INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION. To the end of the early modern period, Europe remained a preindustrial society. Its manufactured goods came from small workshops, and most of its machinery was powered by animals, wind, falling water, or human labor. These two facts reinforced each other, and together they constricted Europe's economic development. Water-powered manufacturing, for instance, could develop only in favored regions and remained constantly subject to weather-related interruptions; with limited supplies of power, there was little reason to concentrate manufacturing processes in large workshops. By 1850, however, these descriptions no longer applied to large areas of western Europe, and by 1914 the European economy as a whole was dominated by large factories, many of them employing thousands of workers. Both manufacturing and transportation now relied on steam power, and gasoline and electric motors were becoming common. The quantity and variety of goods manufactured rose accordingly, a transformation suggested by the development of the British iron industry: Britain produced about 30,000 tons of pig iron in 1760, about one million tons in 1810. Contemporary awareness of change advanced even more quickly than the reality. In his 1848 Manifesto of the Communist Party, written at a time when most Europeans still worked in agriculture and when even British manufacturing was still evenly divided between factories and small workshops, Karl Marx (1818–1883) presented industrialization as the obvious destiny of all European society. The rapidity of these changes and their far-reaching effects amply justify historians' designation of the period as the "industrial revolution." In the century after 1780, European life was transformed.

Industrialization thus numbers among the most important processes that brought the early modern period to a close, and as such it raises important questions about the period itself. Signs of dramatic economic and technological change were already apparent in later eighteenth-century Britain, prompting historians to ask how this phase of rapid change could have emerged from the relatively stable early modern economy and why it emerged first in Britain. More broadly, historians have asked why Europe industrialized ahead of other regions of the globe, and what contributions Europe's empires in the Americas and elsewhere made to its industrialization. Answers to these questions have been varied and surprising. Though the concept of industrialization itself remains unchallenged, recent historical research has overturned much conventional wisdom about how the process took place.

MANUFACTURING BEFORE INDUSTRIALIZATION

Though it lacked factories and steam engines, pre-industrial Europe did not have a static economy, and manufacturing counted for a significant share of its total economic activity—about one-fourth of France's gross national product and almost 40 percent of Britain's in the early eighteenth century, one historian has estimated. In some regions, such as the Netherlands and northern Italy, the percentages might have been even higher, but the difficulties of early modern transportation meant that manufacturing was widely dispersed; with transportation costs high, producers had a strong incentive to establish their workshops near the sources of their raw materials and to focus on meeting the needs of regional markets. Despite this fragmentation, early modern producers regularly introduced new products and adopted new techniques. In the thirteenth century, for instance, Italian craftsmen learned how to make silk cloth, and their techniques spread north of the Alps in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, so that by the eighteenth century the French city of Lyon numbered several thousand silk weavers. The technology of silk weaving changed as well, most dramatically with the invention of the Jacquard loom in the 1720s. The new loom had mechanical codes that governed the weaving process, allowing a relatively unskilled weaver to produce a complex product. In an early version of a process that would be frequently repeated during the industrial revolution, the balance between machine and worker had shifted; knowledge could be embedded in the machine, rendering differences among workers less important. Likewise, calico cloths from India created a sensation when first introduced in later seventeenth-century England. They were quickly imitated by British manufacturers, who effectively established an altogether new industry.

A stream of inventions thus changed manufacturing over the early modern period, but the most important changes that the period witnessed had to do with the organization of work rather than its technology. Most European cities restricted manufacturing work, limiting access to some trades so that those already established in them could continue to enjoy respectable incomes and controlling the amounts that workshops might produce to prevent any one manufacturer from acquiring too dominant a position. Impatient with such restrictions, from the seventeenth century on, merchants in many regions organized new forms of production in the countryside. Labor there was cheap and abundant since contemporary agriculture left many peasants underemployed, and economic restrictions were weak. Cloth merchants were especially well placed to take advantage of this opportunity. They supplied villagers with raw materials, transported goods from one stage of production to the next, and finally marketed the finished product, taking as well the largest share of the profits. Other goods too could be manufactured in this way: in eastern France and Switzerland, merchants organized clock making on these lines. By the mid-eighteenth century, the balance between agriculture and manufacturing had shifted in many regions; for most villagers, farm work had become a supplemental source of income, and they relied mainly on spinning, weaving, and other artisanal activities for their livelihoods.

Historians have applied several names to this process. The term cottage industry accurately captures the fact that this system of manufacturing left unchanged the basic conditions of its workers' lives. Spinners, weavers, and others continued to live in small villages and continued to work according to their own preferences, as independent contractors who owned their equipment. But historians have also spoken of this process as proto-industrialization, a term that emphasizes the new economic relationships and expectations, as well as the demographic consequences, created by this system. Though they set their own pace of work, those involved in cottage industry nonetheless depended on far-flung economic networks; their goods were produced for national and international markets, and the workers were subject to the economic power of the merchants who sold what they produced. The proto-industrial workforce was in some sense a proletariat, whose economic fate rested with others; some historians have suggested that these workers were in effect learning the habits that they would eventually need to work in the factories of the nineteenth century.

But as important as its implications for work discipline were, the rise of cottage industry also changed European buying. As the historian Jan de Vries has argued, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century families were working harder than they had in the past in exchange for the ability to buy more goods: cottage industry allowed women and children to earn cash incomes, and it converted what had been the family's leisure time—especially the slow phases of the agricultural cycle—into cash as well. Well before the onset of industrialization, European manufacturers thus had available to them a large consumer market, one eager for small luxury goods. Historians have turned to probate inventories to demonstrate the breadth of the consumer revolution that these centuries brought to England, the Netherlands, France, and Germany. Even backward areas showed the effects of these changes, with families buying mirrors, clocks, brightly printed clothing, prints, and a variety of other manufactured goods. But the effects were most visible in the developing cities of the age. The largest city of early modern Europe, London, by itself concentrated about 16 percent of England's population—an enormous, conveniently centralized and accessible market for manufactured goods. Paris was smaller in absolute numbers and much smaller relative to total French population, but it too offered manufacturers an enormous, fashion-conscious market for new goods.

TOWARD THE NEW ECONOMY

A critical aspect of the industrial revolution was the effort of manufacturers to take advantage of these markets, most visibly in the clothing industry. By the early eighteenth century, a fundamental step had already been taken: clothing manufacturers increasingly devoted their attention to lightweight, cheap, easily-colored fabrics, rather than the high-quality woolens that had dominated the medieval textile industry. In the early seventeenth century, they shifted to producing the lightweight woolen fabrics known in Britain as "new draperies"; later in the century, the arrival of cotton calicoes and muslins from India produced enormous enthusiasm among consumers and led to efforts both to exclude such imports and to replace them with British-made cotton goods. Over the eighteenth century, manufacturers produced a variety of fabrics that mixed cotton with other fibers, because British thread was usually too weak for producing all-cotton cloths. Throughout, popular demand played a crucial role, and in mid-eighteenth-century Britain cotton producers could not keep up with the demand for their products. In response they introduced a series of technological innovations designed to speed up the manufacturing process and to create other attractive new cotton products. Improvements in weaving starting in the 1730s created pressure on the spinning process, which produced cotton thread; at this point it took eight spinners to produce enough thread to supply one weaver, and several inventors sought to produce machines that could do the job more quickly. Solutions came in the 1760s and 1770s, with the spinning jenny, the water frame, and the spinning mule, all devices that allowed a single operator to manage multiple spindles—and that produced a higher-quality, more even thread than hand spinning. Contemporaries immediately recognized the value of these machines, and they spread rapidly, transforming the relationship between spinning and weaving. With spinning increasingly mechanized, there was now pressure to mechanize weaving—a more difficult task, with a first power loom invented in 1787 but not widely used until the early nineteenth century. But though handloom weaving remained dominant, a revolution in the cotton industry had already occurred by the end of the eighteenth century: between 1770 and 1800 imports of raw cotton to Britain increased twelvefold.

New machinery encouraged new ways of organizing work. The spinning jenny was designed as a hand-operated device, and could be adapted to the needs of cottage industry. But the water frame was larger and from the beginning required an external power source to drive it. Richard Arkwright (1732–1792), who held the patent on it, immediately established a set of water-driven mills to exploit the new invention, and the economies of scale that these factories enjoyed meant that by 1800 cottage spinning had largely disappeared. The larger machinery also required a new approach to managing labor. Necessarily centralized around a single source of power, the new machines required close management in order to repay their heavy costs. The factory thus encouraged a new degree of labor discipline, with workers required to report to work at exact hours and labor at a pace set by the factory's managers. The Arkwright mills and their competitors made an immediate impression on contemporaries; the artist Joseph Wright of Derby (1734–1797) painted them, and the poet William Blake (1757–1827) in about 1805 already spoke of "dark Satanic Mills" transforming the British landscape.

