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Power looms in an English textile factory

The IndustrialRevolution and ItsImpact on EuropeanSociety

C H A P T E R 20

CHAPTER OUTLINEAND FOCUS QUESTIONS

The Industrial Revolution in Great Britain

Q Why was Great Britain the first state to have anIndustrial Revolution? Why did it happen in Britainwhen it did? What were the basic features of thenew industrial system created by the IndustrialRevolution?

The Spread of Industrialization

Q How did the Industrial Revolution spread fromGreat Britain to the Continent and the UnitedStates, and how did industrialization in thoseareas differ from British industrialization?

The Social Impact of the Industrial Revolution

Q What effects did the Industrial Revolution have onurban life, social classes, family life, and standardsof living? What were working conditions like in theearly decades of the Industrial Revolution, and whatefforts were made to improve them?

CRITICAL THINKING

Q What role did government and trade unionsplay in the industrial development of theWestern world? Who helped the workers themost?

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION dramatically and quicklyaltered the political structure of France, and the Napo-leonic conquests spread many of the revolutionaryprinciples in an equally rapid and stunning fashion toother parts of Europe. During the late eighteenth andearly nineteenth centuries, another revolution—an in-dustrial one—was transforming the economic and socialstructure of Europe, although more slowly and lessdramatically.

The Industrial Revolution caused a quantum leap inindustrial production. New sources of energy and power,especially coal and steam, replaced wind and water tobuild and run machines that dramatically decreased theuse of human and animal labor and at the same timeincreased productivity. This in turn called for new waysof organizing human labor to maximize the benefitsand profits from the new machines; factories replacedworkshops and home workrooms. Many early factorieswere dreadful places with difficult working conditions.Reformers, appalled at these conditions, were especiallycritical of the treatment of married women. Onereported, ‘‘We have repeatedly seen married females,in the last stage of pregnancy, slaving from morningto night beside these never-tiring machines, and when . . .they were obliged to sit down to take a moment’s ease,and being seen by the manager, were fined for the of-fense.’’ But there were also examples of well-run facto-ries. William Cobbett described one in Manchester in1830: ‘‘In this room, which is lighted in the most conve-nient and beautiful manner, there were five hundredpairs of looms at work, and five hundred persons

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The Industrial Revolutionin Great Britain

Q FOCUS QUESTIONS: Why was Great Britain the firststate to have an Industrial Revolution? Why did ithappen in Britain when it did? What were thebasic features of the new industrial system createdby the Industrial Revolution?

Although the Industrial Revolution evolved over a longperiod of time, historians generally agree that it began inBritain sometime after 1750. By 1850, the IndustrialRevolution had made Great Britain the wealthiest countryin the world; it had also spread to the European continentand the New World. In another fifty years, both Germanyand the United States would surpass Britain in industrialproduction.

OriginsA number of factors or conditions coalesced in Britainto produce the first Industrial Revolution. One of thesewas the agricultural revolution of the eighteenth cen-tury. The changes in the methods of farming and stockbreeding that characterized this agricultural transforma-tion led to a significant increase in food production. Britishagriculture could now feed more people at lower priceswith less labor. Unlike people in the rest of Europe, evenordinary British families did not have to use most of theirincome to buy food, giving them the potential to purchasemanufactured goods. At the same time, rapid populationgrowth in the second half of the eighteenth century provideda pool of surplus labor for the new factories of the emerging

British industry. Rural workers in cottage industries alsoprovided a potential labor force for industrial enterprises.

SUPPLY OF CAPITAL Britain had a ready supply ofcapital for investment in the new industrial machines andthe factories that were needed to house them. In additionto profits from trade and cottage industry, Britain pos-sessed an effective central bank and well-developed, flex-ible credit facilities. Nowhere in Europe were people soaccustomed to using paper instruments to facilitate capitaltransactions. Many early factory owners were merchantsand entrepreneurs who had profited from the eighteenth-century cottage industry. Of 110 cotton-spinning mills inoperation in the area known as the Midlands between1769 and 1800, fully 62 were established by hosiers,drapers, mercers, and others involved in some fashion inthe cottage textile industry.

EARLY INDUSTRIAL ENTREPRENEURS But capital is onlypart of the story. Britain had a fair number of individualswho were interested in making profits if the opportunitypresented itself (see the box on p. 609). The British were apeople, as one historian has said, ‘‘fascinated by wealthand commerce, collectively and individually.’’ No doubtthe English revolutions of the seventeenth century hadhelped create an environment in Britain, unlike that ofthe absolutist states on the Continent, where politicalpower rested in the hands of a progressive group of peoplewho favored innovation in economic matters.

Nevertheless, these early industrial entrepreneurs facedconsiderable financial hazards. Fortunes were made quicklyand lost just as quickly. The structure of early firms wasfluid. An individual or family proprietorship was the usualmode of operation, but entrepreneurs also brought infriends to help—and just as easily jettisoned them. JohnMarshall, who made money in flax spinning, threw hispartners out: ‘‘As they could neither of them be of anyfurther use, I released them from the firm and took thewhole upon myself.’’1

MINERAL RESOURCES Britain had ample supplies ofimportant mineral resources, such as coal and iron ore,needed in the manufacturing process. Britain was alsosmall, so the resources needed to be transported onlyrelatively short distances. In addition to nature’s provisionof abundant rivers, from the mid-seventeenth centuryonward, both private and public investment poured intothe construction of new roads, bridges, and, beginning inthe 1750s and 1760s, canals. By 1780, roads, rivers, andcanals linked the major industrial centers of the North,the Midlands, London, and the Atlantic. Unlike the Con-tinental countries, Britain had no internal customs bar-riers to hinder domestic trade.

ROLE OF GOVERNMENT Britain’s government also playeda significant role in the process of industrialization.Parliament contributed to the favorable business climateby providing a stable government and passing laws that

608 CHAPTER 20 The Industrial Revolution and Its Impact on European Society

attending those looms; and, owing to the goodnessof the masters, the whole looking healthy and well-dressed.’’

During the Industrial Revolution, Europe experienceda shift from a traditional, labor-intensive economy basedon farming and handicrafts to a more capital-intensiveeconomy based on manufacturing by machines, special-ized labor, and industrial factories. Although the Indus-trial Revolution took decades to spread, it was trulyrevolutionary in the way it fundamentally changed Euro-peans, their society, and their relationship to the rest ofthe world. The development of large factories encour-aged mass movements of people from the countryside tourban areas, where impersonal coexistence replaced thetraditional intimacy of rural life. Higher levels of pro-ductivity led to a search for new sources of raw materi-als, new consumption patterns, and a revolution intransportation that allowed raw materials and finishedproducts to be moved quickly around the world. Thecreation of a wealthy industrial middle class and a hugeindustrial working class (or proletariat) substantiallytransformed traditional social relationships.


protected private property. Moreover, Britain was re-markable for the freedom it provided for private enter-prise. It placed fewer restrictions on private entrepreneursthan any other European state.

