Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution, a major turning point in history, marked the shift from traditional agrarian and handicraft economies to ones dominated by industry and machinery. These groundbreaking technological changes brought about new ways of working and living, completely reshaping societies. It all kicked off in 18th-century Britain and later spread worldwide. The term “Industrial Revolution,” coined by English economic historian Arnold Toynbee in the 19th century, originally described Britain’s economic boom from 1760 to 1840.

Where did the Industrial Revolution Begin?

The Industrial Revolution began in Great Britain, and many of the technological innovations were of British origin. Due to its cold damp climate, Britain was ideal for raising sheep which gave it a long history of producing textiles such as wool, linen, cotton etc. Before the industrial revolution, the textile industry was in every sense a ‘cottage industry’ as the work was performed in smaller workshops and homes by individual spinners, weavers and dyers.
With the introduction of machines like the flying shuttle, spinning jenny and power loom, weaving cloth and spinning yarn was made much easier and faster, while at the same time requiring less human labour.
The efficient and mechanized means of production could now meet the growing demand for cloth both at home and abroad. Britain’s overseas colonies were also a captive market for the goods it produced now. Along with the textile industry, the iron industry adopted some innovations of its own as well. One of these innovations was the method of smelting iron with coke, a material created by heating coal.
This method was cheaper when compared to using charcoal that was traditionally used and produced high-quality material at the same time. The rapidly expanding steel and iron production fulfilled demands created by many wars that Britain fought overseas, such as the Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815) and it helped in the growth of the railway industry.

Background

The industrial revolution started in the United Kingdom in the early seventeenth century. The Act of Union uniting England and Scotland ushered in a sustained period of internal peace and an internal free market without internal trade barriers. Britain had a reliable and fast developing banking sector, a straight forward legal framework for setting up joint stock companies, a modern legal framework and system to enforce the rule of law, and a developing transportation system.
In the latter half of the 1700s the manual labor based economy of the Kingdom of Great Britain began to be replaced by one dominated by industry and the manufacture of machinery. It started with the mechanization of the textile industries, the development of iron-making techniques and the increased use of refined coal. Once started, it spread. Trade expansion was enabled by the introduction of canals, improved roads and railways.
The introduction of steam power (fueled primarily by coal) and powered machinery (mainly in textile manufacturing) underpinned the dramatic increases in production capacity. The development of all-metal machine tools in the first two decades of the nineteenth century facilitated the manufacture of more production machines for manufacturing in other industries.
The effects spread throughout Western Europe and North America during the nineteenth century, eventually affecting most of the world. The impact of this change on society was enormous. The first Industrial Revolution merged into the Second Industrial Revolution around 1850, when technological and economic progress gained momentum with the development of steam-powered ships, railways, and later in the nineteenth century with the internal combustion engine and electric power generation.

Causes

No single explanation as to why the Industrial Revolution began in England has gained widespread acceptance. Causes offered differ according to the worldview of the source of the proposed explanation. Among possible explanations, at least two primary different types have been offered:

Changes in human behavior
Changes in institutions

Changes in human behavior have been further explained in at least three different ways:

Changes in human behavior—Due to genetic change
Changes in human behavior—Due to changes in values
Changes in human behavior—Due to changes in worldview

One the theories that changes in human behavior lie behind the Industrial Revolution has been compiled and published in the 2007 book A Farewell to Alms by the economic historian Gregory Clark. His analysis of English data from 1200 to 1800 shows that as the upper classes tended toward large families with higher rates of survival than the lower classes, descendants of the upper class would, over centuries, have tended to spread downward into the lower class ranks. At the same time, he writes, “Thrift, prudence, negotiation and hard work were becoming values for communities that previously had been spendthrift, impulsive, violent and leisure loving.” These spreading values were precisely those needed for the accumulation of wealth to raise people out of abject poverty and also to support the institutions that were so essential to the Industrial Revolution.

Clark assumes there was a kind of natural selection operating in England that led to the ascendancy of genes inclining people toward the values he observed. He chooses to overlook the role of religion in contributing to the spread of the values he has identified, while others would assert that religion must be considered as a primary source of values for a people. Indeed the sociologist Max Weber asserted a century ago, that the Calvinist Protestant work ethic was an essential feature of the capitalist economy that grew up together with the Industrial Revolution and without which the Industrial Revolution may well not have occurred.

Others have argued that among all the factors necessary for the Industrial Revolution to have occurred in England when it did perhaps the single most essential factor differentiating England from China and even continental Europe in the mid-eighteenth century was the pervasive worldview that the natural world could be harnessed to support of betterment human life through the development of machines. Such a worldview, grounded in the Newtonian synthesis of human knowledge of celestial mechanics, tied to mathematics, formalized in universities, propagated widely by a band of eager popularizers, and applied to mundane tasks by a new breed of educated gentleman entrepreneurs, captured the English imagination and provided the vital intellectual energy behind the Industrial Revolution.

In terms of institutions, the centuries preceding the Industrial Revolution were deemed important for the development in Europe of the concept of corporations, which were a new distinct entity and neither individuals, nor the state, nor the individuals collectively forming the corporation. Among the important corporations, the universities provided slowly developing lines of thought and academic programs that in England first broke solidly out of the mold of the scholastic synthesis of science and religion and gave birth not only to Newton’s Principia (in 1681) but to the proliferation of thought and applied technology based on its model.

Multiple other factors in eighteenth century England identified as part of the causal complex underlying the Industrial Revolution include: Enclosures (the practice of enclosing previously communally used agricultural lands), commercial farming, improved mines and forges, village shops, an active mortgage market, restraints on the arbitrary behavior of the monarchy, colonies providing raw materials and markets, improved intellectual property protection, and greater security of financial and real property.