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20-Industrial-Revolution
Geography Honours
Creighton University
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582
C H A P T E R
20
The Industrial
Revolution
and Its Impact
on European
Society
L
CHAPTER OUTLINE
- The Industrial Revolution in Great Britain
- The Spread of Industrialization
- The Social Impact of the Industrial Revolution
- Conclusion
FOCUS QUESTIONS
- What conditions and developments coalesced in Great Britain to bring about the first Industrial Revolution?
- What were the basic features of the new industrial system created by the Industrial Revolution?
- How did the Industrial Revolution spread from Great Britain to the Continent and the United States, and how did industrialization in those areas differ from British industrialization?
- What effects did the Industrial Revolution have on urban life, social classes, family life, and standards of living?
- What were working conditions like in the early decades of the Industrial Revolution, and what efforts were made to improve them?
T
HE FRENCH REVOLUTION dramatically and quickly altered the political structure of France, and the Napoleonic conquests spread many of the revolutionary principles in an equally rapid and stunning fashion to other parts of Europe. During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, another revolution—an industrial one— was transforming the economic and social structure of Europe, although in a less dramatic and rapid fashion. The period of the Industrial Revolution witnessed a quantum leap in industrial production. New sources of energy and power, especially coal and steam, replaced wind and water to create labor-saving machines that dramatically decreased the use of human and animal labor and, at the same time, increased the level of productivity. In turn, power machinery called for new ways of organizing human labor to maximize the benefits and profits from the new machines; factories replaced shop and home workrooms. Many early factories were dreadful places with difficult working conditions. Reformers, appalled at these conditions, were especially critical of the treatment of married women.
The Industrial Revolution and Its Impact on European Society 583
One reported: “We have repeatedly seen married females, in the last stage of pregnancy, slaving from morning to 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 offense.” But there were also examples of well-run factories. William Cobbett described one in Manchester in 1830: “In this room, which is lighted in the most convenient and beautiful manner, there were five hundred pairs of looms at work, and five hundred persons attending those looms; and, owing to the good- ness of the masters, the whole looking healthy and well-dressed.” During the Industrial Revolution, Europe experi- enced a shift from a traditional, labor-intensive econ- omy based on farming and handicrafts to a more capital-intensive economy based on manufacturing by machines, specialized labor, and industrial factories. Although the Industrial Revolution took decades to spread, it was truly revolutionary in the way it funda- mentally changed Europeans, their society, and their relationship to other peoples. The development of large factories encouraged mass movements of people from the countryside to urban areas where impersonal coex- istence replaced the traditional intimacy of rural life. Higher levels of productivity led to a search for new sources of raw materials, new consumption patterns, and a revolution in transportation that allowed raw materials and finished products to be moved quickly around the world. The creation of a wealthy industrial middle class and a huge industrial working class (or proletariat) substantially transformed traditional social relationships.
u The Industrial Revolution in
Great Britain
Although the Industrial Revolution evolved out of ante- cedents that occurred over a long period of time, histori- ans generally agree that it had its beginnings in Britain in the second half of the eighteenth century. By 1850, the Industrial Revolution had made Great Britain the wealth- iest country in the world; by that time it had also spread to the European continent and the New World. By the end of the nineteenth century, both Germany and the United States would surpass Britain in industrial production.