MARKETS Finally, a supply of markets gave British in-dustrialists a ready outlet for their manufactured goods.British exports quadrupled between 1660 and 1760. In thecourse of its eighteenth-century wars and conquests, GreatBritain had developed a vast colonial empire at the expenseof its leading Continental rivals, the Dutch Republic andFrance. Britain also possessed a well-developed merchantmarine that was able to transport goods anywhere in theworld. A crucial factor in Britain’s successful industriali-zation was the ability to produce cheaply the articles mostin demand abroad. And the best markets abroad were not inEurope, where countries protected their own incipient in-dustries, but in the Americas, Africa, and the East, wherepeople wanted sturdy, inexpensive clothes rather than costly,

highly finished luxury items. Britain’s machine-producedtextiles fulfilled that demand. Nor should we overlook theBritish domestic market. Britain had the highest standardof living in Europe and a rapidly growing population. AsDaniel Defoe noted already in 1728:

For the rest, we see their Houses and Lodgings tolerably fur-nished, at least stuff’d well with useful and necessary house-hold Goods: Even those we call poor People, Journeymen,working and Pains-taking People do thus; they lye warm, livein Plenty, work hard, and know no Want. These are the Peoplethat carry off the Gross of your Consumption; ‘tis for theseyour Markets are kept open late on Saturday nights; becausethey usually receive their Week’s Wages late. . . . In a Word,these are the Life of our whole Commerce, and all by theirMultitude: Their Numbers are not Hundreds or Thousands, orHundreds of Thousands, but Millions; . . . by their Wages theyare able to live plentifully, and it is by their expensive, gen-erous, free way of living, that the Home Consumption is rais’dto such a Bulk, as well of our own, as of foreign Production.2

The Traits of the British Industrial Entrepreneur

Richard Arkwright (1732–1792), inventor of a spinningframe and founder of cotton factories, was a good exam-ple of the successful entrepreneur in the early IndustrialRevolution in Britain. In this selection, Edward Baines, writ-ing in 1835, discusses the traits that explain the success ofArkwright and presumably other British entrepreneurs.

Edward Baines, The History of the CottonManufacture in Great Britain

Richard Arkwright rose by the force of his natural tal-ents from a very humble condition in society. He wasborn at Preston on the 23rd of December, 1732, of poorparents: being the youngest of thirteen children, his par-ents could only afford to give him an education of thehumblest kind, and he was scarcely able to write. Hewas brought up to the trade of a barber at Kirkham andPreston, and established himself in that business at Bol-ton in the year 1760. Having become possessed of achemical process for dyeing human hair, which in thatday (when wigs were universal) was of considerablevalue, he traveled about collecting hair, and again dis-posing of it when dyed. In 1761, he married a wife fromLeigh, and the connections he thus formed in that townare supposed to have afterwards brought him acquaintedwith Highs’s experiments in making spinning machines.He himself manifested a strong bent for experiments inmathematics, which he is stated to have followed withso much devotedness as to have neglected his businessand injured his circumstances. His natural dispositionwas ardent, enterprising, and stubbornly persevering: hismind was as coarse as it was bold and active, and hismanners were rough and unpleasing. . . .

The most marked traits in the character of Arkwrightwere his wonderful ardor, energy, and perseverance. Hecommonly labored in his multifarious concerns fromfive o’clock in the morning till nine at night; and whenconsiderably more than fifty years of age,—feeling thatthe defects of his education placed him under greatdifficulty and inconvenience in conducting his corre-spondence, and in the general management of hisbusiness,—he encroached upon his sleep, in order togain an hour each day to learn English grammar, andanother hour to improve his writing and orthography[spelling]! He was impatient of whatever interfered withhis favorite pursuits; and the fact is too strikingly char-acteristic not to be mentioned, that he separated fromhis wife not many years after their marriage, becauseshe, convinced that he would starve his family [becauseof the impractical nature of his schemes], broke someof his experimental models of machinery. Arkwrightwas a severe economist of time; and, that he might notwaste a moment, he generally traveled with four horses,and at a very rapid speed. His concerns in Derbyshire,Lancashire, and Scotland were so extensive and numer-ous, as to [show] at once his astonishing power oftransacting business and his all grasping spirit. Inmany of these he had partners, but he generally man-aged in such a way, that, whoever lost, he himself wasa gainer.

Q As seen in the life of Richard Arkwright, whattraits did Edward Baines think were crucial to beinga successful entrepreneur? To what extent arethese still considered the necessary traits for asuccessful entrepreneur?

The Industrial Revolution in Great Britain 609


This demand from both domestic and foreign markets andthe inability of the old system to fulfill it led entrepreneursto seek and adopt the new methods of manufacturing thata series of inventions provided. In so doing, these in-dividuals initiated the Industrial Revolution.

Technological Changes and New Formsof Industrial OrganizationIn the 1770s and 1780s, the cotton textile industry tookthe first major step toward the Industrial Revolution withthe creation of the modern factory.

THE COTTON INDUSTRY Already in the eighteenth cen-tury, Great Britain had surged ahead in the production ofcheap cotton goods using the traditional methods of thecottage industry. The development of the flying shuttlehad sped the process of weaving on a loom, enablingweavers to double their output. This caused shortages ofyarn, however, until James Hargreaves’s spinning jenny,perfected by 1768, enabled spinners to produce yarn ingreater quantities. Richard Arkwright’s water frame spin-ning machine, powered by water or horse, and Samuel

Crompton’s so-called mule, which com-bined aspects of the water frame and thespinning jenny, increased yarn productioneven more. Edmund Cartwright’s powerloom, invented in 1787, allowed the weav-ing of cloth to catch up with the spinning ofyarn. Even then, early power looms were

grossly inefficient, enabling home-based hand-loom weaversto continue to prosper, at least until the mid-1820s. Afterthat, they were gradually replaced by the new machines. In1813, there were 2,400 power looms in operation in GreatBritain; they numbered 14,150 in 1820, 100,000 in 1833,and 250,000 by 1850. In the 1820s,there were still 250,000 hand-loomweavers in Britain; by 1860, only 3,000were left.

The water frame, Crompton’s mule,and power looms presented new op-portunities to entrepreneurs. It wasmuch more efficient to bring workers tothe machines and organize their laborcollectively in factories located next torivers and streams, the sources of powerfor many of these early machines, thanto leave the workers dispersed in theircottages. The concentration of labor inthe new factories also brought the la-borers and their families to live in thenew towns that rapidly grew up aroundthe factories.

The early devices used to speed upthe processes of spinning and weavingwere the products of weavers andspinners—in effect, of artisan tinkerers.

But the subsequent expansion of the cotton industry andthe ongoing demand for even more cotton goods createdadditional pressure for new and more complicated tech-nology. The invention that pushed the cotton industry toeven greater heights of productivity was the steam engine.

THE STEAM ENGINE The steam engine revolutionizedthe production of cotton goods and allowed the factorysystem to spread to other areas of production, therebysecuring whole new industries. The steam engine thusensured the triumph of the Industrial Revolution.

In the 1760s, a Scottish engineer, James Watt (1736–1819), created an engine powered by steam that couldpump water from mines three times as quickly as previousengines. In 1782, Watt enlarged the possibilities of thesteam engine when he developed a rotary engine thatcould turn a shaft and thus drive machinery. Steam powercould now be applied to spinning and weaving cotton, andbefore long, cotton mills using steam engines were mul-tiplying across Britain. Because steam engines were firedby coal, they did not need to be located near rivers; en-trepreneurs now had greater flexibility in their choice oflocation.

The new boost given to cotton textile production bytechnological changes became readily apparent. In 1760,Britain had imported 2.5 million pounds of raw cotton,which was farmed out to cottage industries. In 1787, theBritish imported 22 million pounds of cotton; most of itwas spun on machines, some powered by water in largemills. By 1840, fully 366 million pounds of cotton—nowBritain’s most important product in value—were im-ported. By this time, most cotton industry employeesworked in factories. The cheapest labor in India could notcompete in quality or quantity with Britain. British cottongoods sold everywhere in the world. And in Britain itself,cheap cotton cloth made it possible for millions of poor

A Boulton and Watt Steam Engine. Encouraged by his business partner, MatthewBoulton, James Watt developed the first genuine steam engine. Pictured here is atypical Boulton and Watt engine. Steam pressure in the cylinder on the left drives thebeam upward and sets the flywheel in motion.