Blake found the mills "Satanic" partly because by his time a growing number of them relied on steam power. The development of steam technology represented a second critical strand in the industrial revolution, and, as with the development of cotton manufacturing, its origins lay in the seventeenth century, in a combination of scientific, technological, and ecological developments. As late as the mid-seventeenth century, scientists such as René Descartes (1596–1650) doubted that a vacuum was even possible, but his contemporary, the Italian physicist Evangelista Torricelli (1608–1647), and others demonstrated both the possibility and its practical implications. Inventors developed a series of pumps based on this idea, and in 1698 the Englishman Thomas Savery (c. 1650–1715) developed the first working steam engine, essentially a machine for creating a vacuum and using its suction to lift water. A much-improved version was developed by the Englishman Thomas Newcomen (1663–1729), and in 1712 a Newcomen engine was set to work pumping out coal mines in northern England; by the 1730s such engines were in operation in several European countries. As the economic historian Joel Mokyr has observed, this was the world's first economically viable mechanism for transforming heat into regular motion, the artificial power that would be at the center of industrialization. The Newcomen engine performed its task very inefficiently, though, and in 1776 the first of James Watt's (1736–1819) engines was put into commercial operation, allowing a fourfold improvement in efficiency. By 1800, about 2,500 steam engines had been built in Britain, most of them used in mines, but many powering iron foundries, cotton-spinning machines, and other industrial processes. Contemporaries understood that a technological revolution was underway, and despite the inefficiency of the early engines, inventors immediately began exploring new ways to use them. Steam hammers, rolling mills, and bellows revolutionized the British iron industry from the 1760s on; in 1783 a first steamboat was constructed (in France), and in 1803 a first steam locomotive. By the 1820s, railway construction had begun, and a steam-powered ship had crossed the Atlantic.

This sequence of inventions and applications was closely bound up with the availability of cheap fuel, yet another element of the early modern economy that came to full development during the industrial revolution. Coal had long been known as a fuel, but contemporaries disliked its smoke and smell. By the mid-seventeenth century, however, Britons had little choice but to make use of it, for the country was running short of wood and it was becoming too expensive to use as fuel for even the basic needs of heating, let alone for novel industrial uses. The enormous size of seventeenth-century London, over half a million people within easy reach of cheap water transport, and its insatiable demand for fuel ensured that coal mining could be profitable even in the face of technological obstacles. As mines became deeper, for instance, there was the problem of removing the water that seeped into them—the problem that steam-driven pumps eventually answered. Steam-driven vehicles and carts that moved along rails (radically reducing friction) were first employed in the British coal fields as well. The economics of coal-mining made even the inefficiencies of early steam power acceptable; operating in the coal fields themselves, the first steam engines had a readily available supply of cheap fuel and could even use some of the waste from the mining process. With a fully developed coal-mining industry, and increasingly sophisticated means of using the energy that coal contained, Britain suddenly increased its supply of power many times over. The historian Kenneth Pomeranz has argued that only with this step did Europe move clearly ahead of Asian technology, setting the stage for Europe's domination of the world economy during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This interpretation probably understates the significance of other differences, but it accurately captures an important aspect of the industrial revolution: during the eighteenth century, Britain acquired a seemingly limitless supply of power.

Coal played an especially important role in the iron industry, which constituted the fourth strand of industrialization. Iron and steel had been important to European technology since the Middle Ages, but expensive production processes limited their uses. Like other early modern manufacturing, iron-making relied on the experience and skill of a mass of individual artisans, whose small foundries permitted close inspection of each piece that they produced. Steel was even more clearly a specialized product, requiring superior iron ore found mainly in Sweden; forged by hand, it was reserved for such uses as weaponry, and was much too expensive for more mundane products. But starting in the early eighteenth century, the availability of coal and steam engines to power blowers (to create very high temperatures) and hammers (to remove impurities) stimulated a sequence of new iron-making processes, and these dramatically changed the industry's economics. Because expensive machinery was essential to these techniques, iron production was increasingly concentrated in huge enterprises, most dramatically that of the ironmaster John Wilkinson (1728–1808); but once the machinery was in place, it allowed the use of lower-grade, cheaper ores. Costs fell accordingly, and by the late eighteenth century, the availability of cheap iron made it possible to envision an entirely new range of uses for it.

This enthusiasm for spreading innovations to new economic domains was a further characteristic of the later eighteenth century, and it meant that the industrial revolution transformed numerous areas of the British economy, not just cotton, iron-making, and steam power. Cheap iron, for instance, allowed for the creation of new machine tools, and when combined with steam power, these made possible mechanized production of numerous products that once had been made by hand. Steam power and coal fuel allowed the potter Josiah Wedgwood (1730–1795) to establish mass production processes in making porcelain, until then a luxury good. Inventors began to think about the possibilities of using iron in buildings and ships. Economic transformations of these kinds did not mean the end of small workshops or skilled artisans. On the contrary, the development of machine making required more workshops and highly skilled laborers, and many consumer products lent themselves to small-scale production. Even after the advent of power looms, handloom weavers remained numerous and prosperous well into the nineteenth century. But by 1800 it was clear to all that dramatic change was likely to affect all domains of the economy; technological advances had become normal, and contemporaries expected that it would transform new areas of economic activity.

GEOGRAPHIES

Overwhelmingly, the technological innovations that marked eighteenth-century industrialization took place in Britain. Understanding this British dynamism has been an enduring historical problem, producing both classic answers and intense debate among historians. Geographical accidents offer one explanation for British success. Britain had abundant supplies of coal of a quality especially well suited to iron production, and its lack of wood forced it to exploit this resource from the seventeenth century on; in contrast, France had plenty of wood and relatively little coal, and Holland had only peat, which could not produce the high temperatures needed for large-scale iron production. As a relatively small island with numerous navigable rivers, Britain also enjoyed the advantages of cheap water transportation, which allowed the development of an unusually well-integrated national market. The remarkable development of seventeenth-century London offered further economic advantages; as the British historian Anthony Wrigley pointed out a generation ago, London offered a large, concentrated market for industrial products, far more important as a share of the nation's population than contemporary Paris, and it provided a laboratory for new social practices, encouraging both producers and consumers to try out new products. Historians have also noted the chronological accidents that aided British industrial development. During most of the eighteenth century, French economic growth roughly equaled British, but the generation of political chaos that followed the French Revolution of 1789 gave British manufacturers a chance to establish themselves in new markets, with little competition from continental industry. By the end of the Revolutionary Wars, in 1815, Britain had fully established its economic supremacy in Europe.

Efforts to explain British economic successes in terms of culture, politics, and social organization have stimulated more debate among historians. In its social structure, Britain was as aristocratic as other European countries, and its merchants were as eager as merchants elsewhere to achieve acceptance among the landed gentry. But the British aristocracy was probably unusual in the respect that it accorded commerce and manufacturing, and the gentry-dominated British Parliament energetically defended commercial and manufacturing interests against foreign competition. British law was certainly unusual in the protections it gave inventors and property holders. Between 1624 and 1791, Britain was the only European nation with a system of patent laws, designed to give inventors the profits of their achievements. The system both encouraged innovation and expressed British society's admiration for it. In other respects, however, differences between Britain and other countries were less significant. Acquisitive, profit-oriented economic attitudes characterized most of eighteenth-century Europe; and Britain was like other Protestant countries of the early modern period in having a relatively well-educated working class. As for advanced education in the sciences and engineering, eighteenth-century Britain lagged well behind France.

By the late eighteenth century, Britain was also Europe's leading imperial power, holding territories in North America, the Caribbean, and India, and benefiting from the trade in African slaves. Many historians have seen in this global power a further important explanation for British industrialization. Colonies, they have argued, offered raw materials at a discount and ready markets for industrial goods, and the high profits generated by colonial trade permitted British merchants to make expensive investments in machines and factories. But recent scholarship has tended to present colonial markets and materials as only a secondary cause of British economic successes. Few historians would deny the rapacity of eighteenth-century imperialism or the determination of British governments to use any means that might advance the country's economic interests; to protect domestic cotton manufacturers, for instance, importation of Indian cloth was rigorously prohibited. As the Spanish empire of the sixteenth century had demonstrated, however, colonial possessions were no guarantee of industrial development; and the profits of colonial trade were not especially high in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The critical fact in Britain's economic development seems to have been the demand for goods within the country itself and the readiness of manufacturers to use novel means to meet that demand. Colonialism perhaps mattered less as a source of capital than as a source of economic novelties, encouraging Europe as a whole and Britain in particular to undertake business innovations. Such colonial products as tea, coffee, tobacco, and sugar were among the early mass-market luxuries that became the model for later industrial production. More substantial goods like Chinese ceramics and Indian cotton fabrics stimulated determined, and eventually successful, efforts at imitation. The eighteenth-century global economy thus helps to explain Britain's industrialization; indeed, based on a product that did not grow in Europe, the cotton industry itself was only conceivable in the setting of a global economy. But the critical fact was manufacturers' readiness to respond to opportunities that the global economy presented.

