Chapter 48: Wrapping Up the First Industrial Revolution
A look back on all the incredible changes the world saw in the First Industrial Revolution, and some looking forward to the future.
Sources for this episode include:
Allitt, Patrick N. “The Industrial Revolution.” The Great Courses. 2014.
Griffin, Emma. Liberty’s Dawn: A People’s History of the Industrial Revolution. Yale University Press. 2013.
Hobsbawm, Eric J. The Age of Revolution: 1789-1848. Weidenfeld & Nicolson. 1962.
Lindert, Peter H. and Jeffrey G. Williamson. “American Incomes 1774-1860.” National Bureau of Economic Research. 2012.
Mitchell, B.R. British Historical Statistics. Cambridge University Press. 1988.
Stearns, Peter N. The Industrial Revolution in World History. 4th Edition. Westview Press. 2013.
Weber, Eugen. “The Western Tradition.” (Lecture Series) Annenberg Media. 2007.
Weightman, Gavin. The Industrial Revolutionaries. Grove Press. 2007.
Full Transcript
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Imagine, for a moment, living a life from 1760 to 1848.
First of all, you are dying at the ripe-old age of 88, so well done – that’s a long life for that period of history.
Second of all, think of all the change you would have experienced.
You are born into a working family in northern England. Your dad is a farmhand, your mom spins yarn in the family’s cottage. Your grandparents did similar work, as their parents and grandparents had before them. Not everyone in the family followed the same trajectories of course. Maybe some moved to the next village or took up a trade. But overall, for your family, life was pretty much the same as it had been, generation-to-generation, over the past few hundred years.
Years before you were born, John Kay invented his flying shuttle. So, yarn is in high demand. Your mother’s spinning helps the family bring in some extra income. This is important because you have many brothers and sisters who need food and clothing. Thanks to the improved food security made possible by things like the Rotterdam plough, Jethro Tull’s seed drill, and innovations in crop rotation and animal husbandry, your parents were healthier than their parents had been and, thus, they were able to have more children who survived infancy.
You’re only three years old when James Watt is first tasked with building a steam engine. The few steam engines in use, so far, are almost exclusively used to drain mines. But it’s good the mines are being drained. There’s not enough wooded forestland in England anymore, and your family depends on coal to keep warm in the winters.
Then when you’re four years old, James Hargreaves invents his Spinning Jenny. It greatly increases the efficiency of spinning fibers into yarn. But your family doesn’t have quite enough money to buy one. Your mom continues spinning yarn with her wheel. But the price she can fetch for a yard of yarn just keeps falling. She’s doing more work and earning less money. Your parents begin struggling to feed you and your siblings. Then again, it could be worse. Your mother’s sister lost two children (your cousins) to smallpox.
1771 comes around. You’re eleven years old. By this point, it’s time for you to do as your parents had done by the time they were your age – it’s time for you to get a job already. After all, there are a lot of mouths to feed. Your parents will be lucky if they can save up enough to get one of your brothers a traditional guild apprenticeship. As a girl, your opportunities are more limited. But then you learn about a new kind of mill opening up in nearby Cromford. Powered by the river its on, its not going to mill grain but, rather, spin yarn.
So you apply and get a job there. It’s not the easiest work – it’s noisy, you’re working with dangerous machines, and you’re working 12 hours a day, 6 days a week. But you know what? It pays pretty well! And your family needs the money.
So you work there for a while and – even though the owner, Mr. Arkwright, is facing a lawsuit for patent infringement – the mill is doing pretty well. So well, in fact, that its spurring other mills to open around the country.
In 1780, you meet a boy. He’s nice. You both have money. You decide to tie the knot. To your parents, this is a bit sudden, isn’t it? I mean, you’re only 20! But, let’s be real, you want to have sex and, anyway, you can afford to get married.
So you do and, after walking down the aisle, you soon discover you’re pregnant. You quit the mill and stay home to raise the baby, go shopping, cook the meals, and do the chores while your husband works 14 hour days in the factory. He does pretty well for himself, although he drinks more than he should.
By the 1790s, you’ve had five more kids. Your husband can’t find a job that pays enough for the family’s needs, even with you bringing in extra money washing clothes. So, you decide to move to Manchester, where newer, more modern cotton mills are being erected on the city’s new canals – some even use steam energy, rather than water, to power the new machines.