l Origins
A number of factors or conditions coalesced in Britain to produce the first Industrial Revolution. One of these was the agricultural revolution of the eighteenth century. The
changes in the methods of farming and stock breeding that characterized this agricultural transformation led to a sig- nificant increase in food production. British agriculture could now feed more people at lower prices with less labor. Unlike the rest of Europe, even ordinary British families did not have to use most of their income to buy food, giv- ing them the potential to purchase manufactured goods. At the same time, a rapid growth of population in the sec- ond half of the eighteenth century provided a pool of sur- plus labor for the new factories of the emerging British industry. Rural workers in cottage industries also provided a potential labor force for industrial enterprises. Britain had a ready supply of capital for investment in the new industrial machines and the factories that were needed to house them. In addition to profits from trade and cottage industry, Britain possessed an effective cen- tral bank and well-developed, flexible credit facilities. Nowhere in Europe were people so accustomed to using paper instruments to facilitate capital transactions. Many early factory owners were merchants and entrepreneurs who had profited from eighteenth-century cottage indus- try. Of 110 cotton spinning mills in operation in the area known as the Midlands between 1769 and 1800, 62 were established by hosiers, drapers, mercers, and others involved in some fashion in the cottage textile industry. But capital alone is only part of the story. Britain had a fair number of individuals who were interested in making prof- its if the opportunity presented itself (see the box on p. 585). The British were a people, as one historian has said, “fascinated by wealth and commerce, collectively and indi- vidually.” These early industrial entrepreneurs faced con- siderable financial hazards, however. Fortunes were made quickly and lost just as quickly. The structure of early firms was open and fluid. An individual or family proprietorship was the usual mode of operation, but entrepreneurs also brought in friends to help them. They just as easily jetti- soned them. John Marshall, who made money in flax spin- ning, threw out his partners: “As they could neither of them be of any further use, I released them from the firm and took the whole upon myself.” 1 Britain was richly supplied with important mineral resources, such as coal and iron ore, needed in the man- ufacturing process. Britain was also a small country, and the relatively short distances made transportation read- ily accessible. In addition to nature’s provision of abun- dant rivers, from the mid-seventeenth century onward, both private and public investment poured into the con- struction of new roads, bridges, and, beginning in the 1750s and 1760s, canals. By 1780, roads, rivers, and canals linked the major industrial centers of the North, the Midlands, London, and the Atlantic. Unlike the conti- nental countries, Britain had no internal customs barri- ers to hinder domestic trade. Britain’s government also played a significant role in the process of industrialization. Parliament contributed to the favorable business climate by providing a stable government and passing laws that protected private prop- erty. Moreover, Britain was remarkable for the freedom
The Industrial Revolution and Its Impact on European Society 585
much more efficient to bring workers to the machines and organize their labor collectively in factories located next to rivers and streams, the sources of power for many of these early machines, than to leave the workers dispersed in their cottages. The concentration of labor in the new factories also brought the laborers and their families to live in the new towns that rapidly grew up around the factories. The early devices used to speed up the processes of spinning and weaving were the products of weavers and spinners, in effect, of artisan tinkerers. But the subsequent expansion of the cotton industry and the ongoing demand for even more cotton goods created additional pressure for new and more complicated technology. The invention that pushed the cotton industry to even greater heights of pro- ductivity was the steam engine.
/ THE STEAM ENGINE
The invention of the steam engine played a major role in the Industrial Revolution. It revolutionized the production of cotton goods and caused the factory system to spread to other areas of production, thereby creating whole new
industries. The steam engine secured the triumph of the Industrial Revolution. As in much of the Industrial Revolution, one kind of change forced other changes. In many ways the steam engine was the result of the need for more efficient pumps to eliminate water seepage from deep mines. Deep coal mines were in turn the result of Britain’s need and desire to find new sources of energy to replace wood. By the early eighteenth century, the British were acutely aware of a growing shortage of timber, which was used in heating, to build homes and ships, and in enormous quantities to produce the charcoal utilized in smelting iron ore to make pig iron. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the discovery of new processes for smelting iron ore with coal and coke (see the next section) led to deeper and deeper mines for more intensive mining of coal. But as mines were dug below the water table, they filled with water. An early solution to the problem was the use of mechanical pumps powered by horses walking in circles. In one coal mine in Warwickshire, for example, 500 horses were used to lift the water from the mine, bucket by bucket. The need for more efficient pumps led Thomas Newcomen to develop
Richard Arkwright (1732–1792), inventor of a spinning frame and founder of cotton factories, was a good example of the successful entrepreneur in the early Industrial Revo- lution in Britain. In this selection, Edward Baines, who wrote The History of the Cotton Manufacture in Great Britain in 1835, discusses the traits that explain the success of Arkwright and presumably other British entrepreneurs.
l Edward Baines, The History of the Cotton Manufacture in Great Britain
Richard Arkwright rose by the force of his natural talents from a very humble condition in society. He was born at Preston on the 23rd of December, 1732, of poor parents: being the youngest of thirteen children, his parents could only afford to give him an education of the hum- blest kind, and he was scarcely able to write. He was brought up to the trade of a barber at Kirkham and Pres- ton, and established himself in that business at Bolton in the year 1760. Having become possessed of a chemi- cal process for dyeing human hair, which in that day (when wigs were universal) was of considerable value, he traveled about collecting hair, and again disposing of it when dyed. In 1761, he married a wife from Leigh, and the connections he thus formed in that town are supposed to have afterwards brought him acquainted with Highs’s experiments in making spinning machines. He himself manifested a strong bent for experiments in mathematics, which he is stated to have followed with so much devotedness as to have neglected his business
and injured his circumstances. His natural disposition was ardent, enterprising, and stubbornly persevering: his mind was as coarse as it was bold and active, and his manners were rough and unpleasing.... The most marked traits in the character of Arkwright were his wonderful ardor, energy, and perseverance. He commonly laboured in his multifarious concerns from five o’clock in the morning till nine at night; and when considerably more than fifty years of age,—feeling that the defects of his education placed him under great difficulty and inconvenience in conducting his corre- spondence, and in the general management of his busi- ness,—he encroached upon his sleep, in order to gain an hour each day to learn English grammar, and another hour to improve his writing and orthography [spelling]! He was impatient of whatever interfered with his favorite pursuits; and the fact is too strikingly characteristic not to be mentioned, that he separated from his wife not many years after their marriage, because she, convinced that he would starve his family [because of the impracti- cal nature of his schemes], broke some of his experi- mental models of machinery. Arkwright was a severe economist of time; and, that he might not waste a moment, he generally traveled with four horses, and at a very rapid speed. His concerns in Derbyshire, Lan- cashire, and Scotland were so extensive and numerous, as to [show] at once his astonishing power of transact- ing business and his all grasping spirit. In many of these he had partners, but he generally managed in such a way, that, whoever lost, he himself was a gainer.
