Who Benefited From The Industrial Revolution

Much of my family on my mothers’ side originated in Great Britain, my great-great-grandparents were born in the early 1840’s when Great Britain had finished making the transition from agriculture to manufacturing. The Industrial Revolution made Great Britain one of the most powerful and resourceful empires. It was from the success of steam railways and ships that allowed Britain to have control over incoming and outgoing cargo; resulting in the domination of world trade. With power came an immense need for manual labor, to achieve and maintain a continuous flow of profit for the British empire. Great Britain benefited from the slave trade as it helped aid in fueling the Industrial Revolution. Unfortunately, many slaves that worked on the colonies
plantations were from Africa and endured various hardships such as being “[p]acked tightly into the holds of ships and subjected to lack of food, water, and sanitary facilities, as many as 25 percent of these human beings died in transit. Anyone who survived the trip then faced new horrors: starvation and overwork and sometimes harsh physical discipline by their owners.” However, despite these inhumane conditions Great Britain continued to enslave individual’s as “[t]he slave trade generated huge profits, not only for the Europeans, but also for African chiefs who supplied slaves to the traders.” It was not until 1833 when the Slavery Abolition Act took effect that hundreds of thousand human beings were finally freed from the horrid plantations they had been forced to work on for so long.