The Birth of Modern Industrial Society Europe 1815-1850

✵Industrial Revolution, term usually applied to the social and economic changes that mark the transition from a stable agricultural and commercial society to a modern industrial society relying on complex machinery rather than tools.

✵Dramatic changes in the social and economic structure took place as inventions and technological innovations created the factory system of large-scale machine production and greater economic specialization, and as the labouring population, formerly employed predominantly in agriculture (in which production had also increased as a result of technological improvements), increasingly gathered in great urban factory centres.

The above pictures shows an inventor and in the background are inventions that were created during the Industrial Revolution. What are some of the inventions?

✵In Britain, goods and services grew enormously. ✵Between 1796 and 1830, cotton manufacturing increased threefold. ✵By 1850, cotton industry employed 500 000 people! ✵Output of coal increased from 14.5 million tonnes in 1815 to 45.5 million tonnes in 1848.

✵Output of iron doubled from 0.9 million tonnes in 1835 to 1.8 million tonnes in 1848.

✵Transportation also expanded: 1838 there were 869 kilometres of railway; by 1850 there were 10 655 kilometres.

✵Britain was transformed from a primarily agricultural economy to the world’s first industrial nation. ✵In 1760, 41% of working men were in agriculture. ✵By 1840, only 29% still worked in this sector. ✵Industry rose from 20% to 31.5% during this period.

Industrial Discipline✵Factory workers subjected to strict discipline. ✵Employers expected workers to arrive on time, match rhythm of machines, and meet piecework targets. ✵Workers were fined for undesirable behaviour: swearing, drinking, gambling.

✵Rules at Samuel Oldknow’s mill, 1797: ✵The horrid and impious Vice of profane CURSING and SWEARING - and the Habits of Losing Time - and DRUNKENNESS - are becoming so frequent and notorious; that unless speedily checked, they may justly provoke the Divine Vengeance to increase the Calamities…

✵Rules at Samuel Oldknow’s mill, 1797: ✵NOTICE is hereby given, That all the Hands…must be subject to the following RULE: That when any person, either Man, Woman, or Child, is heard to CURSE or SWEAR, the same shall forfeit One Shilling - And when any Hand is absent from Work (unless unavoidably detained by Sickness, or Leave being first obtained), the same shall forfeit as many Hours or Work as have been lost; and if by the Job or Piece, after the rate of 2 shillings and 6 pence per Day. Such forfeitures to be put into a Box, and distributed to the Sick and Necessitous, at the discretion of their employer.

✵Most important development was rise of factory-based cotton textile production. ✵Britain imported 1.1 million kilograms of raw cotton in 1760, 10 million kilograms in 1787, and 121 million kilograms in 1837. ✵Only possible because of technological breakthroughs that allowed cotton spinning to be done on power-driven machines: spinning jenny.

✵Spinning jenny invented c. 1765. ✵Britain outpaced India, which had been major producer at this time. ✵By 1790s, British machines could spin 45 kilograms of cotton in 300 hours compared with 50 000 hours required by Indian hand technology.

✵Initially, new, large factories were located on rivers, because water was the most important source of power until late 19th century. ✵Once steam-powered machines were available, cotton factories were established in urban areas. ✵Most important: Manchester.

✵Population exploded from 10 000 in 1717 to 70 000 in 1787, and 300 000 in 1851.

✵Great importance: recognition of production by the breaking down of skilled tasks into a number of simple, unskilled ones that could be performed more quickly and cheaply. ✵Process of division of labour described by Adam Smith in his Wealth of Nations (1776):

✵To take for an example…the trade of pin-maker…[I]n the way in which this business is now carried on…it is divided into a number of branches of which the greater part are likewise peculiar trades. One man draws out the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth pins it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head; to make the head requires two or three distinct operations…

✵[A]nd the important business of making a pin is, in this manner, divided into about eighteen distinct operations…I have seen a manufactory…where ten men only were employed…[and] could make…upwards of forty-eight thousand pins a day…But if they had all wrought…independently, and without any of them having been educated in this particular business, they could not each of them have made twenty, perhaps, not one pin in a day.

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Effects✵Division of labour meant that skills were lost and pay was lowered.Wages in shillings 1833, Britain

Demographic Changes✵Population of England grew to 8.7 million by 1801 and 16.8 million by 1851. ✵Attributed to declining death rates, increased life expectancy, age of marriage, and women having more children.

✵Industrialization made marriage a possibility for more people, but family was still economic unit. ✵Industrialization removed production from household to make people dependent on wage labour. ✵Wives and children also had to contribute.

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✵Factory towns had major problems - overcrowding, terrible living conditions, lack of sanitation. ✵Also seen as opportunities. ✵Families left country villages to move to towns/cities because they believed there were better jobs there!

✵Some employers were interested in the welfare of their workers, such as Robert Owen (1771-1858). ✵He was a self-made businessman and reformer who set up model living conditions for his workers - hours of labour were limited, schools were established, and decent housing was introduced.

✵Women worked while they were single, but left wage employment after marriage, especially once they had children. ✵Married women’s tasks were to keep house, prepare food, and care for children. ✵When families needed more income, children went to work.

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✵People were used to work and home being in the same place and it was normal for parents and children to work together. ✵Working day ranged from 12 to 16 hours. ✵Women and children regardless of where they worked, had the most exploitative working condition and the lowest rates of pay.

✵Machine altered age-old employer-employee relationship. ✵Prior to 19th century, most people knew their employers and had some sort of personal relationship with them. ✵Now labour became depersonalized. ✵Employers hired women and children because they were more easily managed and because their hands were smaller and could reach in machines clogged with cotton!

✵New class of workers came into being and problems with employers grew more intense. ✵Karl Marx (1818-1883) called new class proletariat. ✵Proletariats owned labour, thus were at the mercy of employers and market.

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Industrial Novel✵Developed a new social purpose in 19th century. ✵Literacy rates were increasing, public education was underway, and increasing middle class welcomed novels that portrayed contemporary life.

✵Novelists in England, notably Charles Dickens (1812-1870) wanted to expose the effects of industrialization. ✵Dickens’ Hard Times (1854), is set in the fictional Coketown:

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✵It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but, as matters stood it was a town of unnatural red and black…It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves forever and ever, and never got uncoiled.

✵It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and cast piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness.”

Worker Resistance✵Worker resistance took many forms: individual and collective, organized and non-organized, peaceful and violent. ✵Efforts were hindered by the state (favoured employers). ✵Governments in the name of “freedom” and “individualism” prevented workers from forming organizations, or unions.

✵In England, unions were illegal between 1799 and 1824. ✵In France the Le Chapelier Law banned unions from 1791 to 1848. ✵A dramatic, widespread form of resistance in early industrial period was machine breaking.

✵Most famous, known as Luddism, took place in textile districts of northern England between 1811 and 1817. ✵Small, disciplined bands moved around the countryside at night and attacked establishments of employers.

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✵At the height of the violence, 1811-1812, government sent twelve thousand troops north to the factory towns. ✵Luddism has been called “collective bargaining by riot.”