THE EXPERIENCE OF WORK AND THE ORGANIZATION OF SOCIETY

"Everything that is solid melts into air," wrote Karl Marx to describe the changes that he saw accompanying the industrialization of Europe. Until well after World War II, most historians of the industrial revolution shared Marx's sense of the period as one of overwhelming social change, both positive and negative. Like contemporaries, historians have been dazzled by the wave of new products and processes that the period brought forth during what Mokyr has called "the age of miracles." Historians have also been struck by the new kinds of work organization that machines required. Preindustrial work tended to be individualistic, with workers setting their own pace; in cottage industry, moments of intense activity alternated with moments of relaxation, and as independent contractors, workers could take on as much work as they chose. Factory work allowed for no such freedoms. Work had to be continuous and coordinated if investments in steam engines, machinery, and buildings were to pay off. Labor discipline thus represented an important aspect of the transition to the factory system; for many ordinary people, this was the point at which clock time became an essential component of daily life and the pocket watch the sign of one's responsibility. The role of skill also diminished in the factory setting. What was needed was someone to tend machines, and this could just as easily be children as adults. Deskilling of this kind represented a loss of both status and income to workers who had been used to the freedom of working on their own. Having reduced the role of skill, factory owners could effectively control the wages they paid; an unskilled worker dissatisfied with his income could easily be replaced by another.

On the other hand, much recent scholarship has drawn attention to continuities between the pre-industrial world and what followed, and to the complexities of industrial development itself. As a result, this line of scholarship has offered more nuanced views of the society that early industrialization produced than were previously available. One reason for this caution has been historians' growing knowledge of preindustrial economies, both in Europe and in the world at large. These economies were capable of considerable growth, and they offered their inhabitants considerable material abundance. Rather than a complete break with the past, therefore, the industrial revolution in significant ways represented a culmination of earlier developments. Historians have also given more attention to the survival of small workshops and skilled work during the industrial revolution. Because the factory system relied so heavily on complex machinery, it created whole new forms of skilled labor in the trades that built and maintained machinery. Small workshops thrived in many other developing trades as well, notably those that produced small metal goods like buttons, buckles, cheap jewelry, guns, and so on, trades that employed about half the workforce of Birmingham, one of Britain's most important industrial cities. The historian Maxine Berg has shown that even the introduction of steam power did not bring the factory system to these trades; instead, several small workshops could share the power of a single steam engine, for instance by renting space in a large building. Even the early textile factories retained some aspects of preindustrial work organization. Family relations continued to count in the factory, and for many manufacturing processes small groups needed to work closely together.

In one respect, however, traditional depictions of industrialization retain their full force: already in late eighteenth-century Britain, early industrialization had created zones of intensive industrial activity that grouped together mining, metallurgy, and a variety of related trades, creating a new kind of physical environment and new social relations. Coal was expensive to transport, and breakage during shipment made it useless in the blast furnaces that produced wrought iron. It thus proved economical to concentrate iron making near the coal fields, and other industrial processes tended to follow. Cotton textiles tended to concentrate also, around the fast-growing city of Manchester, while metal working developed in the city of Birmingham. With the expansion of these highly developed industrial centers, the more evenly dispersed industrial activity of the early eighteenth century tended to disappear. A number of regions that had been important manufacturing centers in the early modern period returned to purely agricultural pursuits, while the new industrial zones became crowded with manufacturing activities, reducing any mixture with agriculture to mere vestiges. Contemporaries found these new industrial regions appalling. As rapidly growing new towns, they lacked basic services and traditional forms of social organization. The combination of haphazard development, inadequate water supplies, coal smoke, and industrial wastes made them unhealthy, and contemporaries believed that the social conditions of industrial life added to the problem. Young people, for instance, earned wages that freed them from the controls that parents earlier exercised over them, and allowed them to indulge in a variety of unwholesome pastimes; they had little or no time for school. Industrial zones like these were genuine challenges to the established order of European society. They offered the spectacle of new disorder among laborers—and of new wealth among factory owners. From a modest background, Richard Arkwright became extremely wealthy from his cotton-spinning mills, and made a point of displaying his wealth in conspicuous ways. He was only one of many industrialists to do so.

But historians have become cautious in interpreting descriptions of this sort, and more alert to the ideological commentaries they contained. If observers were impressed at the forms of misbehavior that characterized the new industrial towns, this to some extent reflected their fears of social change and their inability to see the social relationships that in fact characterized them. It also reflected their limited attention to the evils of preindustrial work, which was altogether ready to employ women and children. Despite their unhealthy conditions, the new industrial centers paid high wages and attracted workers. In the same way, the dramatic rise of new fortunes from industry to some extent obscured from contemporary observers the ability of old elites to profit from economic innovation. Britain's great aristocrats were especially well placed to benefit from the development of mining and metallurgy, controlling as they did many of the country's coal deposits; during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, they showed themselves alert and inventive in profiting from these opportunities, so that their wealth rose in tandem with that of the new industrialists—allowing them to continue dominating Britain's politics down to the eve of World War I. Historians have demonstrated similar adaptations in continental Europe, with old ruling groups effectively profiting from industrialization. If the industrial revolution helped bring the early modern period to a close, it thus also preserved some of that period's characteristic forms of social organization.

See also Clocks and Watches ; Industry ; Laborers ; Mining and Metallurgy ; Proto-Industry ; Textile Industry .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adas, Michael. Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance. Ithaca and London, 1989.

Berg, Maxine. The Age of Manufactures, 1700–1820. New York and Oxford, 1986; 2nd edition, 1994.

de Vries, Jan. The Economy of Europe in an Age of Crisis, 1600–1750. Cambridge, U.K., 1976.

——. "The Industrial Revolution and the Industrious Revolution." Journal of Economic History 54, no. 2 (June 1994): 249–270.

Deane, Phyllis. The First Industrial Revolution. Cambridge, U.K., 1965; 2nd edition, 1979.

Gutmann, Myron. Toward the Modern Economy: Early Industry in Europe, 1500–1800. Philadelphia, 1988.

Landes, David. The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present. Cambridge, U.K., 1969.

Mokyr, Joel. The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress. New York and Oxford, 1990.

Pomeranz, Kenneth. The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy. Princeton, 2000.

Reddy, William. The Rise of Market Culture: The Textile Trade and French Society, 1750–1900. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1984.

Thompson, E. P. The Making of the English Working Class. London, 1963; 2nd edition, 1972.

Jonathan Dewald

INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

The concept of an industrial revolution denotes an economic transition in which the means of production become increasingly specialized, mechanized, and organized. This process uses technology, in some association with science, to create large increases in the productive capacity of an economy, which in turn eventually transforms society as a whole. Industrial revolution is less violent or dramatic than political revolution and has roots that extend into the preindustrial agrarian past as well as consequences that continue to influence distant places and times. Great Britain inaugurated the Industrial Revolution in the late eighteenth century, and other nations have undergone similar revolutions in subsequent years, continuing to the present. This process may be described as a single ongoing Industrial Revolution or as a series of separate revolutions that influence one another. Either way, the Industrial Revolution is without question one of the most important transformations in human history, and it is best understood through an appreciation of its complex origins, its evolution and spread, and its ethical and political influences.

Historical Origins

Most human societies have passed through several broadly defined stages marked by major turning points or revolutions. The transition from nomadic hunting and gathering to settled agriculture (farming and herding) that first occurred in the Near East is often called the Neolithic revolution. By enabling humans to live in one area, grow more numerous, and produce sufficient food surpluses to support nonfarming vocations such as artisanship and soldiery, the Neolithic revolution laid the groundwork for the next stage in societal evolution, the urban revolution. Human history is largely the history of cities and nations, and the gathering of populations into concentrated areas is responsible for many political, cultural, technological, scientific, and other developments. The Industrial Revolution is a third major societal transition point that follows and was made possible by the first two revolutions.

An industrial revolution requires a confluence of favorable labor, capital, technological, and ideological conditions. One vital component of industrialization is a populous labor supply that receives support from an agricultural sector capable of feeding it, and that possesses the necessary skills and discipline for manufacturing work. Capital is vital for covering the start-up and operating expenses that accompany new industrial endeavors, such as the purchase of land, facilities, and machinery; the preparation of stock on hand; the establishment of accounts receivable; and salary payments. Industrialization also depends on technological developments in manufacturing, power generation and transmission, transportation, and raw materials processing. Finally, an industrial revolution is facilitated by the development of political and philosophical ideologies that justify or mandate human organization and control over the natural environment. After many centuries of heterogeneous worldwide population growth, economic development, and technological advancement, all of these conditions converged for the first time in eighteenth-century Great Britain.