The pay in Manchester is higher, though so is the cost of living. Fortunately, your kids start going to work in the mills too, just like you did. That helps. Your oldest, in fact, is something of a prodigy at the mill and has been singled out for advancement. It also helps that the clothing you wear is becoming more and more affordable, thanks to the productivity in those mills which employ your family members.
By 1800, your husband has died. Maybe it was the conditions in the mill. Maybe it was because he drank too much. Maybe it was the cold, damp home you live in. It’s difficult to know. Meanwhile, your own children are starting to get married. Your oldest is on his way to becoming a foreman in a steam-powered mill. Another son is thinking of joining the army.
In some ways, the city feels so modern and alive with human activity. It’s nothing like the humble surroundings of your childhood. So many new and impressive buildings have been built. You watch big barges full of cotton and coal go up and down the canals. More and more people are moving in. At the same time, it’s getting incredibly dirty. The river is foul, the air is full of coal smoke, there’s litter and human waste in the streets. There’s no decent home you can live in at a decent rent.
In 1812, your son in the army is killed fighting the forces of the French emperor. There’s a war on at home too, as the Luddites are running around northern England and destroying mills. Your oldest son is outraged by them. Your neighbors sympathize with them. Thanks to your oldest, you’re pretty well looked after, but you still make some baked goods to sell to the neighbors and look after your young grandkids from time to time. Your grandkids, by the way, have been able to get a new kind of medicine called a vaccine. They won’t be at risk of smallpox like you once were – smallpox that once took the lives of your two cousins.
In the 1820s, the country is reeling from economic depression. Nobody can quite explain why. But your oldest son begins investing his earnings in new businesses and is doing quite well. This puts him at odds with his sisters and their husbands, who are struggling. Nonetheless, your sons-in-law join mutual improvement societies so they can learn to read and write.
One of your daughters and her husband have become devout Methodists. Growing up, you heard about these Methodists although you never really encountered it in person until you got to Manchester. You find this a bit strange but you don’t see the harm in it. Another son-in-law, though, has joined a trade union, making him particularly Radical in an age that seems to be becoming more and more Radical generally.
For one thing, your children are refusing to allow their own children to work. This you can’t understand. They worked as children, just as you worked as a child, just as your parents worked as children. Why are your grandchildren not learning the value of hard work? Meanwhile, you see growing crime and vice in the city. Merchants are ripping off their customers more than ever before. It’s hard to understand what the world is coming to.
At least you can rest easy knowing that, whatever the world is coming to, your own country is leading it. You were still a teenager when the embarrassment of the American Revolution took place. But today, with a military made possible thanks to industrialized ship building, arsenals, and more, the United Kingdom has become the worldwide hegemon.
In 1830 you reach the age of 70, making you relatively old for an Englishwoman. Your oldest son has taken a ride on the new locomotive railway to Liverpool, which got him there in under 2 hours. He can’t stop telling the story. You are impressed with it, but you have no interest in riding one of these trains yourself. You tell people it seems all too fast and exciting for a woman of your age.
With the railway opened up now, the city is busier than ever. Plus, new street lamps have been installed, using a new gas to illuminate the city at night. Crime has fallen a bit ever since. You certainly feel safer.
The economy is doing better too. Your children and older grandchildren have work. The pay could always be better, but its enough to feed their families. Heck, they’re eating well! They can get meat regularly and drink tea most every day. Of course, their homes are falling apart, but that’s Manchester for you. Your oldest son, of course, is doing quite well for himself. His own children are going to grammar schools. They’ll probably wind up living in London or something someday.
By 1848, you are a very old woman who has watched her grandchildren grow up. Those of your youngest son have been able to go into banking and law! Their own children are going to go to one of the great universities one day. Those of your younger children are working in the factories. Due to the latest economic turmoil, they’ve had to take pay cuts, but they’re okay. The Corn Laws were finally repealed, and so the price of food has finally stabilized. Plus they have all kinds of furniture and consumer goods that your grandparents never had.