WilliamRadcliffe, OnPower Looms

(1828)

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people to wear undergarments, long a luxury of the rich,who could afford expensive linen cloth. Cotton clothingwas tough, comfortable, cheap, and easily washable.

The steam engine proved indispensable. Unlike horses,the steam engine was a tireless source of power and de-pended for fuel on a substance—coal—that seemed un-limited in quantity. The popular saying that ‘‘steam is anEnglishman’’ had real significance by 1850. The success ofthe steam engine led to a need for more coal and an ex-pansion in coal production; between 1815 and 1850, theoutput of coal quadrupled. In turn, new processes usingcoal furthered the development of the iron industry.

THE IRON INDUSTRY The British iron industry wasradically transformed during the Industrial Revolution.Britain had large resources of iron ore, but at the begin-ning of the eighteenth century, the basic process of pro-ducing iron had changed little since the Middle Ages andstill depended heavily on charcoal. In the early eighteenthcentury, new methods of smelting iron ore to produce castiron were devised, based on the use of coke or ‘‘courke’’that was made by slowly burning coal. Coke could heatiron ore at a faster rate than charcoal, thus yielding higheramounts. Still, a better quality of iron was not possibleuntil the 1780s, when Henry Cort developed a processcalled puddling in which coke was used to burn awayimpurities in pig iron (the product of smelting iron orewith coke) to produce an iron of high quality calledwrought iron. Wrought iron, with its lower carboncontent, was malleable and able to withstand strain. Aboom then ensued in the British iron industry. In 1740,Britain produced 17,000 tons of iron; in the 1780s, almost70,000 tons; by the 1840s, more than 2 million tons; andby 1852, almost 3 million tons, more than the rest of theworld combined.

The development of the iron industry was in manyways a response to the demand for the new machines.The high-quality wrought iron produced by the Cort

process made it the most widely used metal until theproduction of cheaper steel in the 1860s. The growingsupply of less costly metal encouraged the use of ma-chinery in other industries, most noticeably in new meansof transportation.

A REVOLUTION IN TRANSPORTATION The eighteenthcentury had witnessed an expansion of transportationfacilities in Britain as entrepreneurs realized the need formore efficient means of moving resources and goods.Turnpike trusts constructed new roads, and between 1760and 1830, a network of canals was built. But both roadsand canals were soon overtaken by a new form of trans-portation that dazzled people with its promise. To manyeconomic historians, railroads were the ‘‘most importantsingle factor in promoting European economic progress inthe 1830s and 1840s.’’ Again, Britain was the leader in therevolution.

The railways got their start in mining operations inGermany as early as 1500 and in British coal mines after1600, where small handcarts filled with coal were pushedalong parallel wooden rails. The rails reduced friction,enabling horses to haul more substantial loads. By 1700,some entrepreneurs began to replace wooden rails withcast-iron rails, and by the early nineteenth century,railways—still dependent on horsepower—were commonin British mining and industrial districts. The develop-ment of the steam engine led to a radical transformationof the railways.

In 1804, Richard Trevithick (TREV-uh-thik) pioneeredthe first steam-powered locomotive on an industrial railline in southern Wales. It pulled 10 tons of ore and sev-enty people at 5 miles per hour. Better locomotives soonfollowed. The engines built by George Stephenson and hisson proved superior, and it was in their workshops inNewcastle-upon-Tyne that the locomotives for the firstmodern railways in Britain were built. George Ste-phenson’s Rocket was used on the first public railway line,

Railroad Line from Liverpool to Manchester. The railroad line from Liverpool to Manchester,opened in 1830, relied on steam locomotives. As is evident in this illustration, carryingpassengers was the railroad’s main business. First-class passengers rode in covered cars;second- and third-class passengers, in open cars.

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which opened in 1830, extending 32 miles from Liverpoolto Manchester. Rocket sped along at 16 miles per hour.Within twenty years, locomotives had reached 50 milesper hour, an incredible speed to contemporary passengers.During the same period, new companies were formed tobuild additional railroads as the infant industry provedsuccessful not only technically but also financially. In1840, Britain had almost 2,000 miles of railroads; by1850, 6,000 miles of railroad track crisscrossed much ofthe country (see Map 20.1).

The railroad contributed significantly to the maturingof the Industrial Revolution. The railroad’s demands forcoal and iron furthered the growth of those industries.British supremacy in civil and mechanical engineering, soevident after 1840, was in large part based on the skillsacquired in railway building. The huge capital demandsnecessary for railway construction encouraged a wholenew group of middle-class investors to invest theirmoney in joint-stock companies (see ‘‘Industrialization onthe Continent’’ later in this chapter). Railway construc-tion created new job opportunities, especially for farmlaborers and peasants, who had long been accustomed tofinding work outside their local villages. Perhaps mostimportant, a cheaper and faster means of transportationhad a rippling effect on the growth of an industrialeconomy. By reducing the price of goods, larger marketswere created; increased sales necessitated more factoriesand more machinery, thereby reinforcing the self-sustaining nature of the Industrial Revolution, whichmarked a fundamental break with the traditionalEuropean economy. The great productivity of the In-dustrial Revolution enabled entrepreneurs to reinvesttheir profits in new capital equipment, further expandingthe productive capacity of the economy. Continuous,even rapid, self-sustaining economic growth came to beseen as a fundamental characteristic of the new indus-trial economy.

The railroad was the perfect symbol of this aspect ofthe Industrial Revolution. The ability to transport goodsand people at dramatic speeds also provided visible con-firmation of a new sense of power. When railway en-gineers penetrated mountains with tunnels and spannedchasms with breathtaking bridges, contemporaries expe-rienced a sense of power over nature not felt before inWestern civilization.

THE INDUSTRIAL FACTORY Initially the product of thecotton industry, the factory became the chief means oforganizing labor for the new machines. As the workplaceshifted from the artisan’s shop and the peasant’s cottageto the factory, the latter was not viewed as just a largerwork unit. Employers hired workers who no longer ownedthe means of production but were simply paid wages torun the machines.

From its beginning, the factory system demanded anew type of discipline from its employees. Factory ownerscould not afford to let their expensive machinery standidle. Workers were forced to work regular hours and inshifts to keep the machines producing at a steady pace formaximum output. This represented a massive adjustmentfor early factory laborers.

Preindustrial workers were not accustomed to a timedformat. Agricultural laborers had always kept irregularhours; hectic work at harvest time might be followed byweeks of inactivity. Even in the burgeoning cottage in-dustry of the eighteenth century, weavers and spinnerswho worked at home might fulfill their weekly quotas byworking around the clock for two or three days and then

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MAP 20.1 The Industrial Revolution in Britain by 1850.The Industrial Revolution began in the mid-1700s. Increasedfood production, rapid population growth, higher incomes,plentiful capital, solid banking and financial institutions, anabundance of mineral resources, and easy transport all furtheredthe process, making Britain the world’s wealthiest country by1850.

Q How well did the railroad system connect importantBritish industrial areas?



proceeding at a leisurely pace until the next week’s de-mands forced another work spurt.

Factory owners therefore faced a formidable task.They had to create a system of time-work discipline thatwould accustom employees to working regular, unvaryinghours during which they performed a set number of tasksover and over again as efficiently as possible. One earlyindustrialist said that his aim was ‘‘to make such ma-chines of the men as cannot err.’’ Such work, of course,tended to be repetitive and boring, and factory owners

resorted to tough methods to accomplish their goals.Factory regulations were minute and detailed (see thebox on p. 614). Adult workers were fined for a wide va-riety of minor infractions, such as being a few minuteslate for work, and dismissed for more serious misdoings,especially drunkenness. Drunkenness was viewed asparticularly offensive because it set a bad example foryounger workers and also courted disaster amid danger-ous machinery. Employers found that dismissals andfines worked well for adult employees; in a time when

Opening of the RoyalAlbert Bridge. This paintingby Thomas Robins shows theceremonies attending theofficial opening of the RoyalAlbert Bridge. I. K. Brunel,one of Britain’s greatengineers, designed thisbridge, which carried arailroad line across theTamar River into Cornwall.As is evident in the picture,the bridge was high enoughto allow ships to passunderneath.