The Original Industrial Revolution

A variety of conditions caused Britain to experience moderate economic and manufacturing growth in the early eighteenth century, but these factors produced the greatest effects after 1760. By the 1780s, the British Empire's population, mechanization, and productive output were dramatically expanding. The term "Industrial Revolution" was first formulated by British historian Arnold Toynbee (1884), who considered this period of industrial and technological change more historically significant than political events such as the French Revolution.

Some of the preconditions of the British Industrial Revolution span or even predate the eighteenth century. New agricultural practices, such as the enclosures policies that brought more land under development, Jethro Tull's mechanical drill for sowing seed (c. 1701), Lord Townshend's four-year crop rotation system, advances in animal breeding, and the cultivation of the potato in Ireland, made possible a period of steady population growth. This population included a large supply of available laborers who started to concentrate in towns or cities.

Prior to the existence of large manufacturing establishments, Great Britain fostered a rich craft tradition that provided technological infrastructure and a substantial pool of skilled labor. Farmers comprised more than 90 percent of the preindustrial population, but artisans played a vital economic role. Indeed, while specialized artisans often congregated in cities, many farmers themselves practiced diverse craft trades or produced domestic manufactures in the evening or during winter months, serving as a vast pool of potential labor. This labor was increasingly tapped by enterprising merchants through the putting-out system, which involved the coordination of decentralized part-time laborers and led to regional specialization and the promotion of markets and towns. Early manufacturing networks introduced organizational, managerial, and business strategies that fostered the division of labor, specialization, and greater cooperation between workers or firms.

Great Britain also benefited from a convergence of advantageous economic, environmental, and technical factors. It possessed ample supplies of natural resources such as waterpower and coal, and its efficient transportation networks, including turnpike roads and water transport, further aided development. The commanding British navy and merchant network facilitated the shipment of raw materials to the mother country and carried British products to distant colonies or foreign markets. Described as a "nation of shopkeepers," Britain was founded on commerce, and its many merchants and middlemen fostered the spread of the market and funded manufacturing endeavors. Investment capital could also be raised and distributed through an advanced banking system and institutions such as the London Stock Exchange, and favorable regulatory policies (especially in comparison with European practices) enabled British manufacturers to practice their trades with a minimum of government interference. Two hundred years of British economic growth produced a relatively high level of prosperity, a widespread market economy, and a large potential demand for manufactured goods. And because the Industrial Revolution first took place within a capitalist economy, the pursuit of private profit drove the technological and industrial transformation.

What made it possible to take advantage of this confluence in material factors was the contemporary development of new ideals about how human beings could best realize their humanity. A sense of human beings as having the right to dominate the nonhuman world through technology, which had been emerging within a Christian theological framework in Europe, was given new secular articulation by, for instance, Francis Bacon (1561–1626) and his followers. Bacon's ethical vision of "the conquest of nature" for the "relief of man's estate" both justified and encouraged those activities that merged historical changes into a revolution in human industrial activity.

The takeoff of the British Industrial Revolution arose when several key productive sectors used new technologies to increase quantities of low-priced manufactured goods, change employment patterns, and expand technological networks that aided technical innovation and adoption. As the first nation to industrialize, Britain could not receive capital or technological aid from others. Fortunately, the technological challenges of the early Industrial Revolution were relatively simple and were certainly addressable via decentralized and informal experimentation and tinkering.

Iron production was the first technology to influence the British Industrial Revolution, in conjunction with developments in coal processing. Prior to the eighteenth century, British iron production had been increasingly limited by scarce supplies of wood, which was used to make charcoal. Coal was unusable in blast furnaces for various reasons, but in 1709 Abraham Darby discovered that coke, a burnable substance produced from coal, could be used. Technical barriers and quality control issues proved very limiting until 1760, at which point the British iron industry rapidly expanded.

Steam engines served as a second pillar of the Industrial Revolution and had close ties to coal mining and iron production. The Newcomen steam engine, invented by Thomas Newcomen in 1712, was a bulky and inefficient apparatus requiring enormous quantities of coal fuel. These limitations did not deter coal mine operators, who used it to pump water from deep mine shafts. Steam engines also became increasingly important for the iron industry, where they pumped water for water-powered bellows beginning in 1742, drove air bellows a few years later, and then directly pumped air into furnaces after 1776 via the far more efficient Boulton-Watt steam engine (produced by James Watt and Matthew Boulton). Steam engines freed blast furnaces from the restrictions of water power and were used in different types of factories by the early 1780s.

The third and most visible British technology was the textile industry, which became increasingly mechanized throughout the eighteenth century as self-acting machinery replaced hand manufactures. The weaving process underwent steady productivity increases from early inventions such as the 1733 hand loom and flying shuttle, which caused weaving to outpace yarn production and create yarn shortages. The situation was corrected by subsequent inventions that automated the spinning process, such as James Hargreaves's spinning jenny
(c. 1764) and Richard Arkwright's 1769 water frame. Samuel Crompton's 1779 spinning mule combined aspects of earlier spinning technologies and enabled yarn production to outpace weaving technology. This in turn inspired Edmund Cartwright to make a powered weaving loom in 1785. In addition to this technological escalation, the imposition of new organizational schemes in increasingly large textile factories greatly facilitated productivity increases as well as more exacting standards for the production of uniform thread and woven products.

As a result of these industrial developments, relatively high-quality and inexpensive British goods seized control of the home market and led to enormous increases in the demand for manufactured goods and in the standard of living. Mass production (a term first introduced to describe early-twentieth-century industrialization in the United States) helped inspire mass consumption. In addition to the large and steady domestic market, British goods also dominated many overseas markets, aided by Great Britain's colonization efforts, powerful navy, and aggressive merchant network. Great Britain also spurred industry through wartime purchases.

Britain appreciated the benefits it incurred from its sizable technological lead and attempted to guard and maintain this advantage through mercantile policies and the strict prohibition of technology transfer. Of course, other nations attempted to compete with Britain, which led to industrial espionage, the emigration of British technicians, and industrialization in other nations.

Waves of Industrialization

Although Britain led the world in industrial growth through the 1830s, the Industrial Revolution soon spread to other countries. A second wave of industrialization took place from the 1810s to the 1870s in Belgium, France, Germany, and the United States; and a third wave swept through Russia, Japan, Sweden, Italy, and other nations in the decades surrounding 1900. Latecomer nations have several advantages over industrial pioneers: Governments recognize the advantages of industrialization and develop supportive policies; investment capital is often available from individuals or institutions in more advanced economies; and technological expertise can often be borrowed or appropriated from the industrial powers. In addition to the iron, coal, and textile industries, railroads emerged as a fundamental technology of later industrialization. The Industrial Revolution continued to catalyze changes in technological development, managerial and labor organization strategies, economic policy, and consumer behavior.

As with the British example, the nations in the second wave of industrialization experienced long periods of gradual population growth fostered by agricultural improvements, economic and commercial expansion, and technological development that promoted a rapid industrial takeoff. Despite an overall manufacturing output that, as late as the 1780s, was not that far behind Britain, French industrialization was hindered by strong conservative craft and agrarian traditions and setbacks from the French Revolution and Napoleonic Era. France's mid-nineteenth-century growth was driven by widespread rural industry and thriving local markets, and was greatly aided by new government policies and the creation of institutions to collect and distribute investment capital.

Also in the mid-nineteenth century, the Prussian government took an active role in the sponsorship and funding of large-scale industry, and a close family of German banks offered capital and advice to support new industrial ventures. German industrialization truly began after the 1871 unification of the German states, but powerful agricultural interests successfully protected agrarian subsidies at the expense of the industrialists well into the 1890s. German industry also pioneered the inclusion of research laboratories as a well-funded and influential component of manufacturing endeavors, strengthening the link between science and technology.

Finally, industrialization in the United States was hampered by its small, sparse, and rural population; the lack of a strong economy or banking system; and competition from British goods. Many of these inhibiting factors had been reduced or removed by the mid-nineteenth century, and industrialization was aided in the United States by booming population growth, plentiful natural resources, increased access to investment capital, and the import and modification of technologies from Britain.

The end of the nineteenth century introduced an array of new technological products such as chemicals, bicycles, automobiles, and electrical networks; new methods of mass production and factory mechanization; dramatic increases in the quantity of capital required to launch new manufacturing endeavors; and the corresponding development of new capital-raising strategies such as large-scale stock subscriptions and direct government subsidies. Russia and Japan were the two largest economies to industrialize during this third wave of the Industrial Revolution, following Russia's abolition of serfdom and Japan's increasing degree of interaction with foreign nations. Both governments directly and unhesitatingly supported industrialization by running pilot companies, raising taxes or requesting foreign loans to produce investment capital, and establishing pro-industry policies. During the twentieth century the Industrial Revolution continued to evolve and spread to new regions such as China and India.