The Traits of the British Industrial Entrepreneur
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a steam pump or, as it was called, an “atmospheric engine” that was first used in 1712. Though better than horses, it was still inefficient. In the 1760s, a Scottish engineer, James Watt (1736–1819), was asked to repair a Newcomen engine. Instead he added a separate condenser and steam pump and transformed Newcomen’s machine into a genuine steam engine. Power was derived not from air pressure as in Newcomen’s atmospheric engine, but from steam itself. Much more efficient than a Newcomen engine, Watt’s engine could pump water three times as quickly. Initially, it possessed one major liability, however; as a contemporary noted in 1778: “the vast consumption of fuel in these engines is an immense drawback on the profit of our mines, for every fire-engine of magnitude consumes £3000 worth of coals per annum. This heavy tax amounts almost to a prohibition.” 3 As steam engines were made more efficient, however, they also became cheaper to use. In 1782, James Watt enlarged the possibilities of the steam engine when he developed a rotary engine that could turn a shaft and thus drive machinery. Steam power could now be applied to spinning and weaving cotton, and before long cotton mills using steam engines were multi- plying across Britain. By 1850, seven-eighths of the power available to the entire British cotton industry came from steam. Since steam engines were fired by coal, they did not need to be located near rivers; entrepreneurs now had greater flexibility in their choice of location. The new boost given to cotton textile production by technological changes became readily apparent. In 1760, Britain had imported 2 million pounds of raw cotton, which was farmed out to cottage industries. All work was done by hand either in workers’ homes or in the small shops of master weavers. In 1787, the British imported 22 million pounds of cotton; most of it was spun on machines, some powered by water in large mills. By 1840, 366 million pounds of cotton were imported annually,
much of it from the American South where it was grown by plantation owners using slave labor. By this time, cot- ton cloth was Britain’s most important product by value and was produced mainly in factories, although some hand-loom weavers still worked in their cottages. The price of yarn was but one-twentieth of what it had been. The cheapest labor in India could not compete in quality or quantity with Britain. British cotton goods sold everywhere in the world. And in Britain itself, cheap cotton cloth made it possible for millions of poor people to wear undergar- ments, long a preserve of the rich who alone could afford underwear made with expensive linen cloth. New work clothing that was tough, comfortable to the skin, and yet cheap and easily washable became common. Even the rich liked the colorful patterns of cotton prints and their light weight for summer use. The steam engine proved invaluable to Britain’s Industrial Revolution. In 1800, engines were generating 10,000 horsepower; by 1850, 500,000 horsepower were being generated by stationary engines and 790,000 by mobile engines, the last largely in locomotives (see the next section). Unlike horses, the steam engine was a tire- less source of power and depended for fuel on a sub- stance—namely, coal—that seemed then to be unlimited in quantity. The popular saying that “Steam is an English- man” had real significance by 1850. The steam engine also replaced waterpower in such places as flour and sugar mills. Just as the need for more coal had helped lead to the steam engine, so the success of the steam engine increased the demand for coal and led to an expansion in coal pro- duction; between 1815 and 1850, the output of coal quadrupled. In turn, new processes using coal furthered the development of an iron industry.
/ THE IRON INDUSTRY The British iron industry was radically transformed during the Industrial Revolution. Britain had large resources of
A BOULTON AND WATT STEAM ENGINE. Encouraged by his business partner, Matthew Boulton, James Watt developed the first gen- uine steam engine. Pictured here is a typical Boulton and Watt engine. Steam pressure in the cylinder on the left drives the beam upward and sets the flywheel in motion.