A British Textile Factory. The development of the factory changed the relationship betweenworkers and employers as workers were encouraged to adjust to a new system of discipline thatforced them to work regular hours under close supervision. This 1851 illustration shows womenworking in a British textile factory.

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great population growth had produced large numbers ofunskilled workers, dismissal could be disastrous. Childrenwere less likely to understand the implications of dis-missal, so they were sometimes disciplined more directly—by beating.

The efforts of factory owners in the early IndustrialRevolution to impose a new set of values were frequentlyreinforced by the new evangelical churches. Methodism, inparticular, emphasized that people ‘‘reborn in Jesus’’ mustforgo immoderation and follow a disciplined path. Lazi-ness and wasteful habits were sinful. The acceptance ofhardship in this life paved the way for the joys of the next.Evangelical values paralleled the efforts of the new factoryowners to instill laborers with their own middle-class

values of hard work, discipline, and thrift. In one crucialsense, the early industrialists proved successful. As thenineteenth century progressed, the second and thirdgenerations of workers came to view a regular workingweek as a natural way of life. It was, of course, an attitudethat made possible Britain’s incredible economic growth inthat century.

Britain’s Great Exhibition of 1851In 1851, the British organized the world’s first industrialfair. It was housed at Kensington in London in the CrystalPalace, an enormous structure made entirely of glassand iron, a tribute to British engineering skills. Covering

Discipline in the New Factories

Workers in the new factories of the Industrial Revolutionhad been accustomed to a lifestyle free of overseers.Unlike the cottages, where workers spun thread andwove cloth in their own rhythm and time, the factoriesdemanded a new, rigorous discipline geared to therequirements of the machines. This selection is taken froma set of rules for a factory in Berlin in 1844. They weretypical of company rules everywhere the factory systemhad been established.

Factory Rules, Foundry and EngineeringWorks of the Royal Overseas TradingCompany, Berlin

In every large works, and in the co-ordination of anylarge number of workmen, good order and harmonymust be looked upon as the fundamentals of success,and therefore the following rules shall be strictlyobserved.

1. The normal working day begins at all seasons at6 A.M. precisely and ends, after the usual break ofhalf an hour for breakfast, an hour for dinner andhalf an hour for tea, at 7 P.M., and it shall be strictlyobserved. . . . Workers arriving 2 minutes late shalllose half an hour’s wages; whoever is more than2 minutes late may not start work until after thenext break; or at least shall lose his wages untilthen. Any disputes about the correct time shall besettled by the clock mounted above the gatekeeper’slodge. . . .

3. No workman, whether employed by time or piece,may leave before the end of the working day, with-out having first received permission from the over-seer and having given his name to the gatekeeper.Omission of these two actions shall lead to a fine often silver groschen [pennies] payable to the sickfund.

4. Repeated irregular arrival at work shall lead todismissal. This shall also apply to those who arefound idling by an official or overseer, and refusedto obey their order to resume work. . . .

6. No worker may leave his place of work otherwisethan for reasons connected with his work.

7. All conversation with fellow-workers is prohibited;if any worker requires information about his work,he must turn to the overseer, or to the particularfellow-worker designated for the purpose.

8. Smoking in the workshops or in the yard is prohib-ited during working hours; anyone caught smokingshall be fined five silver groschen for the sick fundfor every such offense. . . .

10. Natural functions must be performed at the appro-priate places, and whoever is found soiling walls,fences, squares, etc., and similarly, whoever is foundwashing his face and hands in the workshop andnot in the places assigned for the purpose, shall befined five silver groschen for the sick fund. . . .

12. It goes without saying that all overseers and offi-cials of the firm shall be obeyed without question,and shall be treated with due deference. Disobedi-ence will be punished by dismissal.

13. Immediate dismissal shall also be the fate of anyonefound drunk in any of the workshops. . . .

14. Every workman is obliged to report to his superiorsany acts of dishonesty or embezzlement on the partof his fellow workmen. If he omits to do so, and itis shown after subsequent discovery of a misde-meanor that he knew about it at the time, he shallbe liable to be taken to court as an accessory afterthe fact and the wage due to him shall be retainedas punishment.

Q What impact did factories have on the lives ofworkers? To what extent have such ‘‘rules’’ deter-mined much of modern industrial life?



19 acres, the Crystal Palace contained 100,000 exhibitsthat showed the wide variety of products created by theIndustrial Revolution. Six million people visited the fair insix months. Though most of them were Britons who hadtraveled to London by train, foreign visitors were alsoprominent. The Great Exhibition displayed Britain’s wealth

to the world; it was a gigantic symbol of British success.Even trees were brought inside the Crystal Palace as a visiblesymbol of how the Industrial Revolution had achieved hu-man domination over nature. Prince Albert, Queen Victo-ria’s husband, expressed the sentiments of the age when hedescribed the exhibition as a sign that ‘‘man is approaching

The Great Exhibition of 1851. The Great Exhibition of 1851 was a symbol of the successof Great Britain, which had become the world’s first industrial nation and its richest. Morethan 100,000 exhibits were housed in the Crystal Palace, a giant structure of cast iron andglass. The first illustration shows the front of the palace and some of its numerous visitors.The second shows the opening day ceremonies. Queen Victoria is seen at the center withher family, surrounded by visitors from all over the world. Note the large tree inside thebuilding, providing a visible symbol of how the Industrial Revolution had supposedlyachieved human domination over nature.

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a more complete fulfillment of that great and sacred mis-sion which he has to perform in this world . . . to conquernature to his use.’’ Not content with that, he also linkedBritish success to divine will: ‘‘In promoting [the progress ofthe human race], we are accomplishing the will of the greatand blessed God.’’3

In addition to demonstrating Britain’s enormous in-dustrial growth, the Crystal Palace exhibition also repre-sented British imperial power. Goods from India were ahighlight of the exhibition, and the East India Companydrew attention to its role in India with exhibits of cotton,tea, and flax. But it was the display of Indian silks, jewels,shawls, and an elephant canopy that captured the attentionof the British press and visitors. Despite the public interestin the ornate and intricate works from India, many Britishcommentators, such as the scientist William Whewell, wereless complimentary. They characterized the Indian hand-made goods as typical of a system in which ‘‘tens of thou-sands’’ worked for a few despots. Moreover, these goodswere examples of the ‘‘wasteful and ridiculous excess’’ ofthe labor-intensive production practices in the East, whichcould not compare to enlightened British labor practices.4

By the year of the Great Exhibition, Great Britainhad become the world’s first industrial nation and itswealthiest. Britain was the ‘‘workshop, banker, and traderof the world.’’ It produced one-half of the world’s coal andmanufactured goods; its cotton industry alone in 1851was equal in size to the industries of all other Europeancountries combined. The quantity of goods produced wasgrowing at three times the rate in 1780. Britain’s certaintyabout its mission in the world in the nineteenth centurywas grounded in its incredible material success.

The Spread of Industrialization

Q FOCUS QUESTION: How did the IndustrialRevolution spread from Great Britain to theContinent and the United States, and how didindustrialization in those areas differ from Britishindustrialization?

Beginning first in Great Britain, industrialization spreadto the Continental countries of Europe and the UnitedStates at different times and speeds during the nineteenthcentury. First to be industrialized on the Continent wereBelgium, France, and the German states; the first in NorthAmerica was the new United States. Not until after 1850did the Industrial Revolution spread to the rest of Europeand other parts of the world.