Indeed, as a result of post–World War II developments in automation, cybernation, and computerization, people began to speak of a second industrial revolution originating in the United States and spreading to other parts of the world. The phenomenon of globalization, which depends on advances in transportation and communication, could also be described as an extension of the industrialization that began in eighteenth-century Great Britain.

Ethics and Politics

The Industrial Revolution affected everyone and everything on the globe, starting with irrevocable alterations to societal development. Individuals and families increasingly left behind their rural agrarian life to gather in urban centers that offered increased access to a staggering variety of jobs, services, and goods, at the cost of health risks and a very different way of life. While the increased productivity of industrialization generally led to rising standards of living and increased consumption, societies became highly stratified and the newly created wealth and luxury items were not shared equally.

Industrial laborers often endured horrible working conditions, such as bad air quality, deafening noise, poor lighting, cramped conditions, lack of sanitation and resultant disease, repetitive work, and dangerous equipment that could cause mutilation and death. Industrialization also imposed a new system of managerial regulation, increased discipline, and the removal of skilled laborers' privileges. When laborers resented or resisted new workplace policies, employers considered them lazy and responded by structuring wages in a manner that forced employees to work long hours at a rapid pace in order to earn a living. This often resulted in the employment of entire families, especially in the textile industry. Unskilled workers frequently lived under the constant threat of unemployment, and even when they were employed their living conditions were often squalid.

The Industrial Revolution may have most affected the lives of women and children. Although advocates of industrialization asserted that contemporary children worked long hours on the farm, children working in factories routinely endured truly nightmarish work environments. Labor laws and other responses to unpleasant child labor conditions gradually shifted the focus of childhood from productivity to education. And although industrialization often forced women to work under horrible conditions for less pay than their male counterparts, this was sometimes mitigated by new opportunities for employed women, such as freedom from the toil or drudgery of farm labor, increased personal and economic freedom, and exposure to urban influences. The Industrial Revolution steadily pushed work out of the family setting and redefined gender and child roles.

These changes inspired extensive commentary from contemporary participants, particularly when the impacts were experienced for the first time in Great Britain. Romantic poets such as William Blake (1757–1827), Victorian novelists such as Charles Dickens (1812–1870), and socialist philosophers such as Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) approached this problem from different perspectives but were united in their association of industrialization with corruption, exploitation, poverty, and other social evils that primarily affected members of the laboring classes. Responses to industrialization included the Luddites' destruction of textile machinery as a means of protesting technological displacement of workers; the promotion of socialist ideals by philosophers such as Engels and Karl Marx (1818–1883); and efforts by Edwin Chadwick (1800–1890) to use the public health movement to establish scientific and technological principles for the improvement of housing and sanitation systems. But on balance, especially under the influence of such ameliorative initiatives, industrialization also clearly improved the material qualities of human life. Versions of these initiatives have been manifested and criticized in other industrializing nations, and debates over the positive and negative impacts continue into the present.

The Industrial Revolution also permanently altered the global power balance. The earliest industrializing nations exerted a substantial and lasting economic and military influence on the nonindustrial world. The growth of industrial economies and trade networks often promoted deindustrialization in less advanced countries that had previously benefited from the sale of handicrafts or other goods. Most nineteenth-century industrial powers practiced imperialism and colonialism, which yielded new supplies of raw materials and new markets and propagated capitalist and Western values throughout the world. In addition, the Industrial Revolution inspired many governments to shift their political philosophy from laissez-faire policies that favored traditional landed interests to proactive social and economic reforms.

Finally, the Industrial Revolution produced previously unimaginable effects on the human–environment relationship. The Industrial Revolution removed many barriers to population growth and accelerated the ability of farmers to produce food more efficiently, leading to an ever-increasing world population. And by increasing fuel use, the supply and demand of manufactured goods, and the scope of extractive tools and machinery, industrialization led to astronomical levels of raw material harvesting and ensuing environmental consequences such as deforestation and air and water pollution. At the same time, the Industrial Revolution firmly connected the scientific tradition to technological development, leading to increased industrial research and development, new standards of education, superior scientific equipment, government funding of science, and renewed support for the increase of human knowledge.

ROBERT MARTELLO

SEE ALSO Affluence;Christian Perspectives;Colonialism and Postcolonialism;Modernization;Science, Technology, and Society Studies;Work;Urbanization.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ashton, T. S. (1997). The Industrial Revolution, 1760–1830, rev. edition, with a new preface and bibliography by Pat Hudson. Oxford: Oxford University Press. This concise study focuses on the beneficial and progress-oriented aspects of the Industrial Revolution, with emphases upon innovation and the revolution's historical context.

Breunig, Charles, and Matthew Levinger. (2002). The Revolutionary Era, 1789–1850, 3rd edition. New York: Norton. Offers a general overview of the industrial revolution as well as a contextual study of relevant trends and events in contemporary Europe.

Diamond, Jared. (1999). Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. New York: Norton. This expansive work explores the geographical, environmental, and demographic factors that caused human civilizations to develop differently. While it does not explicitly discuss the Industrial Revolution, its explanation of the Neolithic and urban revolutions provide interesting background and a global perspective.

Hobsbawm, Eric. (1962). The Age of Revolution: Europe, 1789–1848. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. This survey work adopts an economic approach to European history that is sympathetic to workers and the labor movement. Hobsbawm explores the causes and impacts of the industrial revolution at length and also discusses other European events in the same era.

Hobsbawm, Eric. (1999). Industry and Empire: From 1750 to the Present Day, revised and updated with Chris Wrigley. New York: New Press. This detailed study explores the political, social, and economic history of the industrial revolution (extending into the late twentieth century), primarily from a Western perspective.

Hughes, Thomas P. (1989). The American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm, 1870–1970. New York: Viking. Praises the achievements of technological creativity in the United States during the second wave of industrialization as equivalent in significance to those of the Renaissance.

Landes, David S. (2003). The Unbound Prometheus: Technical Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present, 2nd edition. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Classic and detailed analysis of the economic and societal causes and impacts of the first industrial revolution, emphasizing the importance of technological enhancements to productive potential and the associated enrollment of natural, human, and financial resources.

Mokyr, Joel. (1990). The Lever of Riches. New York: Oxford University Press. A historical approach to technological creativity, exploring the many factors that give some nations innovative advantages over others, as well as the economic and social impacts of creativity.

Pacey, Arnold. (1990). Technology in World Civilization: A Thousand-Year History. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. A global approach to the history of technology, concisely highlighting the impact of technology transfers and industrial development upon different civilizations' economies and societies.

Simon, Julian L., ed. (1995). The State Of Humanity. Oxford: Blackwell. Collects fifty-eight original articles arguing that industrialization has created across-the-board material benefits for all segments of society.

Toynbee, Arnold. (1884). Lectures on The Industrial Revolution in England. London: Rivingtons. First use of the phrase "industrial revolution" to describe the great industrial and economic changes faced by great Britain at the end of the eighteenth century.

INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

The "industrial revolution" is a term coined in the nineteenth century to describe the rapid rise of the modern factory system and the related economic, social, and cultural effects. It is a phrase that to some extent began to fall out of favor in the latter part of the twentieth century as the factory no longer seemed quite so central to western society and as historical research began to question whether the rise of the factory system was quite as revolutionary and rapid as it once seemed. Nevertheless, it remains a useful concept for understanding the great changes of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

origins

The concept is probably most applicable to late-eighteenth-century England, where the rapidity of the onset of industrialization, particularly in the textile and metal industries, was very much remarked upon by contemporaries. The crux of this revolution was in the transformation from handicraft work performed at home or in an artisan's shop to factory work, performed by wage laborers and characterized by a highly developed division of labor and reliance upon automated machinery, such as the spinning jenny of James Hargreaves (d. 1778), the water frame (an automated spinning machine) of Richard Arkwright (1732–1792), and the power loom of Edmund Cartwright (1743–1823). Initially, this machinery was most frequently powered by hand or water, but as the century progressed, the steam engine of James Watt (1736–1819) became increasingly important. While undoubtedly innovative, these developments built upon a long history of textile manufacture in England reaching back at least to the Norman Conquest of the eleventh century. The seventeenth century saw a marked rise in interest in manufacturing by so-called projectors, who began all sorts of new initiatives. By the first half of the eighteenth century, England had entered a transitional phase variously described by historians as an age of manufactures or as protoindustrialization, during which manufacturing began to be performed much more widely and on a broader scale in large, factorylike settings that, nonetheless, had not yet attained the extent of mechanization and division of labor that characterized the industrial revolution.