Manchester has representation in Parliament now and your son – get this, your son – is able to vote! That makes you very proud. Of course, your son-in-law wants the vote too, and he and his sons have been out collecting signatures for the People’s Charter. They can all read – something you never learned to do – and, thanks to newspapers being so much more affordable than they used to be, they are able to keep up-to-date with the latest news. In fact, your grandson is able to tell you about the latest revolution in France (because, yeah, some things never change) practically while it’s still happening.
Your family knows you don’t have much more time with them. So, before you pass on, they want something to remember you by – something that wasn’t possible when your husband died or when your own parents or grandparents died. They pay to have a photographer produce a Daguerreotype of you.
And as you’re finally dying, the world is gearing up with ever newer inventions that will make all these changes seem quaint by comparison.
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This is the Industrial Revolutions
Chapter 48: Wrapping Up the First Industrial Revolution
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Some quick administrative notes…
First: A reminder that in a couple weeks I’ll be releasing a new AMA episode. You can ask me anything by submitting your questions at www.IndustrialRevolutionsPod.com/contact or via social media @IndRevPod – that’s @-I-N-D – R-E-V – P-O-D. Please get your questions in by November 6th, 2020.
Second: Listener James Banks caught a mistake in Chapter 40. I referred to Edmund Burke as a “Tory theorist” but he was, in fact, from a conservative faction of the Whigs. So, sorry about that. It’s a good reminder that the politics of 18th Century Britain are quite a bit different than 19th Century Britain.
But on the note of corrections, I have an update for you. I will soon be making updates to old episodes. Among those updates, I’ll be adding corrections / clarifications with a [ding] noise where the mistake is made. I’ll also be re-recording some of the early episodes because I know they were a little tougher to follow. So, if you’ve been interested in re-listening to the podcast, this should make the experience even better. I’ll let you know when those updates are finished.
Now, on with the program.
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In that fictional life I gave you in the intro, any given year would not have been all that much different than a year or two before. But there is no way that, by the end of your life, you wouldn’t have understood how profoundly the world had changed since the start of it.
One Thomas Jackson, thinking about how he was able to afford plates and eating utensils (which, as a child in the late 18th Century, his family never had) he commented that “Society is in a state of constant progress.”
Benjamin North, a chairmaker from northern England born in 1811, noted in his 1882 autobiography how he wished his ancestors could “revisit the earth...and see the domestic alterations, commercial improvements, and the wonderful and astonishing activities of life.” But he concluded they would not be able to “believe their own eyes.”
In 1860, novelist Mary Ann Evans (better known by her pen name, George Elliot) wrote one of those classic Victorian novels about industrializing England, The Mill on the Floss. As the character Mr. Deane explains to the young protagonist, Tom Tulliver, “the world goes on at a smarter pace now than it did when I was a young fellow ... it’s this steam, you see.”
Not only did the people of the time know what was happening, they asked why. Heck, we’re still asking why and how today.
The story of this Industrial Revolution begins at the roots of the tree.
The people of Europe became settled thanks to trade and new ideas that first came out of the Fertile Crescent, then spread thanks to the Roman Empire. These basic tools of agriculture, warfare, and economic exchange were gradually adopted across the Continent and British Isles. When the Roman Empire fell, this development stalled or even (in some ways) receded.
Then came the Crusades, which eventually created new trade routes between Europe and the Islamic World. This trade brought the plague to Europe, but also important scientific learnings. Plus it incentivized financial innovations.
All of these developments upset the traditional feudal order. So too did cannons and gunpowder, which weakened the status of the warrior nobility and strengthened the centralized power of state monarchies. They, in turn, invested in further scientific research to continue improving their military situations – and this research led to other important, non-military breakthroughs as well.
This scientific advancement led Europeans to discover new voyage routes and new territories they could easily conquer. They used this new position of theirs to spur further economic development – much of it for the purposes of even more war – but also established plantations across the world which would provide the raw materials that later fueled industrialization – like coffee and cotton.
At the same time, Europe was in turmoil, as new ideas were spreading thanks to the printing press – including ideas that challenged prevailing religious doctrines. The Protestant Reformation forced people to rethink their relationships with the powers of the church and of the state.