Industrialization on the ContinentIn 1815, the Low Countries, France, and the Germanstates were still largely agrarian. During the eighteenthcentury, some of the Continental countries had experi-enced developments similar to those of Britain. They, too,

had achieved population growth, made agricultural im-provements, expanded their cottage industries, and wit-nessed growth in foreign trade. But whereas Britain’seconomy began to move in new industrial directions inthe 1770s and 1780s, Continental countries lagged behindbecause they did not share some of the advantages thathad made Britain’s Industrial Revolution possible. Lack ofgood roads and problems with river transit made trans-portation difficult. Toll stations on important rivers andcustoms barriers along state boundaries increased thecosts and prices of goods. Guild restrictions were alsomore prevalent, creating impediments that pioneer in-dustrialists in Britain did not have to face. Finally, Con-tinental entrepreneurs were generally less enterprisingthan their British counterparts and tended to adhere totraditional business attitudes, such as a dislike of com-petition, a high regard for family security coupled with anunwillingness to take risks in investment, and an exces-sive worship of thriftiness. Thus, industrialization on theContinent faced numerous hurdles, and as it proceeded inearnest after 1815, it did so along lines that were some-what different from Britain’s.

BORROWING TECHNIQUES AND PRACTICES Lack oftechnical knowledge was initially a major obstacle to in-dustrialization. But the Continental countries possessedan advantage here; they could simply borrow Britishtechniques and practices. Of course, the British tried toprevent that. Until 1825, British artisans were prohibitedfrom leaving the country; until 1842, the export of im-portant machinery and machine parts, especially for tex-tile production, was forbidden. Nevertheless, the Britishwere not able to control this situation by legislation. Al-ready by 1825, there were at least two thousand skilledBritish mechanics on the Continent, and British equip-ment was also being sold abroad, legally or illegally.

Gradually, the Continent achieved technological inde-pendence as local people learned all the skills their Britishteachers had to offer. By the 1840s, new generations ofskilled mechanics from Belgium and France were spread-ing their knowledge east and south, playing the same rolethat the British had earlier. Even more important, how-ever, Continental countries, especially France and theGerman states, began to establish a wide range of tech-nical schools to train engineers and mechanics.

ROLE OF GOVERNMENT That government played animportant role in this regard brings us to another differ-ence between British and Continental industrialization.Governments in most of the Continental countries wereaccustomed to playing a significant role in economic af-fairs. Furthering the development of industrialization wasa logical extension of that attitude. Hence, governmentsprovided for the costs of technical education, awardedgrants to inventors and foreign entrepreneurs, exemptedforeign industrial equipment from import duties, and insome places even financed factories. Of equal if not



greater importance in the long run, governments activelybore much of the cost of building roads and canals,deepening and widening river channels, and constructingrailroads. By 1850, a network of iron rails had spreadacross Europe, although only Germany and Belgium hadcompleted major parts of their systems by that time (seeMap 20.2).

Governments on the Continent also used tariffs tofurther industrialization. After 1815, cheap British goodsflooded Continental markets. The French responded withhigh tariffs to protect their fledgling industries. The mostsystematic argument for the use of tariffs, however, was

made by a German writer, Friedrich List (FREED-rikhLIST) (1789–1846), who emigrated to America and re-turned to Germany as a U.S. consul. In his National Systemof Political Economy, written in 1844, List advocated arapid and large-scale program of industrialization as thesurest path to develop a nation’s strength. To assure thatpath to industrialization, he felt that a nation must useprotective tariffs. If countries followed the British policyof free trade, then cheaper British goods would inundatenational markets and destroy infant industries beforethey had a chance to grow. Germany, he insisted, couldnot compete with Britain without protective tariffs.

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MAP 20.2 The Industrialization of Europe by 1850. Great Britain was Europe’s firstindustrialized country; however, by the middle of the nineteenth century, several regions on theContinent, especially in Belgium, France, and the German states, had made significant advances inindustrialization.

Q What reasons could explain why coal mining and iron industries are densely clusteredin manufacturing and industrial areas?View an animated version of this map or related maps on the CourseMate website.

The Spread of Industrialization 617


CENTERS OF CONTINENTAL INDUSTRIALIZATION As notedearlier, the Industrial Revolution on the Continent oc-curred in three major centers between 1815 and 1850—Belgium, France, and the German states. As in Britain,cotton played an important role, although it was not assignificant as heavy industry. France was the Continentalleader in the manufacture of cotton goods but stilllagged far behind Great Britain. In 1849, France used64,000 tons of raw cotton, Belgium, 11,000, and Ger-many, 20,000, whereas Britain used 286,000 tons. Con-tinental cotton factories were older, used less efficientmachines, and had less productive labor. In general,Continental technology in the cotton industry was ageneration behind Great Britain. But that is not the wholestory. With its cheap coal and scarce water, Belgiumgravitated toward the use of the steam engine as themajor source of power and invested in the new machines.By the mid-1840s, Belgium had the most modern cotton-manufacturing system on the Continent.

The development of cotton manufacturing on theContinent and in Britain differed in two significant ways.Unlike Britain, where cotton manufacturing was mostlycentered in Lancashire (in northwestern England) and theGlasgow area of Scotland, cotton mills in France, Germany,and, to a lesser degree, Belgium were dispersed throughmany regions. Noticeable, too, was the mixture of old andnew. The old techniques of the cottage system, such as theuse of hand looms, held on much longer. In the Frenchdistrict of Normandy, for example, in 1849, eighty-threemills were still driven by hand or animal power.

As traditional methods persisted alongside the newmethods in cotton manufacturing, the new steam enginecame to be used primarily in mining and metallurgy onthe Continent rather than in textile manufacturing. Atfirst, almost all of the steam engines on the Continentcame from Britain; not until the 1820s was a domesticmachine industry developed.

In Britain, the Industrial Revolution had been built onthe cotton industry; on the Continent, the iron and coal ofheavy industry led the way. As in textiles, however, heavyindustry on the Continent before 1850 was a mixture ofold and new. The adoption of new techniques, such ascoke-smelted iron and puddling furnaces, coincided withthe expansion of old-type charcoal blast furnaces. Before1850, Germany lagged significantly behind both Belgiumand France in heavy industry, and most German ironmanufacturing was still based on old techniques. Not untilthe 1840s was coke-blast iron produced in the Rhineland.At that time, no one had yet realized the treasure of coalburied in the Ruhr valley. A German official wrote in 1852that ‘‘it is clearly not to be expected that Germany willever be able to reach the level of production of coal andiron currently attained in England. This is implicit in ourfar more limited resource endowment.’’ Little did he re-alize that although the industrial development of Conti-nental Europe was about a generation behind Britain atmidcentury, after 1850 an incredibly rapid growth inContinental industry would demonstrate that Britain was

not, after all, destined to remain the world’s greatest in-dustrial nation.

The Industrial Revolutionin the United StatesIn 1800, the United States was an agrarian society. Therewere no cities with populations of more than 100,000, andsix out of every seven American workers were farmers. By1860, however, the population had grown from 5 millionto 30 million people, larger than Great Britain’s. Almosthalf of them lived west of the Appalachian Mountains. Thenumber of states had more than doubled, from sixteen tothirty-four, and nine American cities had more than100,000 in population. Only 50 percent of Americanworkers were farmers. Between 1800 and the eve of theCivil War, the United States had experienced its own In-dustrial Revolution and the urbanization that accompa-nied it.