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Preindustrial workers were not accustomed to a “timed” format. Agricultural laborers had always kept irreg- ular hours; hectic work at harvest time might be followed by periods of inactivity. Even in the burgeoning cottage industry of the eighteenth century, weavers and spinners who worked at home might fulfill their weekly quotas by working around the clock for two or three days, followed by a leisurely pace until the next week’s demands forced another work spurt. Factory owners, therefore, faced a formidable task. They had to create a system of time-work discipline that would accustom employees to working regular, unvarying hours during which they performed a set number of tasks over and over again as efficiently as possible. One early industrialist said that his aim was “to make such machines 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 regula- tions were minute and detailed (see the box on p. 589). Adult workers were fined for a wide variety of minor in- fractions, such as being a few minutes late for work, and dismissed for more serious misdoings, especially drunk- enness. The latter was viewed as particularly offensive because it set a bad example for younger workers and also courted disaster in the midst of dangerous machinery. Employers found that dismissals and fines worked well for adult employees; in a time when great population growth had produced large numbers of unskilled workers, dis- missal could be disastrous. Children were less likely to understand the implications of dismissal so they were sometimes disciplined more directly—frequently by beating. The efforts of factory owners in the early Industrial Revolution to impose a new set of values were frequently reinforced by the new evangelical churches. Methodism, in particular, emphasized that people reborn in Jesus must forgo immoderation and follow a disciplined path. Lazi- ness and wasteful habits were sinful. The acceptance of
OPENING OF THE ROYAL ALBERT BRIDGE. This painting by Thomas Roberts shows the ceremonies attending the official opening of the Royal Albert Bridge. I. K. Brunel, one of Britain’s great engineers, designed this bridge, which carried a railroad line across the Tamar River into Cornwall. As is evident in the picture, the bridge was high enough to allow ships to pass underneath.
finding work outside their local villages. Perhaps most importantly, a cheaper and faster means of transportation had a rippling effect on the growth of an industrial econ- omy. By reducing the price of goods, larger markets were created; increased sales necessitated more factories and more machinery, thereby reinforcing the self-sustaining nature of the Industrial Revolution, which marked a fun- damental break with the traditional European economy. The great productivity of the Industrial Revolution enabled entrepreneurs to reinvest their profits in new capital equip- ment, further expanding the productive capacity of the economy. Continuous, even rapid, self-sustaining eco- nomic growth came to be seen as a fundamental charac- teristic of the new industrial economy. The railroad was the perfect symbol of this aspect of the Industrial Revolution. The ability to transport goods and people at dramatic speeds also provided visible con- firmation of a new sense of power. When railway engi- neers pierced mountains with tunnels and spanned chasms with breathtaking bridges, contemporaries expe- rienced a sense of power over nature not felt before in Western civilization.
/ THE INDUSTRIAL FACTORY
Initially the product of the new cotton industry, the factory became the chief means of organizing labor for the new machines. As the workplace shifted from the artisan’s shop and the peasant’s cottage to the factory, the latter was not viewed as just a larger work unit. Employers hired workers who no longer owned the means of production but were simply paid wages to run the machines. From its beginning, the factory system demanded a new type of discipline from its employees. Factory owners could not afford to let their expensive machinery stand idle. Workers were forced to work regular hours and in shifts to keep the machines producing at a steady pace for maximum output. This represented a massive adjustment for early factory laborers.
The Industrial Revolution and Its Impact on European Society 589
hardship in this life paved the way for the joys of the next. Evangelical values paralleled the efforts of the new factory owners to instill laborers with their own middle-class val- ues of hard work, discipline, and thrift. In one crucial sense, the early industrialists proved successful. As the nineteenth century progressed, the second and third gen- erations of workers came to view a regular working week as a natural way of life. It was, of course, an attitude that made possible Britain’s incredible economic growth in that century.
l The Great Exhibition: Britain in 1851
In 1851, the British organized the world’s first industrial fair. It was housed at Kensington in London in the Crys-
tal Palace, an enormous structure made entirely of glass and iron, a tribute to British engineering skills. Cover- ing nineteen acres, the Crystal Palace contained 100, exhibits that showed the wide variety of products created by the Industrial Revolution. Six million people visited the fair in six months. Though most of them were Britons, who had traveled to London by train, foreign visitors were also prominent. 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 visible symbol of how the Industrial Revo- lution had achieved human domination over nature. Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s husband, expressed the sentiments of the age when he described the exhibition as a sign that “man is approaching a more complete
Workers in the new factories of the Industrial Revolution had been accustomed to a lifestyle free of overseers. Unlike the cottages, where workers spun thread and wove cloth in their own rhythm and time, the factories demanded a new, rigorous discipline geared to the requirements of the machines. This selection is taken from a set of rules for a factory in Berlin in 1844. They were typical of company rules everywhere the factory system had been established.
l The Foundry and Engineering Works of the Royal Overseas Trading Company, Factory Rules
In every large works, and in the co-ordination of any large number of workmen, good order and harmony must be looked upon as the fundamentals of success, and therefore the following rules shall be strictly observed.
