Industrial Revolution Research Paper

The Origins of the Industrial Revolution in England | |
|The Industrial Revolution of the late 18th and early 19th centuries was revolutionary because it changed -- revolutionized -- the |
|productive capacity of England, Europe and United States. But the revolution was something more than just new machines, |
|smoke-belching factories, increased productivity and an increased standard of living. It was a revolution which transformed English,|
|European, and American society down to its very roots. Like the Reformation or the French Revolution, no one was left unaffected. |
|Everyone was touched in one way or another -- peasant and noble, parent and child, artisan and captain of industry. The Industrial |
|Revolution serves
as a key to the origins of modern Western society. As Harold Perkin has observed, "the Industrial Revolution was |
|no mere sequence of changes in industrial techniques and production, but a social revolution with social causes as well as profound |
|social effects" [The Origins of Modern English Society, 1780-1880 (1969)].
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|The INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION can be said to have made the European working-class. It made the European middle-class as well. In the |
|wake of the Revolution, new social relationships appeared. As Ben Franklin once said, "time is money." Man no longer treated men as |
|men, but as a commodity which could be bought and sold on the open market. This "commodification" of man is what bothered Karl Marx |
|-- his solution was to transcend the profit motive by social revolution (see Lecture 24). |
|There is no denying the fact that the Industrial Revolution began in England sometime after the middle of the 18th century. England |
|was the "First Industrial Nation." As one economic historian commented in the 1960s, it was England which first executed "the |
|takeoff into self-sustained growth." And by 1850, England had become an economic titan. Its goal was to supply two-thirds of the |
|globe with cotton spun, dyed, and woven in the industrial centers of northern England. England proudly proclaimed itself to be the
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|"Workshop of the World," a position that country held until the end of the 19th century when Germany, Japan and United States |
|overtook it. |
|More than the greatest gains of the Renaissance, the Reformation, Scientific Revolution or Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution |
|implied that man now had not only the opportunity and the knowledge but the physical means to completely subdue nature. No other |
|revolution in modern times can be said to have accomplished so much in so little time. The Industrial Revolution attempted to effect|
|man's mastery over nature. This was an old vision, a vision with a history. In the 17th century, the English statesman and "Father |
|of Modern Science, Francis Bacon (1561-1626), believed that natural philosophy (what we call science) could be applied to the |
|solution of practical problems, and so, the idea of modern technology was born. For Bacon, the problem was this: how could man enjoy|
|perfect freedom if he had to constantly labor to supply the necessities of existence? His answer was clear -- machines. These labor |
|saving devices would liberate mankind, they would save labor which then could be utilized elsewhere. "Knowledge is power," said |
|Bacon, and scientific knowledge reveals power over nature. |
|The vision was all-important. It was optimistic and progressive. Man was going somewhere, his life has direction. This vision is |
|part of the general attitude known as the idea of progress, that is, that the history of human society is a history of progress, |
|forever forward, forever upward. This attitude is implicit throughout the Enlightenment and was made reality during the French and |
|Industrial Revolutions. With relatively few exceptions, the philosophes of the 18th century embraced this idea of man's progress |
|with an intensity I think unmatched in our own century. Human happiness, improved morality, an increase in knowledge were now within|
|man's reach. This was indeed the message, the vision, of Adam Smith, Denis Diderot, Voltaire, Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin (see|
|Lecture 10). |
|"Tremble all ye oppressors of the world," wrote Richard Price -- and tremble they did (see Lecture 14). The American and French |
|Revolutions, building on enlightened ideas, swept away enthusiasm, tyranny, fanaticism, superstition, and oppressive and despotic |
|governments. "Sapere Aude!" exclaimed Kant -- Dare to know!. With history and superstition literally swept aside, man could not only|
|understand man and society, man could now change society for the better. These are all ideas, glorious, noble visions of the future |
|prospect of mankind. By the end of the 18th century, these ideas became tangible. The vision was reality. Even Karl Marx understood |
|this when he wrote, "Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it." |
|Engines and machines, the glorious products of science began to revolutionize the idea of progress itself. If a simple machine can |
|do the work of twenty men in a quarter of the time formerly required, then could the New Jerusalem be far behind? When you view the |
|Industrial Revolution alongside the democratic revolutions of 1776 and 1789, we cannot help but be struck by the optimism so |
|generated. Heaven on Earth seemed reality and no one was untouched by the prospects. But, as we will soon see, while the Industrial |
|Revolution brought its blessings, there was also much misery. Revolutions, political or otherwise, are always mixed blessings. If we|
|can thank the Industrial Revolution for giving us fluoride, internal combustion engines, and laser guided radial arm saws, we can |
|also damn it for the effect it has had on social relationships. We live in the legacy of the Industrial Revolution, the legacy of |
|the "cash nexus," as the mid-19th century Scottish critic Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) put it, where the only connection between men |
|is the one of money, profit and gain. |
|The origins of the Industrial Revolution in England are complex and varied and, like the French Revolution, the Industrial |
|Revolution is still a subject of a vast historical debate over origins, developments, growth and end results. This debate has raged |
|among historians since at least 1884, when Arnold Toynbee (1852-1883), an English historian and social reformer, published the short|
|book, Lectures on the Industrial Revolution in England. Toynbee was in a fairly good position to assess the revolution in industry |
