The Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution The Industrial Revolution may be defined as the application of

power-driven machinery to manufacturing. It had its beginning in

remote times, and is still continuing in some places. In the

eighteenth century all of western Europe began to industrialize

rapidly, but in England the process was most highly accelerated.

England's head start may be attributed to the emergence of a number of

simultaneous factors.

Britain had burned up her magnificent oak forests in its fireplaces,

but large deposits of coal were still available for industrial fuel.

There was an abundant labor supply to mine coal and iron, and to man

the factories. From the old commercial empire there remained a fleet,

and England still possessed colonies to furnish raw materials and act

as captive markets for manufactured goods. Tobacco merchants of

Glasgow and tea merchants of London and Bristol had capital to invest

and the technical know-how derived from the Scientific Revolution of

the seventeenth century. Last, but not least important, the insularity

of Englandsaved industrial development from being interrupted by war.

Soon all western Europe was more or less industrialized, and the

coming of electricity and cheap steel after 1850 further speeded the

process.

I. The Agricultural Revolution

The English countryside was transformed between 1760 and 1830 as the

open-field system of cultivation gave way to compact farms and

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absence of building codes, and the lack of machinery for public

sanitation. But, it must be added, they were also due to the factory

owners' tendency to regard laborers as commodities and not as a group

of human beings.

In addition to a new factory-owning bourgeoisie, the Industrial

Revolution created a new working class. The new class of industrial

workers included all the men, women, and children laboring in the

textile mills, pottery works, and mines. Often skilled artisans found

themselves degraded to routine process laborers as machines began to

mass produce the products formerly made by hand. Generally speaking,

wages were low, hours were long, and working conditions unpleasant and

dangerous. The industrial workers had helped to pass the Reform Bill

of 1832, but they had not been enfranchised by it.