Protestants would also lead the way toward new banking practices in Sweden, Holland, France, and England. The introduction of fractional reserve banking, in particular, allowed England to increase its money supply, adopt paper currency which upped the efficiency of exchange, and provide the crown the much needed funds to invest further in the industrialization of warfare.
In England, many of those Protestants were unsatisfied with the official Protestant church there and started their own religious movements. After the Glorious Revolution, these nonconformists were tolerated but not fully accepted. With limited opportunities for social and political advancement, they reinvested their wealth into commercial endeavors, building a glut of capital which they would later use to construct great mills, iron foundries, modern machines, new inventions, and more.
The plague, meanwhile, had reshaped the agricultural sector of Europe. Serfdom died off in England, for example, and the merchant class of the towns was rising in power. Over the centuries that followed, feudal estates were more and more converted to pastures for sheep grazing. Then they tapped the new banks for mortgages so they could expand their holdings and consolidate the land for more efficient farming. It both greatly increased the food supply and set the foundations of private property rights and capitalism. But this both grew the supply of and diminished the demand for agricultural labor. This surplus created the conditions of increased poverty going into the Industrial Revolution.
And while plenty of roots weren’t especially important for the trunk of the tree, they had a major impact on how the branches would form. Liberalism and the Enlightenment come to mind, from the American and French revolutions onward. There were also early waves of Romanticism, such as Gothic novels, depressing poetry, and humanist art.
But next, let’s talk about that trunk of the tree.
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The British Agricultural Revolution of the early 18th Century had a big role in catalyzing the Industrial Revolution of the late 18th Century. By consuming more and more food, the British population grew in numbers and – with the extra calories – had more energy to build the future.
This human energy was especially important in the iron foundries, where an incredible work ethic was required. The men needed strength and endurance as they stirred and hammered the iron in extraordinarily high temperatures.
In 1785, a teenage French aristocrat named François La Rochefoucauld – the future Duc de La Rochefoucald – was touring northern England. At one of the ironworks he saw, he commented on the laborers, “Seeing them at work, I reflected as I very often have before: how lucky I am to be born into a position in which I don’t have to work in order to live: and how unhappy I’d be if I had to work as hard as I could for three hours… What a miserable fate! What a price our luxury costs!” Apparently, something got lost in translation, as those workers’ shifts were not three hours, but twelve.
Another French aristocrat, our old friend, the Marquis de Jouffroy d'Abbans, had tried establishing an iron foundry in Brittany, but discovered he did not have the stomach to push his workers the way British iron masters did. As he put it in an 1832 poem, “Adieu to England. Shall I tell of the torments of this Hell on earth, where the English live and die at the works? But merchants, take comfort. If a man has been buried, another barrel of iron is now on sale.”
British iron output was growing thanks to innovators like Abraham Darby, who improved iron smelting by using coke instead of charcoal as early as 1709; Charles and John Wood, who improved the process for refining iron; Benjamin Huntsman, who developed a way to produce large quantities of crucible steel; and perhaps most importantly, Henry Cort, whose “reverberatory furnace” made iron puddling easier on workers, produced better iron with fewer impurities, and enabled a larger scale of production.
And then John “Iron Mad” Wilkinson opened the world up to endless possibilities for iron: Bridges made of iron, ships made of iron, underground water pipes made of iron, machines made of iron, factory buildings made with iron frames, and so on.
In the 1400s, the Austrian Duchy of Styria was Europe’s premier iron-producing region, and could forge about 2,000 tons of iron per year. By 1850, England was producing 2 million tons of iron per year.
To forge the iron, blast furnaces were constructed all over rural Britain – especially in South Wales and from the West Midlands up to Lancashire. And powering the furnaces was coal.
Coal mining was already increasing in Britain due to the islands dwindling timber resources. And thanks to new techniques in mine shaft ventilation, the Davy safety lamp, and tracks to cart out the coal, output soared. There’s lots of different estimates out there, but roughly speaking, British coal production increased by a factor of 13 over the course of the first Industrial Revolution. And with the development of the steam engine, coal was soon needed – and mined – across the world. In all, roughly 640 million tons of coal were mined from the earth during the 1840s.