The initial application of machinery to production wasaccomplished, as in Continental Europe, by borrowingfrom Great Britain. A British immigrant, Samuel Slater,established the first textile factory using water-poweredspinning machines in Rhode Island in 1790. By 1813,factories were being established with power looms copiedfrom British models. Soon thereafter, however, Americansbegan to equal or surpass British technical inventions. TheHarpers Ferry arsenal, for example, built muskets withinterchangeable parts. Because all the individual parts ofthe muskets were identical (for example, all triggers werethe same), the final product could be put together quicklyand easily; this enabled Americans to avoid the morecostly system in which skilled workers fitted together in-dividual parts made separately. The so-called Americansystem reduced costs and revolutionized production bysaving labor, important to a society that had few skilledartisans.

THE NEED FOR TRANSPORTATION Unlike Britain, theUnited States was a large country. The lack of a goodsystem of internal transportation seemed to limit Amer-ican economic development by making the transport ofgoods prohibitively expensive. This deficiency was grad-ually remedied by the introduction of the steamboat andthe railroad as well as the contruction of roads and ca-nals. Thousands of miles of roads and canals were builtlinking east and west. The steamboat facilitated trans-portation on the Great Lakes, Atlantic coastal waters, andrivers. It was especially important to the Mississippivalley; by 1860, one thousand steamboats plied that river(see the box on p. 620). Most important of all in thedevelopment of the American transportation system wasthe railroad. Beginning with 100 miles in 1830, by 1860more than 27,000 miles of railroad track covered theUnited States. This transportation revolution turned theUnited States into a single massive market for the man-ufactured goods of the Northeast, the early center ofAmerican industrialization.



THE LABOR FORCE Labor for the growing number offactories came primarily from rural areas. The UnitedStates did not possess a large number of craftspeople, butit did have a rapidly expanding farm population; its size inthe Northeast soon outstripped the available farmland.While some of this excess population, especially men,went west, others, mostly women, found work in the newtextile and shoe factories of New England. Indeed, womenmade up more than 80 percent of the laboring force in thelarge textile factories. In Massachusetts mill towns, com-pany boarding houses provided rooms for large numbersof young women who worked for several years beforemarriage. Outside Massachusetts, factory owners soughtentire families, including children, to work in their mills;one mill owner ran this advertisement in a newspaper inUtica, New York: ‘‘Wanted: A few sober and industriousfamilies of at least five children each, over the age of eightyears, are wanted at the Cotton Factory in Whitestown.Widows with large families would do well to attend thisnotice.’’ When a decline in rural births threatened to dryup this labor pool in the 1830s and 1840s, Europeanimmigrants, especially poor and unskilled Irish, English,Scots, and Welsh, appeared in large numbers to replaceAmerican women and children in the factories.

Women, children, and these immigrants had one thingin common as employees: they were largely unskilled la-borers. Unskilled labor pushed American industrializationinto a capital-intensive pattern. Factory owners invested

heavily in machines that could produce in quantity at thehands of untrained workers. In Britain, the pace ofmechanization was never as rapid because Britain’s supplyof skilled artisans made it more profitable to pursue alabor-intensive economy.

By 1860, the United States was well on its way to beingan industrial nation. In the Northeast, the most industri-alized section of the country, per capita income was40 percent higher than the national average. Diets, it hasbeen argued, were better and more varied; machine-madeclothing was more abundant. Industrialization did notnecessarily lessen economic disparities, however. Despite agrowing belief in a myth of social mobility based onequality of economic opportunity, the reality was that therichest 10 percent of the population in the cities held 70 to80 percent of the wealth, compared to 50 percent in 1800.Nevertheless, American historians generally argue thatwhile the rich got richer, the poor, thanks to an increase intheir purchasing power, did not get poorer.

Limiting the Spread of Industrializationin the Nonindustrialized WorldBefore 1870, the industrialization that had developed inwestern and central Europe and the United States did notextend in any significant way to the rest of the world.Even in eastern Europe, industrialization lagged farbehind. Russia, for example, remained largely rural and

The Steamboat. The steamboat was an important means of transportation for Americanproducts and markets. Steamboats like the one shown in this illustration regularly plied theMississippi River, moving the farm products of the Midwest and the southern plantations tomarkets in New Orleans. After the American Civil War, railroads began to replace steamboatson many routes.

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The Spread of Industrialization 619


agricultural, and its autocratic rulers kept the peasants inserfdom. There was not much of a middle class, and thetsarist regime, fearful of change, preferred to import in-dustrial goods in return for the export of raw materials,such as grain and timber. Russia would not have its In-dustrial Revolution until the end of the nineteenthcentury.

THE EXAMPLE OF INDIA In other parts of the worldwhere they had established control, newly industrializedEuropean states pursued a deliberate policy of preventingthe growth of mechanized industry. A good example isIndia. In the eighteenth century, India had become one ofthe world’s greatest exporters of cotton cloth produced byhand labor. In the first half of the nineteenth century,

much of India fell under the control of the British EastIndia Company (see Chapter 24). With British controlcame inexpensive British factory-produced textiles, andsoon thousands of Indian spinners and hand-loom wea-vers were unemployed. British policy encouraged Indiansto export their raw materials while buying British-madegoods. Although some limited forms of industrial factoriesfor making textiles and jute (used in making rope) wereopened in India in the 1850s, a lack of local capital andthe advantages given to British imports limited thegrowth of new manufacturing operations. India, then,provides an excellent example of how some of the rapidlyindustrializing nations of Europe worked to deliberatelythwart the spread of the Industrial Revolution to theircolonial dominions.

‘‘S-t-e-a-m-boat A-coming!’’

Steamboats and railroads were crucial elements in atransportation revolution that enabled industrialists toexpand markets by shipping goods cheaply and efficiently.At the same time, these marvels of technology aroused asense of power and excitement that was an important as-pect of the triumph of industrialization. The Americannovelist Mark Twain captured this sense of excitement inthis selection from Life on the Mississippi.

Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi

After all these years I can picture that old time to myselfnow, just as it was then: the white town drowsing in thesunshine of a summer’s morning; the streets empty, orpretty nearly so; one or two clerks sitting in front of theWater street stores, with their splint-bottomed chairstilted back against the walls, chins on breasts, hatsslouched over their faces, asleep; . . . two or three lonelylittle freight piles scattered about the ‘‘levee’’; a pile of‘‘skids’’ on the slope of the stone-paved wharf, and thefragrant town drunkard asleep in the shadow ofthem; . . . the great Mississippi, the majestic, the magnifi-cent Mississippi, rolling its mile-wide along, shining inthe sun; the dense forest away on the other side; the‘‘point’’ above the town, and the ‘‘point’’ below, bound-ing the river glimpse and turning it into a sort of sea,and withal a very still and brilliant and lonely one.Presently a film of dark smoke appears above on thoseremote ‘‘points’’; instantly a negro drayman, famousfor his quick eye and prodigious voice, lifts up to cry,‘‘S-t-e-a-m-boat a-coming!’’ and the scene changes! Thetown drunkard stirs, the clerks wake up, a furious clatterof drays follows, every house and store pours out a humancontribution, and all in a twinkling the dead town [Han-nibal, Missouri] is alive and moving. Drays, carts, men,boys, all go hurrying from many quarters to a commoncenter, the wharf. Assembled there, the people fasten

their eyes upon the coming boat as upon a wonder theyare seeing for the first time. And the boat is rather ahandsome sight, too. She is long and sharp and trimand pretty; she has two tall, fancy-topped chimneys,with a gilded device of some kind swung between them;a fanciful pilot-house, all glass and ‘‘ginger bread,’’perched on top of the ‘‘texas’’ deck behind them; thepaddle-boxes are gorgeous with a picture or with gildedrays above the boat’s name; the boiler deck, the hurri-cane deck, and the texas deck are fenced and orna-mented with clean white railings; there is a flag gallantlyflying from the jack-staff; the furnace doors are openand the fires glaring bravely; the upper decks are blackwith passengers; the captain stands by the big bell,calm, imposing, the envy of all; great volumes of theblackest smoke are rolling and tumbling out of thechimneys—a husbanded grandeur created with a bit ofpitch pine just before arriving at a town; the crew aregrouped on the forecastle; the broad stage is run far outover the port bow, and an envied deck-hand stands pic-turesquely on the end of it with a coil of rope in hishand; the pent steam is screaming through the gauge-cocks; the captain lifts his hand, a bell rings, the wheelsstop; then they turn back, churning the water to foam,and the steam is at rest. Then such a scramble as thereis to get aboard, and to get ashore, and to take infreight and discharge freight, all at one and the sametime; and such a yelling and cursing as the mates facili-tate it all with! Ten minutes later the steamer is underway again, with no flag on the jack-staff and no blacksmoke issuing from the chimneys. After ten moreminutes the town is dead again, and the town drunkardasleep by the skids once more.

