Unit 4: The Industrial Revolution in England
The Industrial Revolution began in England, which was, by 1750, one of the wealthiest capitalist states in the world. The revolution started in England's textile industry, which was struggling to produce goods cheaper and faster for growing consumer markets. Business people and factory workers, rather than scientists, developed key inventions to solve major bottlenecks in textile production. As the production scale grew, the factory emerged as a centralized location where wage laborers could work on machines using raw materials provided by capitalist entrepreneurs. By the late 18th century, steam power was adapted to power factory machinery, sparking an even more significant surge in industrial machines' size, speed, and productivity. New ideas revolutionized heavy industries like ironworking, and new transportation technologies were developed to move products further and faster.
Growing businesses soon outstripped the financial abilities of individuals and their families, leading to legal reforms that allowed corporations to own and operate businesses. While England initially tried to protect its industrial technologies, the central ideas of the Industrial Revolution quickly spread to continental Europe and North America.
In this unit, we examine the significant ideas and events of the Industrial Revolution, study the effects the Industrial Revolution had on the economy of England, and see how the process of economic change spread to other parts of the world.
Completing this unit should take you approximately 5 hours.
Upon successful completion of this unit, you will be able to:
- describe how new technology increased industrialization;
- discuss how improved methods of coal extraction drove multiple other industries;
- interpret primary source documents to understand why some workers opposed industrialization;
- examine the impact of the factory system on the notion of human rights;
- identify major developments in transportation technology; and
- explain how knowledge about industrialization spread within and beyond Europe.
4.1: Coal Mining in England
Coal drove the production of iron, steel, and steam, which in turn required new methods of transportation. Coal drove economies and policies, exports, and manufacturing. The coal industry also caused workers' movements, as the working conditions were horrific, and many miners were essentially bonded labor.
Read this article about how coal provided the essential fuel for many industrialization activities. Would the Industrial Revolution have occurred without coal?
Watch this short video about people who worked in the coal mines to provide fuel for England's Industrial Revolution and beyond. It features former coal miners who are now tour guides at England's National Coal Mining Museum.
Read this excerpt from the Coal Atlas. Of particular interest is how coal acted as a primary source of fueling industry spread around the globe.
4.2: The Steam Engine
During the Industrial Revolution, the steam engine went from being a device that helped make some work a bit more efficient to the primary source of mechanical power. Even today, steam turbines generate a significant portion of the world's electrical power. Not limited to providing mechanical power for industry, steam also drove new forms of transportation and improved agriculture.
Read this article about the spread of steam power. Pay attention to how many other things steam power made possible and its full consequences.
Read this article about how the use of steam power spread throughout England. It also explains the early technological developments in harnessing steam power.
4.3: Revolutionizing Wool and Cotton Spinning
As noted in this first resource, "The British textile industry drove the Industrial Revolution, triggering advancements in technology, stimulating the coal and iron industries, boosting raw material imports, and improving transportation, which made Britain the global leader of industrialization, trade, and scientific innovation". In short, it changed everything.
Read this article about how textile manufacturing in England spurred the Industrial Revolution. In particular, it explains what the industry was like before and after the Industrial Revolution, pointing up its effects.
Read this article about the technological developments in the textile industry in particular. Interestingly, at a certain point, new technology stopped being adopted to continuously refine what was already there.
Read these two articles to learn how new technology changed people's lives. Note how each side tries to make an argument for the common good.
4.4: Resistance to Mechanization
The industrialization process increased the production of goods, made materials cheaper, and helped create a mass consumer market such as the one we have today. However, it also dramatically changed the way we make products and disrupted the lives of the people who made them.
Since the Middle Ages, before industrialization, the European economy was built around a local community of craftsmen and craftswomen who made products in local workshops or from home. Industrialization and the factory system moved production from the home and workshop to the factory floor to a building designed to house the machines that mechanized the production process.
Factory workers lost control of their time and how their day was structured. For example, they often completed one step of a process and never saw the end product of whatever they were working on. In 1811, this process prompted a group of workers called the Luddites to engage in a series of riots that lasted for five years to destroy the machinery that threatened to eradicate their way of life and community.
Read this article about these machine-breaking movements. They began with the Luddites, who were textile workers opposed to how machines in textile factories were being used to deprive some people of work. They were being used to help factory owners get around some of the few fair labor practices.
Read this article about machine-breaking movements more broadly. It explains some similarities and differences between movements on both sides of the English Channel.
4.5: The Factory System
While domestic and cottage industries helped European workers transition from an agricultural to an industrialized society, factory production dominated the economic landscape. Newly-unemployed artisans and agricultural workers would flock to the urban centers, where they would form Britain's new industrial workforce.
Read this article about the beginnings of the factory system. Labor would come to be organized around the factories that housed the machinery of industrialized production.
Read this excerpt of Ure's 1835 book, which gives a contemporary account of the benefits of the factory system in England. Observed from the perspective of the emerging merchant class, it is an enthusiastic endorsement.
Read this brief series of short accounts of the physical deterioration of the English manufacturing class. The accounts of "what the work did to the worker" are from the perspective of a medical observer.
4.6: Iron
Iron was one of the most common elements on earth that people had been working with for a few thousand years. However, the Industrial Revolution brought a greater demand for iron and advances in metallurgy that allowed iron to be obtained, refined, and worked more quickly and cheaply. It is also a key component of steel, which developed into its own coal-driven industry.
Read this article about advancements in metalworking that decreased the price of iron. In turn, less expensive iron quickly made its way into machinery and engine production.
Read this article about how new techniques in metallurgy allowed for the mass production of steel. It is considered one of the primary drivers of the Second Industrial Revolution.
Watch this video, which shows each component of the steel-making process. In addition to history, it also shows how steel mill products are used.
Read this article, which explains the history of steel production and the processes involved in its manufacture. Pay attention to the definitions and scientific descriptions.
4.7: New Transportation Routes
The introduction of the steam locomotive and the steamship revolutionized the transportation systems in England, the United States, and elsewhere. However, steam power and the technology behind these inventions were based on the improved production of steel, in terms of the quantity and quality of the steel produced. The transportation revolution, therefore, was predicated on improved steel production in combination with the invention of the steam boiler.
Read this article to learn about the origins of railroads and their effect on industrialization. It pays special attention to the relationship between time and distance, how the railroad changed it, and what those changes came to mean.
Read this article about the economic and societal implications of the proliferation of railways. While railroads were made possible by industrial advances, the railroads also improved industrial production and made moving raw materials and finished goods significantly less expensive.
Read this article, which explains what railroads brought to North America. Canada specifically already had a system of waterways and canals, so railways served a slightly different purpose than they did in England.
Read this article about the development of the Transcontinental Railroad. The invention of the Pullman sleeping car, in particular, made longer-distance travel much more comfortable than it had been previously.
Watch this video about the development of canals, steamboats, and railroads. It features development timelines and explains some of the transportation systems that English engineers worked on all over the new world.
Unit 4 Assessment
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