The need for coal also led to the improvements made to the steam engine – first by Thomas Newcomen in 1712, using the innovations of Denis Papin and Thomas Savery; then improved by James Watt in the 1760s and beyond, using his cooling condenser; and finally by Oliver Evans and Richard Trevithick, who developed the “strong steam” of high-pressure steam engines.
Built by iron and fueled by coal, these steam engines revolutionized the production of power in manufacturing and transportation.
Technological advancements had already been made in textiles, including the Fly Shuttle and Spinning Jenny, both of which allowed a single worker to more than double his or her output. A new means of organizing labor – what Adam Smith called the Division of Labor – was being introduced in factories like Josiah Wedgwood’s pottery works at Etruria. Combining these concepts of more productive technology and deskilled labor specialization were pioneers like Sir Richard Arkwright and his partners. And then it got turned up a notch further with the introduction of Samuel Crompton’s Spinning Mule and Edmund Cartwright’s Power Loom.
By connecting machines like the Spinning Mules and Power Looms to steam engines, textile mills became more productive and they could be set up anywhere. Rather than being spread along river villages like Cromford or New Lanark, they could be clustered in cities, allowing those cities to grow larger and larger in population, as desperate workers sought higher wages in the mills. And thanks to canals and eventually railroads, fibers like cotton and wool could be shipped to the mills to be processed (same as the coal that would fuel the steam engines) and then the finished products could be shipped back out on those same lines. At its peak around the Renaissance, the city of Florence produced roughly 80,000 pieces of cloth per year. By the end of the first Industrial Revolution, a single mill in Manchester could match that figure and then some.
And while these technological and labor concepts were adopted first and foremost in textile mills, they followed in other factories too. At the Portsmouth Block Mills, they were used to make millions of blocks for British naval vessels. In the foundries, they were used to hammer large slabs of iron. Many factories used these techniques to mass produce dishware, eating utensils, and other household goods. At plants like St. Rollox, they were used to mass produce chemicals like bleaching powder. In factories in the United States, they were adopted to mass produce clocks, cabinets, cured meats, soaps, firearms, and more.
And across the world they were adopted in paper mills to make paper that could then be used to print books and periodicals en masse. By 1848, the number of books published annually in Britain, France, Germany, and U.S. ran well into the five figures. Over 4,000 newspapers were in publication across the world.
By increasing the overall supply of these products while simultaneously reducing labor costs, the manufacturers could sell their goods at lower prices to consumers. Ordinary people could afford items which we now take for granted as basic necessities but which were, to most people at the time, considered luxuries.
And I’ve already mentioned how the Transport Revolution allowed speedier delivery of goods to market. Made possible by river navigations, then canals, then steamboats, steamships, locomotive railways, and even hot air balloons, this revolution also allowed news and ideas to travel farther and faster. 48 million passengers used the railways in the UK in 1845 alone, covering about 3,000 miles. And by 1850, that number of railway track miles had doubled.
In time, these developments would remake the maps of Europe and the United States. This could be seen in the “Burned Over District” of upstate New York, opened up by the Erie Canal. With the construction of the railways, suburbs began to pop up in places like the English West Midlands. And an even greater transport revolution was now on the horizon with the development of vulcanized rubber.
In the age before the canals and railroads, few people had the means to leave their medieval villages. They had few of our modern comforts. To them, success or failure was shared among their neighbors, as it was tied to the success or failure of the harvests. As a result of the Industrial Revolution, the strength of community, family, tradition broke down. It has never recovered. Replacing them was the power of technology and capital.
And all that technology and capital would be used to create even more innovations, like the telegraph, gaslighting, and photography. And all of these innovations would have their own further effects on the world.
So let’s turn our attention then to the effects of the first Industrial Revolution – the branches of the tree.
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Remember when you first joined Facebook? Back then, the rise of the tech industry seemed like a great story of young, scrappy upstarts bringing the world together. They paid good wages to their employees, had a lower carbon footprint than many businesses, etc.
That was only about a decade ago.
But already, we see the darker sides of the tech industry coming into full light – privacy concerns, election hacking and polarization, cyberbullying, the proliferation of dangerous conspiracy theories... How times have changed, huh?
Well, many people were feeling the same way in the early 19th Century.