Q In what ways does Twain’s description illustratethe impact of the transportation revolution on dailylife in the United States?



The Social Impact of theIndustrial Revolution

Q FOCUS QUESTIONS: What effects did the IndustrialRevolution have on urban life, social classes,family life, and standards of living? What wereworking conditions like in the early decades of theIndustrial Revolution, and what efforts were madeto improve them?

Eventually, the Industrial Revolution radically altered thesocial life of Europe and the world. Although much ofEurope remained bound by its traditional ways, already inthe first half of the nineteenth century, the social impactof the Industrial Revolution was being felt, and futureavenues of growth were becoming apparent. Vast changesin the number of people and where they lived were alreadydramatically evident.

Population GrowthPopulation increases had already begun in the eighteenthcentury, but they accelerated dramatically in the nine-teenth. They were also easier to discern because recordkeeping became more accurate. In the nineteenth century,governments began to take periodic censuses and system-atically collect precise data on births, deaths, and mar-riages. In Britain, for example, the first census was taken in1801, and a systematic registration of births, deaths, andmarriages was begun in 1836. In 1750, the total Europeanpopulation stood at an estimated 140 million; by 1800, ithad increased to 187 million and by 1850 to 266 million,almost twice its 1750 level.

This population explosion cannot be explained by ahigher birthrate, for birthrates were declining after 1790.Between 1790 and 1850, Germany’s birthrate droppedfrom 40 per 1,000 to 36.1; Great Britain’s, from 35.4 to32.6; and France’s, from 32.5 to 26.7. The key to the ex-pansion of population was the decline in death rates evi-dent throughout Europe. Historians now believe that twomajor causes explain this decline. There was a drop in thenumber of deaths from famines, epidemics, and war. Majorepidemic diseases, such as plague and smallpox, declinednoticeably, although small-scale epidemics broke out nowand then. The ordinary death rate also declined as a gen-eral increase in the food supply, already evident in theagricultural revolution of Britain in the late eighteenthcentury, spread to more areas. More food enabled a greaternumber of people to be better fed and therefore moreresistant to disease. Famine largely disappeared fromwestern Europe, although there were dramatic exceptionsin isolated areas, Ireland being the most significant.

Although industrialization itself did not cause popula-tion growth, industrialized areas did experience a change inthe composition of the population. By 1850, the proportionof the population actively involved in manufacturing,mining, or building had risen to 48 percent in Britain,37 percent in Belgium, and 27 percent in France. But the

actual pockets of industrialization in 1850 were small anddecentralized; one author characterized them as ‘‘islands inan agricultural sea.’’

This minimal industrialization in light of the growingpopulation meant severe congestion in the countryside,where ever-larger numbers of people divided the sameamount of land into ever-smaller plots, and also gave riseto an ever-increasing mass of landless peasants. Over-population, especially noticeable in parts of France,northern Spain, southern Germany, Sweden, and Ireland,magnified the already existing problem of rural poverty.In Ireland, it produced the century’s greatest catastrophe.

THE GREAT HUNGER Ireland was one of the most op-pressed areas in western Europe. The predominantlyCatholic peasant population rented land from mostly ab-sentee British Protestant landlords whose primary con-cern was collecting their rents. Irish peasants lived in mudhovels in desperate poverty. The cultivation of the potato,a nutritious and relatively easy food to grow that producedthree times as much food per acre as grain, gave Irishpeasants a basic staple that enabled them to survive andeven expand in numbers. As only an acre or two of po-tatoes was sufficient to feed a family, Irish men andwomen married earlier than elsewhere and started havingchildren earlier as well. This led to significant growth inthe population. Between 1781 and 1845, the Irish popu-lation doubled from 4 million to 8 million. Probably halfof this population depended on the potato for survival. Inthe summer of 1845, the potato crop in Ireland was struckby blight due to a fungus that turned the potatoes black.Between 1845 and 1851, the Great Famine decimatedthe Irish population (see the box on p. 622). More thana million died of starvation and disease, and almost2 million emigrated to the United States and Britain. Ofall the European nations, only Ireland had a decliningpopulation in the nineteenth century. But other countries,too, faced problems of dire poverty and declining stan-dards of living as their populations exploded.

EMIGRATION The flight of so many Irish to Americareminds us that the traditional safety valve for over-population has always been emigration. Between 1821and 1850, the number of emigrants from Europe aver-aged about 110,000 a year. Most of these emigrants camefrom places like Ireland and southern Germany, wherepeasant life had been reduced to marginal existence.Times of agrarian crisis resulted in great waves of emi-gration. Bad harvests in Europe in 1846–1847 (such asthe catastrophe in Ireland) produced massive numbers ofemigrants. In addition to the estimated 1.6 million fromIreland, for example, 935,000 people left Germany be-tween 1847 and 1854. More often than emigrating,however, the rural masses sought a solution to theirpoverty by moving to towns and cities within their owncountries to find work. It should not astonish us, then,that the first half of the nineteenth century was a periodof rapid urbanization.

The Social Impact of the Industrial Revolution 621


The Growth of Cities

Although the Western world would not become a pre-dominantly urban society until the twentieth century,cities and towns had already grown dramatically in thefirst half of the nineteenth century, a phenomenon re-lated to industrialization. Cities had traditionally beencenters for princely courts, government and military of-fices, churches, and commerce. By 1850, especially inGreat Britain and Belgium, cities were rapidly becomingplaces for manufacturing and industry. With the steamengine, entrepreneurs could locate their manufacturing

plants in urban centers where they had ready access totransportation facilities and unemployed people from thecountry looking for work.

In 1800, Great Britain had one major city, London, witha population of one million, and six cities between 50,000and 100,000. Fifty years later, London’s population hadswelled to 2,363,000, and there were nine cities over100,000 and eighteen cities with populations between50,000 and 100,000. All together, these twenty-eight cit-ies accounted for 5.7 million residents, or one-fifth of thetotal British population. When the populations of citiesunder 50,000 are added to this total, we realize that more

The Great Irish Famine

The Great Irish Famine caused by the potato blight wasone of the nineteenth century’s worst natural catastrophes,resulting in the decimation of the Irish population. In thisselection, an Irish nationalist reported what he had wit-nessed in Galway in 1847.

