Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution is a period of rapid economic growth in Britain from about 1750 to 1850, characterized by the growth of factories, railroads, coal mining and business enterprises using the new technologies.

An "industrial revolution" (uncapitalised) is the transition from an agrarian economy – where the majority of the population is geared towards subsistence – to an industrial economy with a greater focus on manufacturing. The Industrial Revolution (capitalised) is the name applied to the transition in Britain when the combination of mercantile activity supported by energetic inventors and entrepreneurs harnessed the natural resources of coal, iron and water power to create a manufacturing industry that was dominant in the world. The British Industrial Revolution was closely followed by industrial revolutions in continental Europe, and in the newly fledged United States, with the United States and Germany being the major players in the Second Industrial Revolution after 1850.

Historiography

English historian Arnold Toynbee introduced the concept into English after the French political writer Louis Blanqui used it in 1837. Historians debate the dating of the Industrial Revolution. T.S. Ashton places it roughly between 1760 and 1830. Eric Hobsbawm emphasized the effects were not fully felt until the 1830s or 1840s according.

In the 20th century historians (such as Charles Beard) looking for the social forces they thought controlled history, emphasized industrialization and urbanization. These were forces unleashed by the industrial revolution. By the mid 20th century attention was turning to the broader concept of "modernization," which included industrialization, urbanization, and psychological changes and changes in values. By the late 20th century historians largely stopped looking for deep explanatory forces, and stressed instead complexity and interrelationships.

Goldstone (2002) argues that many premodern and non-Western economies show spurts or efflorescences of economic growth, including sustained increases in both population and living standards, in urbanization, and in underlying technological change. Medieval Europe, Golden Age Holland, and Qing China, among other cases, show such remarkable efflorescences of impressive economic growth.Yet these did not lead to modern industrialized societies. The distinctive feature of Western economies since 1800 has not been growth per se, but growth based on a specific set of elements: engines to extract motive power from fossil fuels, to a degree hitherto rarely appreciated by historians; the application of empirical science to understanding both nature and practical problems of production; and the marriage of empirically oriented science to a national culture of educated craftsmen and entrepreneurs broadly educated in basic principles of mechanics and experimental approaches to knowledge. This combination developed from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries only in Britain, and was unlikely to have developed anywhere else in world history.

Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy(2000) asks one of the classic questions of history: Why did sustained industrial growth begin in northwest Europe, despite surprising similarities between advanced areas of Europe and East Asia? Specifically he compares Britain and China in depth.

Principal components

The measures of productivity over the period show major transitions in the manufacture of textiles; the consumption of coal; and the production of iron goods. Coupled with these are the movement of the population from rural to urban environments; and the rapid development and use of turnpikes, canals, railways, steamships and the telegraph.

Textiles

For centuries the spinning of yarn and the weaving of cloth had remained a manual operation. In England, for example, women and children, working at home, combed cotton with wire brushes and spun it by hand; the father then wove the cotton on a hand loom. Output was expensive and consumed locally. Most of Britain's cloth was home-made from wool in the West Country, Yorkshire and Lancashire. 1702 a critical turning point occurred when Thomas Cotchett and George Sorocold built a silk mill powered by a waterwheel at Derby. Their mill was probably Britain's first factory, for it was a single establishment with complex machinery, a source of power and accommodation for workers.

Machine productions was the answer; it would be faster, cheaper and more uniform in quality; the machine was needed to made large scale marketing possible. Textile machines were invented and improved in Britain to increase the speed of spinning and weaving. The first key innovation was the fly-shuttle, invented by John Kay in 1733. On the hand loom the operator pulled the shuttle carrying the woof from one side of the warp to the other. Kay used hammers which propelled the shuttle back and forth between the warp threads. In 1764, James Hargreaves invented the spinning jenny, which increased productivity per worler by a factor of eight.

In 1761, the Society for the Encouragement of Arts and Manufacturies offered a prize of £50 for a spinning machine that could turn fiber into yarn and replace the hand-operated jersey wheel. Numerous inventors tried their hand; in 1768 Richard Arkwright (1732-92) employed John Kaye, a clockmaker from Warrington, to help build wooden models. In 1769 they invented the waterframe, which passed the carded cotton between successive pairs of rollers, each pair in turn revolving with greater velocity, so that a great number of threads of any degree of fineness and hardness could be drawn. The spun thread was now strong enough to be used as warp. At first he relied on water power, but as the machinery grew more complex he tirned to steam engines for power. Arkwright made a great fortune from his patents. While his role as the main creator of the factory system has been exaggerated, Arkwright was remarkable in his ability to adapt other people's techniques, raise funds from investors, and persevere with his vision of a mechanized textile factory.In 1779 Samuel Crompton combined the Hargreaves and Arkwright ideas into the "muslin machine" (or "spinning mule") which could spin yarn for making muslin (until then imported from India). Originally known as the muslin wheel, or hall-in-the-wood wheel, In 1785, Dr. Edmund Cartwright invented the first power loom, which mechanized weaving operations and eventually developed into the modern power loom. In 1794, Eli Whitney, an American, patented the cotton gin, which separated the cotton fibers from the seeds, making short-fiber cotton grown in America the major raw material for the first stage of the inductrial revolution. Between 1781 and 1791 imports of cotton into Britain quadripled. In 1811 there were more than 5,000,000 spindles at work, of which 310,500 employed the Arkwright principle, 4,600,00 that of Crompton's mule spindle, and 156,000 that of Hargreaves's jenny.

Railways

see * Railway History

Coal mining

see * Coal Mining: History

Iron and Steel

see * Steel industry, history

Bibliography

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See also

• Coal Mining: History
• Railway History
• Steel industry, history
• Textile industry, history