Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution refers to a period of economic, technological, and social transformation that occurred primarily in Great Britain beginning in the 1760s and ending approximately 80 years later. The major innovations associated with this revolution include steam powered manufacturing, cheaper and higher quality iron and steel, increased use of chemicals in industry, the invention and diffusion of railroads, and the appearance of the first large, mechanized, highoutput factories for producing cotton textiles and some other consumer goods. Some historians argue that this was only the first of two such revolutions, and a second Industrial Revolution took place in the United States and, to a lesser extent, Germany during the last decades of the 19th century. This second revolution was characterized by the emergence of giant industrial corporations that exploited petroleum and electric power in both their manufacturing and their products.

The impact of the initial British revolution was felt most dramatically in a handful of industries, leading some to argue that the term revolution exaggerates overall trends. Others defend the term by pointing out that industries most thoroughly transformed had an overwhelmingly disproportionate impact on the workings of the British economy and on patterns of world trade. The cotton industry, for example, had gradually climbed to 6% of British exports in 1784, but 50 years later, cotton textiles accounted for 48.6% of a much higher total of exports. Even traditional industries were transformed during this era, if somewhat less dramatically. Josiah Wedgewood, the grandfather of Charles Darwin, made himself the most successful pottery producer of his time by applying steam power, chemistry, factory organization, and rail transportation to his ancient craft. As a result of such innovations spreading throughout the economy, the volume of industrial output in Britain, which grew about 1% a year between 1700 and 1780, increased by 3% to 4% annually over the following 80 years, an extended explosion of industrial output unprecedented in world history up to that time.

Among the many factors that help explain the timing and location of the Industrial Revolution, two in particular stand out. The first is Britain's preindustrial coal industry, which supplied a major source of heating fuel before 1760. This coal industry did not only provide power for industrial machinery and an essential input in the new metallurgy; mining coal stimulated demand for the first steam engines to run mine-pumps and the first railroads to transport the heavy mineral to ports. Perhaps the more important factor, however, was the heavily commercial nature of British society at the eve of the revolution. For more than two centuries, first English and then Scottish agriculture had been undergoing their own transformations. Dramatic changes in the uses and ownership of agricultural land, loosely referred to by historians as “the enclosure movement,” led to increased commercial husbandry, higher agricultural productivity, and the destruction of peasant self-sufficiency. These in turn stimulated a number of interdependent and reinforcing developments: greater use of wage labor, growing consumer markets, innovations in farming technology, and a willingness to invest in roads, canals, and shipping to further strengthen this market system. As a result, when the powerful woolen goods lobby blocked the importation of Indian cotton goods, the textile center of Manchester already possessed the necessary labor, technology, energy, banking, and transportation infrastructure necessary to support the world's first consumer industry based on mechanization and mass production.

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