John Mitchel, The Last Conquest of Ireland

In the depth of winter we traveled to Galway, throughthe very center of that fertile island, and saw sights thatwill never wholly leave the eyes that beheld them—cowering wretches, almost naked in the savage weather,prowling in turnip-fields, and endeavoring to grub uproots which had been left, but running to hide as themail-coach rolled by;—very large fields where smallfarms had been ‘‘consolidated,’’ showing dark bars offresh mold running through them where the ditches hadbeen leveled;—groups and families, sitting or wanderingon the high-road, with failing steps and dim patienteyes, gazing hopelessly into infinite darkness; before

them, around them, above them, nothing but darknessand despair—parties of tall brawny men, once theflower of Meath and Galway, stalking by with a fiercebut vacant scowl; as if they knew that all this ought notto be, but knew not whom to blame, saw none whomthey could rend in their wrath. . . . Around those farm-houses which were still inhabited were to be seen hardlyany stacks of grain; the poor-rate collector, the rentagent, the county-cess collector had carried it off; andsometimes I could see in front of the cottages little chil-dren leaning against a fence when the sun shone out—for they could not stand—their limbs fleshless, theirbodies half naked, their faces bloated yet wrinkled, andof a pale greenish hue,—children who would never, itwas too plain, grow up to be men and women.

Q What was the impact of the Great Irish Famineon the Irish people and on the broader Atlanticworld? How were the industrial revolutions ofother nations affected by this disaster?

A New Industrial Town. Cities andtowns grew dramatically in Britainin the first half of the nineteenthcentury, largely as a result ofindustrialization. Pictured here isSaltaire, a model textile factory andtown founded near Bradford byTitus Salt in 1851. To facilitate thetransportation of goods, the townwas built on the Leeds and Liverpoolcanals.

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than 50 percent of the British population lived in townsand cities by 1850. Britain was forced to become a foodimporter rather than an exporter as the number of peopleinvolved in agriculture declined to 20 percent of thepopulation.

Urban populations also grew on the Continent, but lessdramatically. Paris had 547,000 inhabitants in 1800, butonly two other French cities had populations of 100,000:Lyons and Marseilles. In 1851, Paris had grown to amillion while Lyons and Marseilles were still under200,000. German and Austrian lands had only three citieswith more than 100,000 inhabitants (Vienna had247,000) in 1800; fifty years later, there were only five,but Vienna had grown to 440,000. As these figures show,urbanization did not proceed as rapidly here as in Britain;of course, neither had industrialization. Even in Belgium,the most heavily industrialized country on the Continent,almost 50 percent of the male workforce was still engagedin agriculture at midcentury.

URBAN LIVING CONDITIONS IN THE EARLY INDUSTRIALREVOLUTION The dramatic growth of cities in the firsthalf of the nineteenth century produced miserable livingconditions for many of the inhabitants. Of course, thishad been true for centuries for many people in Europeancities, but the rapid urbanization associated with the In-dustrial Revolution intensified the problems and madethese wretched conditions all the more apparent. Wealthy,middle-class inhabitants, as usual, insulated themselves asbest they could, often living in suburbs or the outer ring ofthe city, where they could have individual houses andgardens. In the inner ring of the city stood the small rowhouses, some with gardens, of the artisans and the lowermiddle class. Finally, located in the center of most indus-trial towns were the row houses of the industrial workers(see Images of Everyday Life on p. 624). This report onworking-class housing in the British city of Birmingham in1843 gives an idea of the conditions they faced:

The courts [of working-class row houses] are extremelynumerous; . . . a very large portion of the poorer classes of theinhabitants reside in them. . . . The courts vary in the numberof the houses which they contain, from four to twenty, andmost of these houses are three stories high, and built, as it istermed, back to back. There is a wash-house, an ash-pit, and aprivy at the end, or on one side of the court, and not un-frequently one or more pigsties and heaps of manure. Gen-erally speaking, the privies in the old courts are in a mostfilthy condition. Many which we have inspected were in a statewhich renders it impossible for us to conceive how they couldbe used; they were without doors and overflowing with filth.5

Rooms were not large and were frequently overcrowded, asthis government report of 1838 revealed: ‘‘I entered severalof the tenements. In one of them, on the ground floor, Ifound six persons occupying a very small room, two in bed,ill with fever. In the room above this were two more per-sons in one bed ill with fever.’’6 Another report said,‘‘There were 63 families where there were at least five

persons to one bed; and there were some in which even sixwere packed in one bed, lying at the top and bottom—children and adults.’’7

Sanitary conditions in these towns were appalling. Dueto the lack of municipal direction, city streets were oftenused as sewers and open drains: ‘‘In the center of thisstreet is a gutter, into which potato parings, the refuse ofanimal and vegetable matters of all kinds, the dirty waterfrom the washing of clothes and of the houses, are allpoured, and there they stagnate and putrefy.’’8 Unable todeal with human excrement, cities in the new industrialera smelled horrible and were extraordinarily unhealthy.The burning of coal blackened towns and cities with soot,as Charles Dickens described in one of his novels: ‘‘A longsuburb of red brick houses—some with patches of gardenground, where coal-dust and factory smoke darkened theshrinking leaves, and coarse rank flowers; and where thestruggling vegetation sickened and sank under the hotbreath of kiln and furnace.’’9 Towns and cities were fun-damentally death traps. As deaths outnumbered births inmost large cities in the first half of the nineteenth cen-tury, only a constant influx of people from the countrysidekept them alive and growing.

Adding to the deterioration of urban life was theadulteration of food. Consumers were defrauded in a va-riety of ways: alum was added to make bread look whiteand hence more expensive; beer and milk were watereddown; and red lead, despite its poisonous qualities, wassubstituted for pepper. The government refused to in-tervene; a parliamentary committee stated that ‘‘morebenefit is likely to result from the effects of a freecompetition . . . than can be expected to result from anyregulations.’’ It was not until 1875 that an effective foodand drug act was passed in Britain.

Our knowledge of the pathetic conditions in the earlyindustrial cities is largely derived from an abundance ofsocial investigations. Such investigations began in Francein the 1820s. In Britain, the Poor Law Commission pro-duced detailed reports. The investigators were oftenstruck by the physically and morally debilitating effects ofurban industrial life on the poor. They observed, for ex-ample, that young working-class men were considerablyshorter and scrawnier than the sons of middle-classfamilies and much more subject to disease. They wereespecially alarmed by what they considered the moralconsequences of such living conditions: prostitution,crime, and sexual immorality, all of which they saw aseffects of living in such squalor.

URBAN REFORMERS To many of the well-to-do, thissituation presented a clear danger to society. Were notthese masses of workers, sunk in crime, disease, andimmorality, a potential threat to their own well-being?Might not the masses be organized and used by unscru-pulous demagogues to overthrow the established order?One of the most eloquent British reformers of the 1830sand 1840s, James Kay-Shuttleworth, described them as‘‘volcanic elements, by whose explosive violence the

The Social Impact of the Industrial Revolution 623


IMAGES OF EVERYDAY LIFE

Living Conditions of London’s Poor

Although some environmental hazards existed beforeindustrialization, others intensified in early industrialBritain, with a dramatic impact on living conditions.Burning coal filled the air with ash and soot, metalsmelting gave off pungent fumes, and industrial plantsbelched clouds of smoke from the fires stoked in thesteam engines. Water pollution was another problem asslaughterhouses dumped their refuse into the streamsand human waste found its way there as well due to a

lack of proper sewerage. Consequently, working-classtenants in London found themselves living in crowdedrooms surrounded by filth and putrid smells. Many ofthe houses for the poor were built back to back, leavinglittle room for sanitation. Despite efforts to improveconditions, the plight of London’s workers remaineddire. In 1869, an English writer, Blanchard Jerrold,commissioned the French illustrator Gustave Dor�e tocreate illustrations for a guide to London called London:

A Pilgrimage. The book was published in1872 with Dor�e’s illustrations accompa-nying Jerrold’s textual descriptions of theliving conditions of London’s poor. Dor�e’smost haunting images are of tenementhousing and its inhabitants in areas such asWhitechapel. In the first illustration, Dor�eshows a London slum district overshadowedby rail viaducts. The second image depictsan open air market on Drury Lane, wheremen, women, and children are attempt-ing to sell their wares. In the image at theright, children in ragged clothes play inthe street.

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