|-- England had, by the 1880s, endured more than a century of industrialization. |
|Still, like any revolution, the Industrial Revolution leaves us with many questions: was the revolution in industry simply an issue |
|of new machinery or mechanical innovation? did young boys and girls work and live shoulder to shoulder for more than twelve hour a |
|day? was industrial capitalism nothing more than a clever system devised by clever capitalists to exploit the labor of ignorant |
|workers? was the revolution in industry the product of conscious planning or did it appear spontaneously? I can't answer all these |
|questions in one lecture -- indeed, an entire course of study on the subject would perhaps get us no closer to the answers to these |
|important questions. However, we can make one serious confession -- what the Industrial Revolution accomplished was nothing less |
|than a structural change in the economic organization of English and European society. This is what made the Revolution |
|revolutionary. In other words, England, then the Continent and the United States, witnessed a shift from a traditional, pre-modern, |
|agrarian society to that of an industrial economy based on capitalist methods, principles and practices. |
|In general, the spread of industry across England was sporadic. In other words, not every region of England was industrialized at |
|the same time. In some areas, the factory system spread quickly, in others not at all. Such a development also applies to the steam |
|engine -- one would think that once steam engines made their appearance that each and every factory would have one. But this is |
|clearly not the case. The spread of industry, or machinery, or steam power, or the factory system itself was erratic. I imagine the |
|reason why we assume that industrialization was a quick process is that we live live in an age of rising expectations -- we expect |
|change to occur rapidly and almost without our direction. Late 20th century developments in technology are perhaps most responsible |
|for this attitude. We know that technology supplies a constant stream of products that are "new and improved." We know that the |
|moment we bring home a top of the line computer that within six months it will become not necessarily obsolete but "old." |
|Historians are now agreed that beginning in the 17th century and continuing throughout the 18th century, England witnessed an |
|agricultural revolution. English (and Dutch) farmers were the most productive farmers of the century and were continually adopting |
|new methods of farming and experimenting with new types of vegetables and grains. They also learned a great deal about manure and |
|other fertilizers. In other words, many English farmers were treating farming as a science, and all this interest eventually |
|resulted in greater yields. Was the English farmer more enterprising than his French counterpart? Perhaps, but not by virtue of |
|intelligence alone. English society was far more open than French -- there were no labor obligations to the lord. The English farmer|
|could move about his locale or the country to sell his goods while the French farmer was bound by direct and indirect taxes, tariffs|
|or other kinds of restrictions. In 1700, 80% of the population of England earned its income from the land. A century later, that |
|figure had dropped to 40%. |
|The result of these developments taken together was a period of high productivity and low food prices. And this, in turn, meant that|
|the typical English family did not have to spend almost everything it earned on bread (as was the case in France before 1789), and |
|instead could purchase manufactured goods. |
|There are other assets that helped make England the "first industrial nation." Unlike France, England had an effective central bank |
|and well-developed credit market. The English government allowed the domestic economy to function with few restrictions and |
|encouraged both technological change and a free market. England also had a labor surplus which, thanks to the enclosure movement, |
|meant that there was an adequate supply of workers for the burgeoning factory system. |
|England's agricultural revolution came as a result of increased attention to fertilizers, the adoption of new crops and farming |
|technologies, and the enclosure movement. Jethro Tull (1674-1741) invented a horse-drawn hoe as well as a mechanical seeder which |
|allowed seeds to be planted in orderly rows. A contemporary of Tull, Charles "Turnip" Townshend (1674-1738), stressed the value of |
|turnips and other field crops in a rotation system of planting rather than letting the land lay fallow. Thomas William Coke |
|(1752-1842) suggested the utilization of field grasses and new fertilizers as well as greater attention to estate management. |
|In order for these "high farmers" to make the most efficient use of the land, they had to manage the fields as they saw fit. This |
|was, of course, impossible under the three field system which had dominated English and European agriculture for centuries. Since |
|farmers, small and large, held their property in long strips, they had to follow the same rules of cultivation. The local parish or |
|village determined what ought to be planted. In the end, the open-field system of crop rotation was an obstacle to increased |
|agricultural productivity. The solution was to enclose the land, and this meant enclosing entire villages. Landlords knew that the |
|peasants would not give up their land voluntarily, so they appealed by petition to Parliament, a difficult and costly adventure at |
|best. The first enclosure act was passed in 1710 but was not enforced until the 1750s. In the ten years between 1750 and 1760, more |
|than 150 acts were passed and between 1800 and 1810, Parliament passed more than 900 acts of enclosure. While enclosure ultimately |
|contributed to an increased agricultural surplus, necessary to feed a population that would double in the 18th century, it also |
|brought disaster to the countryside. Peasant formers were dispossessed of their land and were now forced to find work in the |
|factories which began springing up in towns and cities. |
|England faced increasing pressure to produce more manufactured goods due to the 18th century population explosion -- England's |
|population nearly doubled over the course of the century. And the industry most important in the rise of England as an industrial |
|nation was cotton textiles. No other industry can be said to have advanced so far so quickly. Although the putting-out system |
|(cottage industry) was fairly well-developed across the Continent, it was fully developed in England. A merchant would deliver raw |
|cotton at a household.