The United States lacked this long engagement with manufacturing. Before the American Revolution, most colonists remained content to make money through agriculture and commerce while importing manufactures from Britain. Furthermore, mercantilist legislation such as the Wool Act (1699), Hat Act (1732), and Iron Act (1750) made many forms of large-scale manufacturing illegal. After the Revolution, however, Americans became very interested in ending their dependence on British manufactures for political and economic reasons. Without a rich manufacturing heritage they found themselves at a disadvantage. Often the solution was to rely on skilled immigrants and to steal British technology. Immigrants such as the German glassmaker John F. Amelung (1741–1798), the British cloth dyer John Hewson (1744–1821), and most famously Samuel Slater (1768–1835), who smuggled plans for Arkwright's machinery out of England, brought established European technologies to the new nation.

Americans also developed some innovations of their own. They were particularly adept at creating automated machinery, a necessity in a country where labor costs remained relatively high. Oliver Evans of Delaware invented an automated gristmill (1784) that allowed Americans to grind wheat into flour with very little human labor. Jacob Perkins's nail-making machine (1795) automated that process and rapidly drove the price of nails down by more than 60 percent. David Wilkinson cleverly automated the machine shop at Slater's Rhode Island mill, creating instruments such as a power-driven lathe (1794). By the early nineteenth century, precision machine tools allowed Eli Whitney (1765–1825) to develop his system of interchangeable parts, which came to be known as the American System of Manufactures and which opened the door to mass production.

While industrialization was relatively late and derivative in the United States, demand for manufactures was quite high from the colonial period onward. From the first seventeenth-century settlements, Anglo-Americans were highly disposed to purchase fine manufactured goods on the world market, and by the eighteenth century many were avid participants in a consumer revolution that was connected to the increasingly widespread availability of manufactured goods from industrializing England. Additionally, well before the onset of industrialization, Americans were participating in what has been described as an "industrious revolution" characterized by increased household production of agricultural and manufactured goods by families hoping to improve their income in order to purchase new manufactures such as inexpensive, factory-made china. Thus, developments that once were described as effects of the industrial revolution—increased consumption and increased productivity—are now seen to have preceded industrialization in the United States and Europe.

the process of industrialization

The textile industry followed the industrial revolution model more closely than any other early national American economic sector. Before the American Revolution, virtually all domestic-made textiles were manufactured in the home. With the onset of the Revolutionary crisis and the demonization of British manufactures during the American boycotts, Patriots attempted to construct textile factories in Philadelphia, Boston, and New York City. The Philadelphia project, commonly known as the American Manufactory (1775), was the most successful. It employed several hundred workers, many of them women, to produce wool, linen, and cotton cloth before disbanding due to the British occupation of Philadelphia in 1777. Many new textile factories emerged in the decade following the war in the mid-Atlantic and New England states, including the famous Almy, Brown, and Slater mill (1790) in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. While these early operations all anticipated the modern factory in employing some automated machinery, usually powered by water, they also continued earlier traditions of hiring large numbers of outworkers, usually (although not exclusively) women who spun thread or sewed fabric in their own homes.

Between 1808 and 1830 the textile sector began to industrialize in earnest, prompted in large part by difficulties in importing products during President Thomas Jefferson's embargo (1807–1809) and the War of 1812 (1812–1815). One of the first and largest projects was the heavily mechanized Union Manufacturing Company established in Baltimore in 1808 and initially fitted with between six and eight thousand spindles. It was followed by a number of other sizable textile mills clustered in Baltimore, New England, and western New York. The largest and most famous were the Waltham-Lowell factories in Massachusetts, founded in 1812 by the so-called Boston Associates using technology pirated from England by the merchant Francis Cabot Lowell (1775–1817) and modified by Paul Moody (1779–1831), a skilled mechanic.

The Boston Associates' establishments were the first fully automated, vertically integrated factories in the United States. Their factories at Lowell performed all the functions of textile manufacturing—spinning, weaving, finishing, printing, and packaging—under a single roof housing impressive amounts of water-powered machinery. By 1836 the Boston Associates had invested more than $6.2 million in these establishments.

Although immensely important in the development of American industry, the Lowell pattern was not the only one followed by early national industrialists. In Philadelphia, manufacturers created a different model that came to be known as "proprietary capitalism." Unlike their corporate counterparts in Massachusetts, these individual proprietors invested in numerous smaller, specialized textile firms that lacked the efficiencies of scale of the vertically integrated Massachusetts firms but had the advantage of flexibility, which allowed them to retool rapidly and produce only those products currently in high demand.

Other manufacturing sectors followed still different paths. Iron making was one of the few large-scale colonial industries. By 1775, America's iron foundries produced one-seventh of the world's iron, frequently relying upon the labor of enslaved African Americans. The technology and scale of this industry changed very little during the early Republic, although after 1830 a switch to anthracite coal would have important ramifications. Shoe manufacturing grew very rapidly during the same period in places such as Lynn, Massachusetts, where output rose from 100,000 pairs in 1788 to nearly 1.7 million by 1830. This increase was made possible through increased division of labor and centralization of production under the control of market-oriented merchants. Unlike the textile industry, the shoe industry underwent virtually no mechanization before 1830. Similarly, New York City became increasingly industrial despite a relative absence of mechanized factories. This pattern, sometimes called "metropolitan industrialization," was marked by relatively small manufactories composed of twenty or more workers performing traditional craft processes as wage workers, who generally had less expectation of becoming a master than in earlier generations. But metropolitan industrialization, like early industrialization generally, was difficult to define because it was characterized by diversity rather than typicality.

impact of industrialization

Although the heaviest industrialization would come later in the nineteenth century, the labor force of the United States was already showing signs of transformation in the early Republic. As late as 1810, nearly thirty times as many Americans worked in agriculture as in manufacturing. By 1840 that ratio had dropped to seven to one. Even more important, as a result of industrialization the nature of those jobs shifted. Earlier, most manufacturing workers labored in small shops within a craft system of masters, journeymen, and apprentices, with some expectation of attaining a "competency," a comfortable living as a master, by the latter stages of their careers. By 1830, laborers more frequently worked for wages within a factory or a larger shop in which the artisanal system was breaking down and in which hopes for advancement were less realistic. In short, a more clearly defined working class was now emerging.

Workers increasingly expressed dissatisfaction with the emerging labor system. In the early 1790s a number of journeymen actions—at least six in New York City alone between 1791 and 1793—protested the declining wages and loss of workplace control already developing as the craft system began to weaken. In the well-known Philadelphia cordwainers' strike of 1805, journeymen who struck against lower wages were imprisoned, charged, and convicted of conspiracy to restrain trade, thereby setting a precedent allowing courts to break up subsequent strikes as illegal conspiracies. Despite this setback, in the 1820s workers began a new phase of intense organization during which they formed workingmen's societies that called for ten-hour days and more educational opportunities for laborers. The unions of the 1820s published twenty newspapers and attracted up to 300,000 members.

Early industrialization also led to important shifts in gender roles. The Boston Associates initially employed women, many of them New England farm girls, as operatives in their mills. Although many of these young women planned to work only a short time before leaving to get married and have a family, they nonetheless came to resent their low wages, typically below those of the lowest-paid male workers, and by the 1830s they, like their male counterparts, began to strike for better pay. Even the women who remained at home saw their roles altered by early industrialization. The home had been the most important workshop for American manufacturing throughout the eighteenth century, but by 1830 home manufacturing was in precipitous decline as the factory began its ascendency. As a result, the role of middle-class women could now be increasingly directed away from producing goods and toward raising children in the more intensive fashion of the Victorian era.

Although the greatest period of immigration would not begin until the 1840s, in the years before 1830 industrialization was already attracting a steady stream of immigrants to the United States. Many early entrepreneurs such as Samuel Slater emigrated to the new nation expressly because they saw an opportunity to profit from the emerging manufacturing sector. Of the fifty-three thousand Irish immigrants arriving in Philadelphia between 1789 and 1806, an estimated 30 to 40 percent were skilled artisans and their families.

Finally, early industrialization also led to an acceleration of urbanization and the growth of the market economy. Some new mill towns quickly became urban centers. The population of Lowell, for example, ballooned from twenty-five hundred in 1826 to more than twelve thousand by 1833. Established population centers such as Philadelphia and Baltimore also grew rapidly. Because early factories were generally powered by streams and rivers, many rural areas were also affected. For example, largely agricultural Oneida County in western New York contained fourteen textile factories by 1832. Rural people there became more closely tied to markets as they purchased factory goods and sold farm goods to factory workers. More generally, the widespread availability of inexpensive manufactured items coupled with better and cheaper transportation of goods in the canal age were important factors in the great market revolution of the early nineteenth century.