As W. Cooke Taylor wrote in his 1842 Notes of a Tour in the Manufacturing District of Lancashire:
“The steam-engine had no precedent, the spinning-jenny is without ancestry, the mule and the power-loom entered on no prepared heritage: they sprang into sudden existence like Minerva from the brain of Jupiter.”
He goes on to say…
“The manufacturing population is not new in its formation alone: it is new in its habits of thought and action, which have been formed by the circumstances of its condition, with little instruction, and less guidance, from external sources…”
Beginning as early as the 1790s, a new, deskilled, working class began to form around the cotton mills (increasingly powered by steam). As the years went on, they became a larger, more powerful force, distinct from the skilled tradesmen of the past. This process intensified during the wars with France. The Luddites, in frustration, smashed up machines across the north of England. The Pentridge Rising and Peterloo followed before the end of that same decade. Then in the 1820s, labor unions proliferated across the country. Robert Owen began building a new socialist movement. The Ten Hours Movement and Chartism followed.
And the visual symbols of industrialization were impossible for the people of the time to ignore – from railroads and other modern infrastructure to the huge buildings of mass production and mass employment.
As E.P. Thompson put it:
“...it is the image of the ‘dark, Satanic mill’ which dominates our visual reconstruction of the Industrial Revolution. In part, perhaps, because it is a dramatic visual image – the barrack-like buildings, the great mill chimneys, the factory children, the clogs and shawls, the dwellings clustering around the mills as if spawned by them… In part, because the cotton-mill and the new mill-town – from the swiftness of its growth, ingenuity of its techniques, and the novelty or harshness of its discipline – seemed to contemporaries to be dramatic and portentous…”
To achieve this industrialization – not only in Britain but, in time, the U.S. and Continental Europe too – required a massive amount of investment on the part of capitalists, who required raw materials like iron, coal, and cotton, as well as transportation of the raw materials and finished products, and of course the new machines that processed raw materials into finished products.
They were able to make these investments thanks to the low wages that prevailed during these years, thanks to an expanding rural population which could not find sufficient work in agriculture or traditional trades, thus, they moved into the cities to find low-skill jobs. And while these workers were glad to find these jobs – and these jobs paid well compared to their other opportunities – they were nevertheless crowding into recently-constructed neighborhoods with unsanitary living conditions.
But the economy was growing. British Gross Domestic Product rose from about £78 million in 1760 to roughly £650 million in 1848. Take population and inflation into account, and over that 88 year period, the average British household saw its real annual income grow to become five times what it used to be before industrialization. Per capita income in the United States, meanwhile, grew about 645% between 1774 and 1860. In western Continental Europe, the Industrial Revolution began a bit later and even then took off a bit slower. But already between 1830 and 1850, Gross National Product per capita grew roughly 35% across these lands.
Trade between industrializing countries grew as well. Global international commerce multiplied fourfold between 1780 and 1848, reaching about 800 million pounds sterling.
Economic growth, in turn, created economic disruption. Capital accumulation among the rising bourgeoisie – the ranks of which more than tripled in the UK between 1801 and 1851 – allowed capitalists to build new mills, iron works, factories, canals, railways, steamships, and more, employing more and more people forced out of the farming sector by agricultural innovations and out of traditional trades by liberal crackdowns on the once-powerful guilds. In this process, industrialists deskilled the labor force, training them to do only a few monotonous, repetitive tasks. This deskilling of labor allowed them to control the quality of the goods being produced, increase the productivity of labor, and keep the demands of their workers in check.
The new relationship of capital to labor also created backlash, which we saw in the cases of the Luddites, the Silicean Weavers, the Parisian tailors who burned down Barthelemy Thimonnier’s sewing machine factories not once but twice, the strikes of England’s trade unionists, and even perhaps the destruction of Matthew Boulton’s Albion Mills. In all these events, we see how the skilled laborers of the guilds or of cottage industries reacted to their fellow bourgeois who had accumulated enough capital to invest in new technologies which, in turn, put those skilled laborers out of business.
But, again, for those laborers who were not brought up in the skilled trades, the Industrial Revolution provided a lot of opportunities they wouldn’t have otherwise had. As the carpenter John Bennet – born in Wiltshire in 1787, said in the 1850s, “Look back and see what troublesome times we had during my bringing up...the working classes, in my opinion, was never so well off.”
