Industrialization - AP European History

The Industrial Revolution was the rapid growth of industrial technology and manufacturing. Immediate results included improved transportation due to inventions such as the steam engine, growth of urban centers as many people moved to cities for factory jobs, and tremendous growth of manufacturing, largely in the textile industry. It did NOT immediately increase life expectancy, as factories were often hazardous to workers and cities were plagued with pollution and other unsanitary conditions that allowed diseases such as cholera to spread.

Johannes Gutenberg, a German blacksmith, invented the printing press around 1440. He was the first European to create a method for mass printing. The method he used was based on agricultural screw presses that were common in farming. Before Gutenberg, all book making had to be done by hand. Monks or other literate people would copy books page by page, this was expensive and time consuming, which meant that books were rare and only for the wealthy. The invention of the printing press helped to spread enlightenment ideas throughout Europe much faster than would have otherwise been possible.

By the eighteenth century, most of Britain's wood was gone. Factories required a lot of energy, so the British began mining coal. The steam engines that became prominent during this period were fueled by coal.

Life for factory workers during the Industrial Revolution was grueling and extremely harsh. Many people worked six days a week, for fourteen hours a day, in cramped and unhealthy conditions for little pay. Work was dangerous, and if you were injured and unable to continue working you were given no compensation. From about 1830 onwards, the nineteenth century in Britain was defined by constant social and political reform. Working conditions were slowly improved, and political suffrage rights were expanded to more and more men.

The driving force of the Industrial Revolution's early years was the English textile manufacturing industry, which gained phenomenal success on the back of a number of innovations to the production methods used for textiles. Included among such British inventions were the spinning jenny, the water frame, the power loom, and the flying shuttle, all of which mechanized and sped up the process of weaving and producing cloth. The cotton gin, which sped along the process by which cotton was separated from its seeds, was an American invention of the 1790s.

All of these reasons contributed to the emergence of the Industrial Revolution first in Great Britain. At the dawn of the nineteenth century, the British Empire extended around the globe, and British society had grown rich from its banking and trading policies. Furthermore, the British government enacted favorable policies that encouraged innovation in Britain by legally protecting inventions and patents. Additionally, Britain had plentiful reserves of coal and iron that were used to fuel the Industrial Revolution. Finally, the Agricultural Revolution of the eighteenth century had greatly reduced the number of people who needed to work the fields to support the population. This led to a rise in population and a surge in the number of workers who moved to the cities in search of employment.

In the initial years of the Industrial Revolution in England, many members of the working class were resistant to the widespread changes being wrought by the introduction of machine-driven production. Many unskilled and skilled workers alike feared for their livelihood and believed that factory conditions were much worse than the life they had previously enjoyed. The Luddites were nineteenth-century English textile workers who resisted the introduction of the factory system. Famously, they even physically attacked and destroyed machinery in many factories. The British government responded by enacting harsh laws against anybody found guilty of destroying industrial machinery and by engaging in show trials, executions, and penal deportations of those found guilty.

The movement towards industrialized and urban societies in nineteenth-century Europe led to a widespread increase in class conflict. The poor were forced by economic necessity to work long, arduous, and dangerous shifts to manufacture products that seemed only to make their living situations worse. This led, amongst other things, to the rise of Liberalism and Socialism in Europe.

For much of the nineteenth century, Manchester and Liverpool were both major centers of the Industrial Revolution; however, Manchester was thirty miles inland and companies in Liverpool controlled the access to raw resources that arrived via the port. In an attempt to overcome what they viewed as excessive charges, the companies of Manchester sought to build the Manchester Ship Canal to allow goods to be transported directly to Manchester, bypassing the city of Liverpool. The canal was completed in 1894 and led almost immediately to the rise of Manchester and the decline of Liverpool as industrial and economic powerhouses.

The farming industry had already been revolutionized by the Agricultural Revolution in the eighteenth century, so the first industry to be revolutionized by the Industrial Revolution was the textile industry. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, textiles were extremely laborious and inefficient (by our standards) to produce and were primarily manufactured by family units called “cottage industries”; however, with the introduction of machinery, the production of textiles skyrocketed.

The Industrial Revolution, as you likely know, began in Great Britain at the dawn of the nineteenth century; however, it was relatively slow to take hold in Germany (apart from Prussia) due to the disunified nature of the German-speaking world until Prussian-led German Unification in 1871. Following unification, the German government embarked on a massive project of economic and industrial overhaul that led to the German Industrial Revolution, particularly in the production of steel, which surpassed the British production of steel by the turn of the twentieth century. Germany and the United States would be the dominant industrial powers of the early twentieth century.

The original Combination Acts were passed in Great Britain in 1799 and 1800 to prohibit workers from forming unions and to prevent workers from striking at a time when the British government was engaged in war. The Acts were repealed in 1824, but a series of debilitating strikes followed, and the British government reinstated the policy the following year. The primary goal of the acts was to prohibit the formation of unions and to limit the ability of workers to campaign collectively for better wages and treatment through coordinated strikes.

The Industrial Revolution began in Great Britain, but by 1807, a British entrepreneur named William Cockerill had created a textile-machine-manufacturing business in Belgium that helped spread the Industrial Revolution first around Belgium, then to France, and finally around the European continent. Cockerill was particularly important because at the time, Britain was engaged in a war with Napoleonic France and most of Europe was cut off from British industrial production and innovation.

The first great wave of industrialization in the eighteenth century focused on the production of textiles. Technological improvements such as the flying shuttle and spinning jenny greatly improved productivity in textiles. These technological improvements also led to the replacement of the artisanal putting-out system with the centralized factory system of production. This process of factories coming to replaced artisans would come to be a defining characteristic of industrialization.

During the Industrial Revolution, factories became a dominant feature in the economies of large cities. Rural villagers and townsmen left worsening agricultural prospects for new opportunities working in these factories, causing city populations to balloon.

Bessemer steel was produced inexpensively from pig iron according to the principle of oxidation. The process was developed during the Second Industrial Revolution, which lasted from between the 1840s and 1860s to 1914. Oil, electricity and electrical communications, and production lines processes were developed during this period. The Newcomen steam engine was invented in 1712 and later refined into the Watt steam engine, which inaugurated the First Industrial Revolution from 1760 to 1840.

Division of Labor would allow for the construction of assembly lines, in which many unskilled workers would specialize in a very small part of a task to produce goods, like gluing a sole onto a shoe. This would replace the old system in which one craftsman would make, to keep with our example, an entire pair of shoes by hand.

Artillery accounted for close to sixty percent of all battlefield casualties during the First World War. The mass production of large, cheap ammunition made it possible for a besieging force to bombard a fixed position for weeks at a time, without stopping.

The Industrial Revolution did not end the need for agriculture. In fact, in most places in Europe during most of the nineteenth century, the majority of the population continued to work in agriculture.