The normal working day begins at all seasons at 6 A .M. precisely and ends, after the usual break of half an hour for breakfast, an hour for dinner and half an hour for tea, at 7 P ., and it shall be strictly observed.... Workers arriving 2 minutes late shall lose half an hour’s wages; whoever is more than 2 minutes late may not start work until after the next break; or at least shall lose his wages until then. Any dis- putes about the correct time shall be settled by the clock mounted above the gatekeeper’s lodge....
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 of ten silver groschen [pennies] payable to the sick fund.
Repeated irregular arrival at work shall lead to dismissal. This shall also apply to those who are found idling by an official or overseer, and refused to obey their order to resume work....
No worker may leave his place of work otherwise than for reasons connected with his work.
All conversation with fellow-workers is prohibited; if any worker requires information about his work, he must turn to the overseer, or to the particular fellow-worker designated for the purpose.
Smoking in the workshops or in the yard is prohib- ited during working hours; anyone caught smoking shall be fined five silver groschen for the sick fund for every such offense....
Natural functions must be performed at the appro- priate places, and whoever is found soiling walls, fences, squares, etc., and similarly, whoever is found washing his face and hands in the workshop and not in the places assigned for the purpose, shall be fined five silver groschen for the sick fund....
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.
Immediate dismissal shall also be the fate of any- one found drunk in any of the workshops....
Every workman is obliged to report to his superiors any acts of dishonesty or embezzlement on the part of his fellow workmen. If he omits to do so, and it is shown after subsequent discovery of a misdemeanor that he knew about it at the time, he shall be liable to be taken to court as an accessory after the fact and the wage due to him shall be retained as punishment.
Discipline in the New Factories
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The Industrial Revolution and Its Impact on European Society 591
finally been defeated and normal communication between Britain and the Continent had been restored, British indus- trial equipment had grown larger and become more expen- sive. As a result, self-financed family enterprises were either unable or unwilling to raise the amount of capital necessary to modernize by investing in the latest equip- ment. Instead, most entrepreneurs in France, Belgium, and Germany initially chose to invest in used machines and less productive mills. Consequently, industrialization on the Continent faced numerous hurdles, and as it pro- ceeded in earnest after 1815, it did so along lines that were somewhat different from Britain’s. Lack of technical knowledge was initially a major obstacle to industrialization. But the continental coun- tries possessed an advantage here; they could simply bor- row British techniques and practices. Of course, the British tried to prevent that. Until 1825, British artisans were prohibited from leaving the country; until 1842, the export of important machinery and machine parts, espe- cially for textile production, was forbidden. Nevertheless, the British were not able to control this situation by leg- islation. Already by 1825, there were at least 2,000 skilled British mechanics on the Continent, and British equip- ment was also being sold abroad, whether legally or illegally. Although many Britons who went abroad to sell their skills were simply skilled mechanics, a number of them were accomplished entrepreneurs who had managerial as well as technical skills. John Cockerill, for example, was an aggressive businessman who established a highly prof- itable industrial plant at Seraing near Liège in southern Belgium in 1817. Encouraged by the Belgian government, Cockerill thought nothing of pirating the innovations of other British industrialists to further his own factories. Aware of their importance, British technicians abroad were often contentious and arrogant, arousing the anger of con- tinental industrialists. Fritz Harkort, who initiated the engi- neering industry in Germany, once exclaimed that he
could scarcely wait for Germans to be trained “so that the Englishmen could all be whipped out: we must even now tread softly with them, for they’re only too quick to speak of quitting if one does so little as not look at them in a friendly fashion.” 5 Gradually, the Continent achieved technological independence as local people learned all the skills their British teachers had to offer. By the 1840s, a new genera- tion of skilled mechanics from Belgium and France was spreading their knowledge east and south, playing the same role that the British had earlier. More importantly, however, continental countries, especially France and the German states, began to establish a wide range of tech- nical schools to train engineers and mechanics. That government played an important role in this regard brings us to a second difference between British and continental industrialization. Governments in most of the continental countries were accustomed to playing a sig- nificant role in economic affairs. Furthering the develop- ment of industrialization was a logical extension of that attitude. Hence, governments provided for the costs of technical education; awarded grants to inventors and for- eign entrepreneurs; exempted foreign industrial equipment from import duties; and, in some places, even financed fac- tories. Of equal, if not greater importance in the long run, governments actively bore much of the cost of building roads and canals, deepening and widening river channels, and constructing railroads. By 1850, a network of iron rails had spread across Europe, although only Germany and Belgium had completed major parts of their systems by that time. Although European markets did not feel the real impact of the railroad until after 1850, railroad construc- tion itself in the 1830s and 1840s gave great impetus to the metalworking and engineering industries. Governments on the Continent also used tariffs to further industrialization. After 1815, cheap British goods flooded continental markets. The French responded with high tariffs to protect their fledgling industries. The most
THE CRYSTAL PALACE. The Great Exhibition, organized in 1851, was a symbol of the success of Great Britain, which had become the world’s first and richest industrial nation. Over 100, exhibits were housed in the Crystal Palace, a giant structure of cast iron and glass. This illustration shows the front of the palace and some of its numerous visitors.