Between the better pay they received in the mills compared to as landless laborers, the new technologies like street lamps and telegraphs, the living conditions that were starting to improve, better food and cheaper consumer goods, as well as increasing empowerment with trade unions, mutual improvement societies, and worker protection laws, there was a legitimate sense that things were getting better since the darkest days of the 18-teens and ‘20s. All taken together, the disruption caused to the skilled workers of the Medieval guilds and putting-out cottages seemed to represent little more than the unfortunate growing pains of modernization.
Of course, none would be spared from the harsh realities of the capitalist business cycle – the vicious booms and busts that would build up feelings of economic security and then crush them thanks to the periodic overextensions of capital. The brutal post-Napoleonic depression in Britain, the Latin American debt crisis of 1825, the Panic of 1837 in the U.S., and the potato famine (overlapping with the bursting of the railway bubble) across Europe in the 1840s, each created the conditions of social unrest we so often associate with the Industrial Revolution.
The phenomena of population growth and urbanization were also impossible to ignore. By 1848, the world’s population was greater than ever before, in many places greater than previously thought possible. During the Middle Ages, European cities rarely (if ever) saw their populations top 100,000, and even these were pretty much limited to northern Italy. By 1851, London's population was over 2.6 million, and several other cities across Europe had populations in the six figures. Middle and northern England saw particularly big booms, with previously negligible places like Birmingham and Manchester springing onto the world stage as major modern cities.
With the expansion of cities and the expansion of the middle class came an expansion of political rights. The most obvious way was in the passage of the Great Reform Act of 1832, which both expanded the franchise among the British bourgeoisie and cleaned up some of the old corruption, including rotten boroughs, so cities like Birmingham and Manchester could be better represented in Parliament.
With the rise of manufacturing and the repeal of the Corn Laws, the economic value of landholding fell in Britain – and, by extension, the political clout of the gentry began to wane. In fact, the Prime Minister who got the Corn Laws repealed – Sir Robert Peel – was the son of a manufacturer and, thus, the first PM from a middle class background.
On the Continent, this movement toward liberalism was seen in places like France and Belgium too. Meanwhile, countries like Prussia, Austria, and Russia became more autocratic, fearing the ways industrialization and liberalism would up-end their traditional orders. Yet, almost everywhere, the traditions of serfdom gradually fell by the wayside.
Of course, in all the industrializing world, no country was as liberal as the United States. By the end of the First Industrial Revolution, the Americans already had universal suffrage (at least for white men), a prohibition on nobility, and many civil liberties not yet realized in Europe.
Yet, the United States also expanded the anti-liberal institution of slavery during these years. While the rest of the world gradually abolished slavery during the first Industrial Revolution, the demand for cotton in the mills of England, New England, Belgium, and elsewhere was growing. And in the cotton regions of the New World – especially Brazil and the southern U.S. – so too was slavery. The enslaved population of the U.S. grew from roughly 700,000 in 1790 to 3.2 million in 1850.
Still, the anti-slavery movement was growing too, and even the United States voted to officially ban the slave trade as soon as the Constitution allowed. Much of this was driven by religious denominations like the Quakers, Methodists, and others. Religious liberty was on the rise, to the point where Protestants and Catholics alike (and even Jews, like the Rothschilds) were allowed equal rights.
The so-called “Great Awakenings” of the early 18th and early 19th centuries shifted the religious landscapes of the U.K. and North America and, with them, the social and political landscapes. The Methodists and Baptists, in particular, brought the working classes into religious life in a way other churches didn’t. They encouraged spiritual development through education and leadership opportunities and, in doing so, they unintentionally created the conditions for working-class self-empowerment.
The British working classes furthered these conditions in Mutual Improvement Societies, night schools, trade unions, co-ops, and more. In time they created national movements, like Chartism, pushing directly for political reform and inclusion.
Accompanying the growing literacy of the working classes was the growing availability of books and – critically – newspapers. The now highly-productive paper mills and printing presses allowed a greater circulation of newspapers at a lower cost. And news spread long distances faster than ever thanks to the telegraph. By the end of the First Industrial Revolution, the ruling classes, capitalist classes, and working classes of Europe were all becoming well-informed on the issues of the day. As such, the capitalist and working classes more and more demanded an equal voice with the ruling classes in politics.