See alsoEconomic Development; Labor Movement: Labor Organizations and Strikes; Manufacturing; Manufacturing, in the Home; Technology; Textiles Manufacturing; Work: Factory Labor .

bibliography

Ben-Atar, Doron S. Trade Secrets: Intellectual Piracy and the Origins of American Industrial Power. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004.

Bezis-Selfa, John. Forging America: Ironworkers, Adventurers, and the Industrious Revolution. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004.

Dublin, Thomas. Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826–1860. New York: Columbia University Press, 1979.

Licht, Walter. Industrializing America: The Nineteenth Century. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995.

Mantoux, Paul. The Industrial Revolution in the Eighteenth Century. Rev. ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983.

Meyer, David R. The Roots of American Industrialization. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003.

Peskin, Lawrence A. Manufacturing Revolution: The Intellectual Origins of Early American Industry. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003.

Scranton, Philip. Proprietary Capitalism: The Textile Manufacture at Philadelphia, 1800–1885. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

Lawrence A. Peskin

INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION. The industrial revolution can be defined as a drastic transformation both of the processes by which American (and European) society produced goods for human consumption, and of the social attitudes surrounding these processes. The first non-ambiguous use of the term is attributed to the French economist Adolphe Blanqui in 1837, but the idea of a "revolution" in the industrial sphere showed up in various forms in the writings of many French and British intellectuals as early as the 1820s. The expression underlines the depth and speed of the changes observed, and the fact that they seemed to derive from the introduction of machine-based factories. Although in Great Britain the slow process of industrial transformation has led historians there to question the very notion of an "industrial revolution," the speed and radical character of the change that took place in the United States in the nineteenth century largely precludes any such discussion.

An Economic and Social Revolution

The spread of new, powerful machines using new sources of power (water, then coal-generated steam) constituted the most obvious aspect of this process of change. Alexander Hamilton's Report on Manufactures (1791) made explicit reference to "the extension of the use of machinery," especially in the British cotton industry, and in 1812, Tench Coxe, a political economist and career official in the Treasury Department, peppered his Report on the State of Manufactures in the United States with paeans to "laborsaving machinery." Factories built around new machines became a significant element in the urban landscapes of several eastern cities in the 1830s, while railroads brought steam-powered engines into the daily life of rural areas. The new industrial order included productivity increases that made available a wealth of new, nonagricultural goods and activities. Three out of four American male workers accounted for in the census of 1800 worked full time in

agriculture; by 1900 more than two-thirds of the workforce was employed in the manufacturing and service sectors. Another, less visible evolution was even more momentous: in 1800 virtually all Americans were working in family-sized units of production, based on long-term or permanent (slaves, spouses) relationships and included such nonquantitative characteristics as room and board and "moral" rules of behavior. When wages were paid, their amount was a function of these "moral" customs (some historians even speak of a "moral" economy) and the prosperity of the business as much as of the supply and demand of labor. A century later, wages determined by the labor market were becoming the norm, with little attention paid to "custom" or the moral imperative of "fair wages." Moreover, employers and employees lived increasingly disconnected lives, both socially and spatially. Among many other consequences, this shift eventually led to a reevaluation of "women's work," hitherto left unpaid within the household, and made untenable first slavery, then the segregation with which southern white supremacists hoped to create their own racist version of the labor market. It is thus impossible to overstate the social and political impact of the industrial revolution.

From New Machines to Modern Businesses

While the existence of an industrial revolution is hard to dispute, its chronology and causes are more open to discussion. Technologically, the United States took its first steps toward mass production almost immediately after independence, and had caught up with Great Britain by the 1830s. Following the British lead, American innovation was concentrated in cotton and transportation. In 1793, after fifteen years of experimentation in the Philadelphia and Boston areas, Samuel Slater set up the country's first profitable cotton-spinning factory in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Thomas Jefferson's decision in 1807 to stop trade with Europe, and the subsequent War of 1812 with Great Britain, created a protected environment for American manufacturers, and freed commercial capital. This led to such ventures as the Boston Manufacturing Company, founded under the impulse of Boston merchant Francis Cabot Lowell in 1813 in Waltham, Massachusetts. The company's investors went on to create a whole series of new factories in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1822. Thanks to a combination of immigrant British technicians, patent infringements, industrial espionage, and local innovations, American power looms were on a par

with the English machines by the end of the 1810s. Moreover, Waltham, which combined under one roof all the processes of textile production, particularly spinning and weaving, was the first wholly integrated textile factory in the world. Still, despite the development of a high-pressure steam engine by inventor Oliver Evans in Philadelphia in 1804, American cotton manufacturers, and American industry in general, lagged in the use of steam. In 1833, Secretary of the Treasury Louis McLane's federal survey of American industry reported few steam engines outside of the Pittsburgh area, whereas James Watt's steam engine, perfected between 1769 and 1784, was used throughout Great Britain by 1800.

However, in 1807, the maiden run of Robert Fulton's first steamboat, the Clermont, on the Hudson River marked the first commercial application of steam to transportation, a field in which Americans were most active. The first commercial railroad in the United States, the Baltimore and Ohio, was launched in 1828, three years after its first British counterpart. In 1829, the British inventor George Stephenson introduced his Rocket engine; the New Jersey transportation magnate John Stevens bought one two years later and had built three improved (and patent-infringing) copies by 1833. His son, Robert L. Stevens, added his own contribution by creating the modern T-rail. John Stevens also gave technical information to young Matthias Baldwin of Philadelphia, who launched what would become the Baldwin Locomotive Works with his first engine, the Ironsides, built in 1832. With the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, and the ensuing "canal craze," a spate of canal construction extending into the 1840s, all the ingredients of the so-called transportation revolution were in place.

Between the 1820s and the Civil War, American machinery surpassed that of their British competitors, a superiority made public at the Crystal Palace Exhibition in London in 1851. For instance, under the impulse of John Hall, a machinist who began working at the Harpers Ferry federal gun factory in 1820, American gun makers developed a production process precise and mechanized enough to produce standardized, interchangeable gun parts; such an approach would make the fortune of gun maker Samuel Colt in the 1850s. Standardized production was eventually applied to other goods, starting with Isaac Merritt Singer's sewing machines, sold commercially from 1851 on. The biggest advance in communications technology since the railroad greatly improved mail delivery, was the telegraph, an American innovation introduced by Samuel F. B. Morse between Washington, D.C., and Baltimore in 1844. The 1830–1860 period is most important, however, for its organizational innovations. Up to then, cotton manufacturers, steamboat promoters, and railroad administrators alike were less concerned with productivity than with turning a quick profit through monopolies, cartels, and niche markets. Accounting was sloppy at best, making precise cost control impossible. Subcontracting was the rule, as well as piece-work rather than wages. In this environment, technical innovations that sped production could lessen costs for the manufacturer only if piece rates were cut accordingly. This began to occur in American cotton factories from 1828 on (leading to the first modern industrial conflicts in Manayunk and other factories around Philadelphia, six years before the better-known strikes in Lowell and other New England centers in 1834). It was not until the 1840s and 1850s that modern business procedures were introduced. These included the accounting innovations of Louis McLane, at this time president of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, and his chief engineer, Benjamin Latrobe, and the organizational overhaul of the Pennsylvania Railroad launched by its president, J. Edgar Thompson, in 1853.

By the Civil War, competent technicians and productivity-minded administrators were revolutionizing one industry after another, a process that became generalized after 1870. Organizers and inventors systematically allied with each other; in Pittsburgh, Alexander L. Holley built for Andrew Carnegie the most modern steel mill in the world, the Edgar Thomson works, which opened in 1875. Sometimes organizer and inventor were one and the same, as in the case of Thomas Edison, who set up an experimental laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey, in 1876, developed the first electric lightbulb in 1879, and went on to build what became General Electric. In other fields, the pioneers were superseded by outsiders. Colonel Edwin Drake was the first person to successfully use drilling to extract oil from the earth, which he did in Titusville, Pennsylvania, in 1859, but John D. Rockefeller was the man who succeeded in gaining control over 90 percent of American refineries between 1865 and 1879, creating with Standard Oil the first modern monopoly in America. The systematized search for productivity led to systematized research and development through the combined use of applied research and funding from large corporations, university-based science, and federal subsidies. From oil and electricity to chemistry, the pace of innovation became such that the period has been called a "second industrial revolution" (actually a misnomer, since rates of growth were not significantly higher than in the previous period). Similarly, the search for economies of scale led to giant factories, great concentrations of workers, and widespread urbanization. The search for new outlets for constantly increasing output led to mass consumption and advertisement. And the search for lower costs prompted bloody battles with workers. Compromise in this area was slowly reached; in 1914, Henry Ford introduced the idea that high wages meant efficient workers and useful consumers, and Roosevelt and the New Deal, from 1933 on, set up a social security system giving those same workers a safety net in hard times. Thus, much of the history of the late-nineteenth and the twentieth centuries is the history of the struggle to come to terms with the economic, political, and social consequences of the new forms of organization of human production developed before the Civil War and systematized in the Gilded Age. More generally, the industrial revolution inaugurated trends that perpetuated themselves into the twenty-first century and can properly be described as the matrix of the contemporary world.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Chandler, Alfred D., Jr. The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1977.