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systematic exposition for the use of tariffs, however, was made by a German writer, Friedrich List (1789–1846), who emigrated to America and returned to Germany as a United States consul. In his National System of Political Economy, written in 1844, List advocated a rapid and large-scale program of industrialization as the surest path to develop a nation’s strength. To assure that path to industrialization, he felt that a nation must use protec- tive tariffs. If countries followed the British policy of free trade, then cheaper British goods would inundate national markets and destroy infant industries before they had a chance to grow. Germany, he insisted, could not compete with Britain without protective tariffs. A third significant difference between British and continental industrialization was the role of the joint-stock investment bank on the Continent. Such banks mobilized the savings of thousands of small and large investors, cre- ating a supply of capital that could then be plowed back into industry. Previously, continental banks had been
mostly merchant or private banks, but in the 1830s two Belgian banks, the Société Générale and the Banque de Belgique, took a new approach. By accepting savings from many depositors, they developed large capital resources that they invested on a large scale in railroads, mining, and heavy industry. These investments were especially impor- tant to the Belgian coal industry, which became the largest on the Continent in the 1840s. Shareholders in these joint- stock corporations had limited liability; they could only be held responsible for the amount of their investment. Similar institutions emerged in France and German- speaking lands as well in the 1850s with the establishment of the Crédit Mobilier in France, the Darmstadt Bank in Germany, and the Kreditanstalt in Austria. They, too, took in savings of small investors and bought shares in the new industries. The French consul in Leipzig noted their significance: “Every town and state [in Germany],” he pointed out, “however small it may be, wants its bank and its Crédit Mobilier.” These investments proved invaluable
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MAP 20 The Industrialization of Europe by 1850.
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mid-century, after 1850 an incredibly rapid growth in con- tinental industry would demonstrate that Britain was not, after all, destined to remain the world’s greatest indus- trial nation.
l The Industrial Revolution in the United States
In 1800, the United States was an agrarian society. There were no cities over 100,000, and six out of every seven American workers were farmers. By 1860, however, the population had grown from 5 to 30 million people, larger than Great Britain. Almost half of them lived west of the Appalachian Mountains. The number of states had more than doubled, from sixteen to thirty-four, and nine Amer- ican cities had over 100,000 in population. Only 50 per- cent of American workers were farmers. Between 1800 and the eve of the Civil War, the United States had experienced an industrial revolution and the urbanization that accom- panied it. The initial application of machinery to production was accomplished—as in continental Europe—by bor- rowing from Great Britain. A British immigrant, Samuel Slater, established the first textile factory using water- powered spinning machines in Rhode Island in 1790. By 1813, factories with power looms copied from British ver- sions were being established. Soon thereafter, however, Americans began to equal or surpass British technical inventions. The Harpers Ferry arsenal, for example, built muskets with interchangeable parts. Because all the indi- vidual parts of a musket were identical (for example, all triggers were the same), the final product could be put together quickly and easily; this enabled Americans to avoid the more costly system in which skilled workers fit- ted together individual parts made separately. The so-called American system reduced costs and revolutionized pro- duction by saving labor, important to a society that had few skilled artisans. Unlike Britain, the United States was a large coun- try. The lack of a good system of internal transportation seemed to limit American economic development by mak- ing the transport of goods prohibitively expensive. This deficiency was gradually remedied, however. Thousands of miles of roads and canals were built linking east and west. The steamboat facilitated transportation on the Great Lakes, Atlantic coastal waters, and rivers. It was espe- cially important to the Mississippi valley; by 1860, 1, steamboats plied that river (see the box on p. 595). Most important of all in the development of an American trans- portation system was the railroad. Beginning with 100 miles in 1830, by 1860 more than 27,000 miles of railroad track covered the United States. This transportation revo- lution turned the United States into a single massive mar- ket for the manufactured goods of the Northeast, the early center of American industrialization. Labor for the growing number of factories in this area came primarily from rural New England. The United
