Industrialization and its consequences

Framing a historical context

• Last of the great revolutions• A “western” phenomenon?• Industrialization & capitalism

The time frame • Bringing in older industrial

activities• Regional industrialization and

de-industrialization

Thomas Gainsborough, The Harvest Wagon, (first exhibited, 1767)

Explaining industrial “take-off”• Agricultural innovations• Livestock• Enclosures

Robert Bakewell, 1723-1795

Explaining industrial “take-off”• Demographic expansion• Malthusian controls?

1700 1800

Europe 100/120 million 190 million

England 6 million (1750) 10 million

Explaining industrial “take-off”• The Power Crisis

• Human and animal power

• Wood• Coal

• British politics

An early coal mine in the Midlands

Explaining industrial “take-off”• A commercial revolution

– Pre-industrial capitalism– Internal trade growth,

18C– External trade growth

• Navigation Acts (1652, 1674)

– Supply & demand– Cultural values &

ideologies• Climate and geography

Total GB exports compared to exports to Caribbean trade ( North America, W Indies,

West Africa, Spanish America )

A closer view• Lancashire, India and cotton

– The Seven Years War (1756-63)– cotton’s advantages

Higherford Mill in Barrowford, Lancashire (abt. 20 miles north of Manchester), first used waterwheel for

power in the 18C. This building was built in 1827, after steam engines had come online.

Industrial technologies 1: textiles• Idea of Industrial Revolution as process

– The bottleneck phenomenon– Why were textiles first?

• King Cotton and Manchester– Flying Shuttle, 1733– Spinning Jenny, 1765– The water-frame, 1769– The water-mule, 1790

Manchester1811-1821 40% pop. rise1821-1831 47%

The hand-loom weavers• A golden age, 1780s-1810s

– Power-loom, 1785– Cotton-gin, 1800

• The fate of the handloom weavers

year hand-loom weavers

powerlooms

1820 400,000 14,150

1835 188,000 110,000

1850 50,000 250,000

1861 7000 400,000

Industrial technologies 2: power

• Remember the process idea!– Early water-dependency– Thomas Newcomen’s Engine, 1702– James Watt, 1763

• Results: urbanization & industrialization united

The Factory System

• Machine technologies central• Factory discipline

– Elizabethan Statute of Artificers extended, 1766• Factory Acts, 1830s

– “Condition of England” question

A famous image, used by pro-Factory Act activists in the 1830s.

New Social Classes• The Factory Owners• Working classes

– Resistance and assimilation• Luddites• Methodism?

Top: A contemporary image of “Ned Ludd,” fictive leader of the Luddites, along with (bottom) a Home Office advertisement from 1811.

The “Living Standards” question• Industrial production• 1780-1800: 2x• 1800-1851: 3.5x• Population

– 1780: 9m– 1851: 21m

The “Living Standards” question

• Marxist-inspired historiography– Material conditions

• Revisionist views– 1750-90: general improvements– 1790-1810: deterioration– 1815-50: slow rise in wages

• Counter-revisionism: E. J. Hobsbawm