The cotton would be cleaned and then spun into yarn or thread. After a period of time, the merchant would |
|return, pick up the yarn and drop off more raw cotton. The merchant would then take the spun yarn to another household where it was |
|woven into cloth. The system worked fairly well except under the growing pressure of demand, the putting-out system could no longer |
|keep up. |
|There was a constant shortage of thread so the industry began to focus on ways to improve the spinning of cotton. The first solution|
|to this bottleneck appeared around 1765 when James Hargreaves (c.1720-1778), a carpenter by trade, invented his cotton-spinning |
|jenny. At almost the same time, Richard Arkwright (1732-1792) invented another kind of spinning device, the water frame. Thanks to |
|these two innovations, ten times as much cotton yarn had been manufactured in 1790 than had been possible just twenty years earlier.|
|Hargreaves' jenny was simple, inexpensive and hand-operated. The jenny had between six and twenty-four spindles mounted on a
sliding|
|carriage. The spinner (almost always a woman) moved the carriage back and forth with one hand and turned a wheel to supply power |
|with the other. Of course, now that one bottleneck had been relieved, another appeared -- the weaver (usually a man) could no longer|
|keep up with the supply of yarn. Arkwright's water frame was based on a different principle. It acquired a capacity of several |
|hundred spindles and demanded more power -- water power. The water frame required large, specialized mills employing hundreds of |
|workers. The first consequence of these developments was that cotton goods became much cheaper and were bought by all social |
|classes. Cotton is the miracle fiber -- it is easy to clean, spin, weave and dye and is comfortable to wear. Now millions of people |
|who had worn nothing under their coarse clothes could afford to wear cotton undergarments. |
|Although the spinning jenny and water frame managed to increase the productive capacity of the cotton industry, the real |
|breakthrough came with developments in steam power. Developed in England by Thomas Savery (1698) and Thomas Newcomen (1705), these |
|early steam engines were used to pump water from coal mines. In the 1760s, a Scottish engineer, James Watt (1736-1819) created an |
|engine that could pump water three times as quickly as the Newcomen engine. In 1782, Watt developed a rotary engine that could turn |
|a shaft and drive machinery to power the machines to spin and weave cotton cloth. Because Watt's engine was fired by coal and not |
|water, spinning factories could be located virtually anywhere. |
|Steam power also promoted important changes in other industries. The use of steam-driven bellows in blast furnaces helped ironmakers|
|switch over from charcoal (limited in quantity) to coke, which is made from coal, in the smelting of pig iron. In the 1780s, Henry |
|Cort (1740-1800) developed the puddling furnace, which allowed pig iron to be refined in turn with coke. Skilled ironworkers |
|("puddlers") could "stir" molten pig iron in a large vat, raking off refined iron for further processing. Cort also developed |
|steam-powered rolling mills, which were capable of producing finished iron in a variety of shapes and forms. |
|Aided by revolutions in agriculture, transportation, communications and technology, England was able to become the "first industrial|
|nation." This is a fact that historians have long recognized. However, there were a few other less-tangible reasons which we must |
|consider. These are perhaps cultural reasons. Although the industrial revolution was clearly an unplanned and spontaneous event, it |
|never would have been "made" had there not been men who wanted such a thing to occur. There must have been men who saw opportunities|
|not only for advances in technology, but also the profits those advances might create. Which brings us to one very crucial cultural |
|attribute -- the English, like the Dutch of the same period, were a very commercial people. They saw little problem with making |
|money, nor with taking their surplus and reinvesting it. Whether this attribute has something to do with their "Protestant work |
|ethic," as Max Weber put it, or with a specifically English trait is debatable, but the fact remains that English entrepreneurs had |
|a much wider scope of activities than did their Continental counterparts at the same time. |
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