Even the women’s rights movement was picking up steam, as industrialization upended traditional gender norms. Again, this was in part thanks to the Great Awakening, in which women were included in the expansion of spiritual development, education, and leadership opportunities. Voices like Mary Wollstonecraft provided a catalyst for first wave feminist thought. Such developments could also be seen in movements like the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association. (Shout out Chapter 33!) And with new technologies like the sewing machine and others around the corner, more and more was being added to the foundation of women’s empowerment.
But while political rights were beginning to expand in the industrializing world, the rest of the world was increasingly exploited by imperialist and capitalist forces.
Rich in natural resources and having favorable climates and soil, the countries of what we now sometimes call the “Global South” had comparative advantages in cash crops for export. Many of these cash crops – including cotton and indigo, but also coffee, sugar, etc. – fueled the Industrial Revolution. However, the countries of the Global South were never equal trading partners with the industrializing countries.
First of all, comparative advantage is not the same as absolute advantage, and countries with comparative advantage in manufacturing goods will grow faster than countries with comparative advantage in agricultural goods.
Second, the industrializing powers made sure to limit the industrial development of the Global South. For instance, Britain outlawed the exportation of industrial technologies for many decades and squashed cotton manufacturing in India. Instead, western capitalists sought to develop industry in the Global South to the form of modern transport, to help move cash crops across the world faster. In Latin America, they did this by underwriting loans for rail and shipping infrastructure, for which they earned interest, helping accelerate the global economic development gap.
Finally, the British used their military prowess to force the terms of trade they wanted on the wider world. Nowhere was this done more effectively than in China, where they used steam-powered ships and gunboats to move up the rivers, shoot their increasingly reliable guns and cannons, and decisively win the Opium Wars.
All-in-all, the British flooded the global market with cheap textile goods, preventing nascent textile industries from developing elsewhere. As British liberals from Adam Smith to David Ricardo had hoped, Britain used its hegemony to become the workshop of the world. Only the Americans were able to so effectively counter British domination, thanks in part to tariffs and in part to their modernization of additional industries.
Speaking of Smith and Ricardo, the Industrial Revolution also spawned the new study of economics. While economic thought had existed since at least antiquity, it became a more focused and relevant branch of philosophy as capitalism and industrialization flourished. Smith’s Wealth of Nations really helped this along and kick-started the so-called “Classical School” of economics, including the ever-optimistic Jean-Baptiste Say, the ever-pessimistic Thomas Malthus, and, of course, Ricardo. And while Say and Malthus were highly-influential in their day, it was Ricardo who inspired a great diversity and within economic thought – from John Stuart Mill to the neo-liberals to socialists, setting the stage for over 150 years of economic debate.
Most socialists of this period were the so-called “utopians” – Robert Owen, Henri de Saint-Simone, Charles Fourier, etc. But after Ricardo the philosophy became more refined. And the more radical socialist schools of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Karl Marx were now coming into focus too. In retrospect, this reaction to the Industrial Revolution should have been fairly predictable. Because as capitalism and industry upended the traditional order of western civilization, it was only natural for people to raise the social question: With the economy expanding, what kind of society do we want to build?
It is also with the benefit of hindsight we see the other great reaction to the Industrial Revolution – the need for spiritual development to accompany material development. We saw this in the form of the Great Awakenings, of course. But we also saw it with the burgeoning artistic movement known as Romanticism. And whether it took the form of paintings, or poetry, or music, Romanticism continues to influence our arts and culture to the present day.
This movement helped along the development of Humanism and our increasing religious devotion to concepts like human rights. And I think it’s fair to say that the introduction of photography also played a major role in that, as people were able to see the faces of the rulers, their war dead, and even their ancestors, in the years and decades to come.
In fact, industrialization shaped our culture in countless ways. By 1848, it was changing the future course of fashion and dietary habits. It was even giving rise to modern sports.
And looking forward, big advancements were coming in health care, warfare, urban planning, the environment, international migration, and more. And, of course, more scientific discoveries, more inventions, and more business innovations were on the way too. All of it we’ll be talking about more next year on the Industrial Revolutions.
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