Cochran, Thomas C. Frontiers of Change: Early Industrialism in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981.

Cohen, Isaac. American Management and British Labor: A Comparative Study of the Cotton Spinning Industry. New York: Greenwood Press, 1990.

Hounshell, David A. From the American System to Mass Production, 1800–1932: The Development of Manufacturing Technology in the United States. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984.

Jeremy, David J. Transatlantic Industrial Revolution: The Diffusion of Textile Technologies between Britain and America, 1790–1830s. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981.

Licht, Walter. Industrializing America: The Nineteenth Century. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995.

Scranton, Philip. Endless Novelty: Specialty Production and American Industrialization, 1865–1925. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997.

Zunz, Olivier. Why the American Century? Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.

PierreGervais

See alsoEmbargo Act ; Railroads ; Standard Oil Company ; Steam Power and Engines ; Steamboats ; andvol. 9:Mill Worker's Letter on the Hardships in the Textile Mills .

INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

The advent of the Industrial Revolution towards the end of the nineteenth century raised numerous economic and political questions for the United States that neither the populace nor the government was prepared for. In the years following the American Civil War (1861–1865), the twin pillars of capitalism and industrialization catapulted the American economy to the forefront of world commerce. Oil, steel, rail, mining, and agricultural industries all enjoyed tremendous growth in the latter part of the nineteenth century as Americans exploited the riches of its natural resources, land, manufacturing technology, and a large labor pool from increased immigration. In cities across the United States, all of these elements came together to form the ingredients and the momentum behind the Industrial Revolution.

America's tremendous industrial and financial growth in the last decades of the nineteenth century were due in large part to the entrepreneurial boldness and business instincts of a number of industrial and financial tycoons who came to be known as the "robber barons." J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, James J. Hill, Jay Gould, and others guided their diverse business interests to unprecedented levels of profitability. The monopolies of the robber barons enabled them to eliminate less powerful competitors, raise prices, and subsequently realize huge profits that were pumped back into their businesses. The federal government gradually began to heed the voices of small business owners, who called for reform, and the cries of American workers, who had begun launching the country's first organized labor unions in the face of company-sponsored violence and public ridicule.

In 1890 the Sherman Anti-Trust Act was enacted in an effort to curb the power of the trusts, but the robber barons continued to maintain their privileged positions in the American system. Blessed with access to abundant natural resources, valuable technological advances, a growing labor force, and a congenial political environment, these men and the monopolies they held dominated the U.S. economy. So much so that, for a generation after the Civil War, political power of the presidency paled in comparison to the economic talent and power of the robber barons.

The railroad industry particularly transformed the business landscape of the United States. By the early 1850s several railroads had established lines that allowed them to transport freight back and forth between the Great Lakes region and the East Coast, and new railroad construction projects were generating across eastern America. This ever-growing network of rail lines, many of which spanned relatively short distances, came to be seen as a more timely, reliable, and inexpensive way to transport goods than other options previously available. The explosive growth of the railroad industry in the eastern states, coupled with the potential wealth contained in the country's western territories and the nation's accompanying desire to expand in that direction, convinced growing numbers of people that a transcontinental railroad stretching from coast to coast should be built. Begun in 1863, the effort was hampered by the Civil War and the daunting obstacles of western geography and weather, but on May 10, 1869, the rail lines of the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific railroads were finally joined in Utah. Celebrations of the epic achievement erupted across the nation as Americans hailed this giant step forward in the country's westward expansion.

Farmers benefited from increased mechanization, sophisticated transportation options, and scientific cultivation methods. Nonetheless, the financial situations of many farming families grew precarious in the 1880s and 1890s. Record crop yields resulted in lower prices while production costs increased, a combination that threw many farmers into debt. They responded by forming unions and alliances that insisted on populist reforms. Many of their themes, dismissed as outlandish when first expressed, later became cornerstones of progressive reform in the early 1900s.

The surging economic and technological growth of the United States caused tremendous changes in the character of American life during the last decades of the nineteenth century. The rural farming culture of previous generations gave way to an increasingly urban and industrial one, as manufacturing plants sprang up and cities mushroomed in size; the nation's urban population rose 400 percent between 1870 and 1910.

Still, for many Americans, city life was less an immediate experience than a distant and powerful lure. The attraction was powerful, for the drain on the countryside was particularly noticeable, especially in the Midwest and in the East. As the 1870s and 1880s witnessed the worst agricultural depression in the country's history, large numbers of farmers succumbed to the temptations of urban promises and packed their bags. Jobs, higher wages, and such technological wonders as electricity and the telephone gradually took its toll on rural defenses.

Joining these farmers were an increasing number of immigrants from eastern and southern Europe, who, like their American counterparts, came mostly from the countryside and knew very little of urban life. These "new" immigrants, as they were called—as opposed to the more established generation of largely Protestant immigrants from the western and northern European countries of Britain, Ireland, Germany, and Scandinavia—came largely from Italy, Austria, Hungary, Poland, Serbia, and Russia and were predominantly Catholic or Jewish. These "new" immigrants typically congregated in the urban centers of the East, particularly New York.

As Americans gradually came to favor urban over rural life, there was much about the Industrial Revolution that would justify the prejudices of the old rural ideals. Cities of the late nineteenth century grew without plan, with a minimum of control, and typically by the direction of industrial enterprise. Accordingly, American cities seemed to harbor all the afflictions that plague modern society: poverty, disease, crime, and decay. For members of the urban working class, life was often marked by hardship and uncertainty. Layoffs were common, and as much as 30 percent of the urban work force was out of work for some period during the year. Child labor was common as well, and in 1900 as many as three million of America's children were forced to work on a full-time basis to help support their families.

Living conditions in the cities were often deplorable, with thousands of families forced to reside in slums that were breeding grounds for typhoid, smallpox, cholera, tuberculosis, and other diseases that swept through the cities on a regular basis. City tenement housing quickly degenerated into slums that not only brought unsanitary living conditions, but also increased poverty, prostitution, and organized crime. In 1881 the homicide rate in America was 25 per million; in 1898, the rate had risen to 107 per million. Diseases such as cholera, typhoid fever, and diphtheria increasingly plagued cities and wreaked havoc on working-class populations. Several factors made many problems in American cities more pronounced. In the 1880s and 1890s the gulf between social classes was dramatically emphasized. The term "Gilded Age," coined by Mark Twain, came into common use and indicated corruption, profiteering, and false glitter. In both Chicago and New York, elegant and lavish homes were often built on the same street or within view of the slums. A few blocks from New York's elite Fifth Avenue, the desolation of Shantytown, with its Irish paupers and roaming livestock, presented a sharp 60-block contrast. While a relatively high degree of residential mobility did exist, ethnic neighborhoods such as Little Italy, Polonia, and Greektown also served to highlight and define urban poverty.

The industrialization of the United States also produced a fundamental reorganization of public consumption. As the nation's manufacturing plants and farms produced greater quantities of goods and products, an increasingly consumer-oriented economy emerged. Products of convenience—such as processed and preserved foods, ready-made clothing, and telephones—appeared and were made available to a far greater number of consumers than ever before.

Leisure time activities blossomed as well. Revolutions in transportation, technology, and urbanization all fostered an environment favorable to the pursuit of recreational activities. Americans with money in their pockets and time on their hands looked to spend both on entertainment, and businessmen rushed to supply consumers in this newest lucrative economic niche. Organized sports, previously the territory of only the wealthiest American families, were embraced by all classes of spectators and participants. Circuses, vaudeville shows, theatrical dramas, and musical comedies attracted tens of thousands of citizens, too. As one commentator on the times noted, "while telephones, typewriters, cash registers, and adding machines sped and made routine the conduct of business, cameras, phonographs, bicycles, moving pictures, amusement parks, and professional sports defined the mass popular culture that still dominates our times."

See also: Child Labor, Immigration, Industrialization, Monopoly, Robber Barons, Sherman Anti-Trust Act, Slums, Tenements, Urbanization

FURTHER READING

Bruchey, Stuart. Enterprise: The Dynamic Economy of a Free People. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990.

Cochran, Thomas. Frontiers of Change: Early Industrialism in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981.

North, Douglas. The Economic Growth of the United States, 1790–1860. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1961.

Sellers, Charles. The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Taylor, George Rogers. The Transportation Revolution, 1815–1860. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1951.

the surging economic and technological growth of the united states caused tremendous changes in the character of american life during the last decades of the nineteenth century.