the consequences of the introduction of machinery, driven by steam power, would be felt worldwide.

Agriculture, backed by commerce, would no longer be the main source of wealth, and material wealth would increase through greater productivity. More than technology or resources were involved: enterprise was required, as was capital. The formation of capital depended on rates of profit and interest. How incomes would be distributed in future would raise difficult questions, for the relationships between employers, who owned the machines, and the workers, men and women (they were sometimes called “hands”), who operated them, would be different from the relationships between landowners and the agricultural workers dependent upon them. Karl Marx, who claimed that new industrial workers, separated from the products that they made, were alienated, less than full human beings, nonetheless believed in the unparalleled power of industrial advance and treated the invention of the steam engine as the beginning of a new era in human history.

By the end of the 19th century, when the term “industrial revolution” had passed into general circulation, other countries besides Britain, including Germany, the United States, and post-Meiji Restoration Japan, were already undergoing what were also called industrial revolutions. Enterprise, as had been forecast, continued to generate vast new wealth. There were signs by then, however, that in some industries Britain’s lead in production and marketing had already been lost. In many industrializing countries there was evidence also of organized working-class pressure to influence conditions of work exerted through cooperative societies, trade unions, and political parties.

Those socialists (a new 19th-century word) who followed Karl Marx believed that it was inevitable in the new economic conditions that the “capitalist system”, which was associated with the exploitation for profit of new technologies, would give way in time, following crises, to a socialist system. There were few British industrial workers, however, who subscribed to this view, although Marx had based his economic analysis on the British industrial revolution.

British experience did not serve as a model in other countries. The state usually played a bigger role elsewhere than it had done in Britain, and so, too, did science. In the United States, however, while tariff protection supported early industry, its expansion depended on the dynamics of capitalism. International trade, crucial to Britain as an island, had expanded rapidly before the Industrial Revolution, setting the revolution within a world frame, and during the 19th century Britain was the most active proponent of international free trade. In the 18th century imports of cotton from across the oceans were the basis of the most rapidly developing of the new British machine industries, mechanized cotton spinning, in the process disturbing and destroying the older Indian handicraft cotton industry. British mill owners depended for their profits on the opening up of African markets for cheap cotton goods through triangular trade between Britain, Africa, and America, in which the movement of slaves was part of the system. Britain subsequently took the lead in the movement to abolish the slave trade, but by then its industrial lead seemed secure. As other countries industrialized—some, particularly the United States, with far greater resources at the disposal of their manufacturers—competitive trade rivalries directly or indirectly influenced politics. So, too, did recurring business cycles, with booms at their peaks and depressions at their troughs.

II

Common Elements in the Pattern

However marked the contrasts in the timing and sequences of industrialization in different countries, all “industrial revolutions” had a number of elements in common.

A

Power

The quest for new sources of inanimate power—steam first, electricity second—was fundamental to industrialization. Hitherto people had depended on natural power—wind, water, and human backed by animal power, and water employed in early British cotton mills continued to be used in parallel to steam until and after the beginnings of the age of electricity. Inanimate power was measured at first in units of horse power. In late 18th-century Birmingham, where the Scots engineer James Watt worked in partnership with the businessman Matthew Boulton, the latter told the visitors to his works that he was selling what all the world wanted—”power”.

The gospel of steam, proclaimed as forcefully in the 19th century as the gospel of work, rested on the conviction, not shared by all workers tied to it, that steam was a universal boon; and writing after it had been applied not only to driving machines but to locomotion (railways and ships)—considered its greatest triumph—a Yorkshire poet, Ebenezer Elliott, popular critic of agricultural protection, wrote in verses called “Storm in the Desert”:

B

Materials

The exploitation of existing materials and the discovery of new materials, accompanied by advances in technology and in chemistry, were other key elements in the industrial revolutions. Metals, particularly iron, acquired new uses. So, too, did glass. Coal was demanded in large quantities. One chemical product, sulphuric acid, was deemed so important that the German chemist Justus Liebig suggested that the commercial prosperity of a country might be measured by its consumption. Chemical products included caustic soda, chlorine (used for bleaching), soap, dyestuffs, and paints.