HIST363: Global Perspectives on Industrialization

In conclusion, Victorian Empire experienced major changes that affected the living standards profoundly in different stages of Victorian period. Economic, scientific, medical and technological advances contributed to population growth. The population at the end of the Victorian period doubled the population at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Industrial revolution led to many poor people all over the world to immigrate to urban places in the empire with the intention of working by increasing the general population in the empire.

As "this was a period of transition from one mode of industry to another and all transition is painful" (8: 207), workers and employers were in clash with each other for the sake of their own interests in this capitalist world. However, as compared with the earlier century, it is seen that people were much more wealthy and prosperous than their poorer predecessors in every sense. High wages, improving sanitary, housing and working conditions, political liberties such as the enfranchisement of men, educational reforms, economic and technological developments, the new woman who are educated, career-oriented, and unconventional were all indicative of a rapidly developing and democratising empire unquestionably, although it was really hard to experience this transitional period in social respects.

Especially working-class was faced to face with poverty and unemployment because of the replacement of machines for hand power, although machines meant nothing without physical labour and required cheap human power in the capitalist system. This situation forced them to move to urban sides and to work under very harsh, unhealthy and oppressive conditions for low wages at the expense of death. This gloomy atmosphere mostly belonged to the early Victorian period.

At the second half of the 19th-century and mid-Victorian period, there were acts of amelioration in every sphere of society. There was more focus on educational reforms and movements as well as individual and political liberties. The public schools were reformed to satisfy the requirements of the changing world. These schools, which symbolizes masculinity and played significant roles in the education of male youth, made great progress morally. There was also a substantial decline in death rate because of medical advances, along with decreasing birth rate by the mid-19th century because of the improvements in the quality of life.

It was realised that the solution to poverty did not lie in workhouses, but in the state that had to take action against the social ills, so a more humanistic approach was adopted in the treatment of poverty. Although industrial revolution increased poverty partly, it was not the main factor, but a social organizer with its results that promised economic progress and material prosperity in the long run.

The nineteenth-century British political and social thought had a deep influence on the central ideas of government such as, conservatism, liberalism, feminism and socialism in the light of industrial changes, their revolutionary consequences and democratic movements and thanks to the works of the representatives of these ideologies.

Both Industrial Revolution and democratization were two significant developments that shaped the rise of these ideologies together with capitalist policies and rise of the British Empire. Radical changes and revolutions in British history deeply affect the role of the individual in the society and the role of government by forcing them to inevitable changes in their policies and roles. Conservatism struggles with revolutions and Industrial Revolution brings in capitalism.

The hard working conditions of people in factories with industrialization lead to socialist movements and then liberalist ideas supporting individual rights and encouraging democratic system of government in British history. Through the late-Victorian period the suffering middle-class women under the dominance of patriarchy finds the solution in education which enables them to have better employment opportunities and to have influence over their fate. This group of women compose the first-wave feminists who aim at independence in British political and social life.

This case shows how these ideologies are tied to each other with a chain relation following each other by affecting and being affected. Hence, it is right and inevitable to perceive the subjects of Queen Victoria in 1901 in better conditions rather than in 1837 because of all reforms and innovations for the goodness of society.