Industrialization

Industrial Revolutions

The first Industrial Revolution occurred in England from around 1750 to 1830 for a variety of reasons. The English landed classes controlled a government that was sympathetic to the interests of private capitalists and industrial development and passed legislation supporting those interests. English agriculture was efficient enough to support a large number of nonfarming workers, land had been consolidated into fewer hands by enclosure acts passed by Parliament that favored large commercial farmers, and population growth had been sharp enough (and the enclosure movements ruthless enough) to create substantial reserves of cheap and impoverished labor.

In 1763 England emerged victorious from two centuries of military and naval conflict with its European rivals and gained access to the markets and resources of most of the world from India to the Americas. The key to English industrialization was cotton. The English cotton industry, which unquestionably benefited from technological inventions like the flying shuttle (1733), steam engine (1769), and water frame (1769) that revolutionized and sped up the production of cotton cloth, grew with the English conquest of India, the slave trade, the cotton plantations of the Caribbean and the Americas (whose work regimens some historians argue were the models for the later steam-powered industrial factories in England), and the huge market of its colonies.

Between 1750 and 1769, British cotton exports increased over tenfold and once the British destroyed the cotton handicraft production of their Indian colony, their major competitor in the global cotton textile business after 1800, India became a net importer of British textiles and its handicraft producers were reduced to unemployment and poverty. Cotton, integrated with world empire, was one industry where goods could be produced cheaply on a massive scale, creating enormous profits and benefiting from slight improvements in technology.

During the first decades of this first Industrial Revolution, the technological capacity of society and the wealth of the already wealthy increased considerably, while the wages of the poor declined. Handloom weavers, who were displaced by factory production, were especially hard hit, but the real wages of factory workers declined as well. Poverty amid affluence, low wages, unorganized workers, and diseased slums in every manufacturing city were hallmarks of capitalist industrialization and were repeated in every subsequent industrial revolution. It was not until 1880 that average real wages reached their preindustrial levels in England and the second Industrial Revolution, this time powered by coal and steel industries, was well under way.

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