States did not possess a large number of craftspeople, but it did have a rapidly expanding farm population; its size in the Northeast soon outstripped the available farmland. While some of this excess population, especially men, went west, others, mostly women, found work in the new textile and shoe factories of New England. Indeed, women made up more than 80 percent of the laboring force in the large textile factories. In Massachusetts mill towns, company boarding houses provided rooms for large numbers of young women who worked for several years before marriage. Outside Massachusetts, factory owners sought entire families including children to work in their mills; one mill owner ran this advertisement in a newspaper in Utica, New York: “Wanted: A few sober and industrious families of at least five children each, over the age of eight years, are wanted at the Cotton Fac- tory in Whitestown. Widows with large families would do well to attend this notice.” When a decline in rural births threatened to dry up this labor pool in the 1830s and 1840s, European immigrants, especially poor and unskilled Irish, English, Scottish, and Welsh, appeared in large numbers to replace American women and chil- dren in the factories. Women, children, and these immigrants had one thing in common as employees; they were largely unskilled laborers. Unskilled labor pushed American industrializa- tion into a capital-intensive pattern. Factory owners invested heavily in machines that could produce in quan- tity at the hands of untrained workers. In Britain, the pace of mechanization was never as rapid because Britain’s sup- ply of skilled artisans made it more profitable to pursue a labor-intensive economy. By 1860, the United States was well on its way to being an industrial nation. In the Northeast, the most industrialized section of the country, per capita income was 40 percent higher than the national average. Diets, it has been argued, were better and more varied; machine-made clothing was more abundant. Industri- alization did not necessarily lessen economic disparities, however. Despite a growing belief in a myth of social mobility based upon equality of economic opportunity, the reality was that the richest 10 percent of the popu- lation in the cities held 70 to 80 percent of the wealth compared to 50 percent in 1800. Nevertheless, American historians generally argue that while the rich got richer, the poor, thanks to an increase in their purchasing power, did not get poorer.
u The Social Impact of the
Industrial Revolution
Eventually, the Industrial Revolution revolutionized the social life of Europe and the world. Although much of Europe remained bound by its traditional ways, already in the first half of the nineteenth century, the social impact
The Industrial Revolution and Its Impact on European Society 595
of the Industrial Revolution was being felt, and future avenues of growth were becoming apparent. Vast changes in the number of people and where they lived were already dramatically evident.
l Population Growth
Population increases had already begun in the eighteenth century, but they became dramatic in the nineteenth cen- tury. They were also easier to discern because record keep- ing became more accurate. In the nineteenth century, governments began to take periodic censuses and sys- tematically collect precise data on births, deaths, and mar- riages. In Britain, for example, the first census was taken in 1801, and a systematic registration of births, deaths, and marriages was begun in 1836. In 1750, the total Euro-
pean population stood at an estimated 140 million; by 1800, it had increased to 187 million and by 1850 to 266 million, almost twice its 1750 level. This population explosion cannot be explained by a higher birthrate for birthrates were declining after 1790. Between 1790 and 1850, Germany’s birthrate dropped from 40 per 1,000 to 36; Great Britain’s from 35 to 32, and France’s from 32 to 26. The key to the expansion of population was the decline in death rates evident throughout Europe. Historians now believe that two major causes explain this decline. There was a drop in the num- ber of deaths from famines, epidemics, and war. Major epidemic diseases, in particular, such as plague and small- pox declined noticeably, although small-scale epidemics continued. The ordinary death rate also declined as a general increase in the food supply, already evident in the
Steamboats and railroads were crucial elements in a trans- portation revolution that enabled industrialists to expand markets by shipping goods cheaply and efficiently. At the same time, these marvels of technology aroused a sense of power and excitement that was an important aspect of the triumph of industrialization. The American novelist Mark Twain captured this sense of excitement in this selection from Life on the Mississippi.
l Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi
After all these years I can picture that old time to myself now, just as it was then: the white town drowsing in the sunshine of a summer’s morning; the streets empty, or pretty nearly so; one or two clerks sitting in front of the Water street stores, with their splint-bottomed chairs tilted back against the walls, chins on breasts, hats slouched over their faces, asleep;... two or three lonely little freight piles scattered about the “levee”; a pile of “skids” on the slope of the stone-paved wharf, and the fragrant town drunkard asleep in the shadow of them; ... the great Mississippi, the majestic, the magnificent Mississippi, rolling its mile-wide along, shining in the sun; the dense forest away on the other side; the “point” above the town, and the “point” below, bounding 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 those remote “points”; instantly a negro drayman, famous for his quick eye and prodigious voice, lifts up to cry, “S–t–e–a–m–boat a–coming!” and the scene changes! The town drunkard stirs, the clerks wake up, a furious clatter of drays fol- lows, every house and store pours out a human contri- bution, and all in a twinkling the dead town [Hannibal, Missouri] is alive and moving. Drays, carts, men, boys,
all go hurrying from many quarters to a common center, the wharf. Assembled there, the people fasten their eyes upon the coming boat as upon a wonder they are seeing for the first time. And the boat is rather a handsome sight, too. She is long and sharp and trim and 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; the paddle-boxes are gorgeous with a picture or with gilded rays above the boat’s name; the boiler deck, the hurricane deck, and the texas deck are fenced and ornamented with clean white railings; there is a flag gallantly flying from the jack-staff; the furnace doors are open and the fires glar- ing bravely; the upper decks are black with passengers; the captain stands by the big bell, calm, imposing, the envy of all; great volumes of the blackest smoke are rolling and tumbling out of the chimneys—a husbanded grandeur created with a bit of pitch pine just before arriving at a town; the crew are grouped on the forecas- tle; the broad stage is run far out over the port bow, and an envied deck-hand stands picturesquely on the end of it with a coil of rope in his hand; the pent steam is screaming through the gaugecocks; the captain lifts his hand, a bell rings, the wheels stop; then they turn back, churning the water to foam, and the steam is at rest. Then such a scramble as there is to get aboard, and to get ashore, and to take in freight and discharge freight, all at one and the same time; and such a yelling and cursing as the mates facilitate it all with! Ten minutes later the steamer is under way again, with no flag on the jack-staff and no black smoke issuing from the chim- neys. After ten more minutes the town is dead again, and the town drunkard asleep by the skids once more.
“S–t–e–a–m–boat a–coming!”
L
The Industrial Revolution and Its Impact on European Society 597
l 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 the first half of the nineteenth century, a phenomenon related to indus- trialization. Cities had traditionally been centers for princely courts, government and military offices, churches, and commerce. By 1850, especially in Great Britain and Belgium, they were rapidly becoming places for manufacturing and industry. With the steam engine, entrepreneurs could locate their manufacturing plants in urban centers where they had ready access to transporta- tion facilities and unemployed people from the country looking for work. In 1800, Great Britain had one major city, London, with a population of 1 million, and six cities between 50,000 and 100,000. Fifty years later, London’s popula- tion had swelled to 2,363,000, and there were nine cities over 100,000 and eighteen cities with populations between 50,000 and 100,000. All together, these twenty- eight cities accounted for 5 million or one-fifth of the total British population. When the populations of cities under 50,000 are added to this total, we realize that more than 50 percent of the British population lived in towns and cities by 1850. Britain was forced to become a food importer rather than an exporter as the number of peo- ple involved in agriculture declined to 20 percent of the population. Urban populations also grew on the Continent, but less dramatically. Paris had 547,000 inhabitants in 1800, but only two other French cities had populations of 100,000: Lyons and Marseilles. In 1851, Paris had grown to 1 million while Lyons and Marseilles were still under 200,000. German and Austrian lands had only three cities with over 100,000 inhabitants (Vienna had 247,000) 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 engaged in agriculture by midcentury.
/ URBAN LIVING CONDITIONS IN THE EARLY INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
The dramatic growth of cities in the first half of the nine- teenth century produced miserable living conditions for many of the inhabitants. Of course, the quality of life had been poor for centuries for many people in European cities, but the rapid urbanization associated with the Industrial Revolution intensified the problems in the first half of the nineteenth century and made these wretched conditions all the more apparent. City authorities of what- ever kind either felt little responsibility for these conditions or more frequently did not have the skills to cope with the complex, new problems associated with such rapidly grow- ing populations. City authorities might also often be fac-
tory owners who possessed little or no tradition of public service or public responsibility. Wealthy, middle-class inhabitants, as usual, insu- lated themselves as best they could, often living in sub- urbs or the outer ring of the city where they could have individual houses and gardens. In the inner ring of the city stood the small row houses, some with gardens, of the arti- sans and lower middle class. Finally, located in the center of most industrial towns were the row houses of the indus- trial workers. This report on working-class housing in the British city of Birmingham in 1843 gives an idea of the gen- eral conditions they faced: The courts [of working-class row houses] are extremely numerous;... a very large portion of the poorer classes of the inhabitants reside in them.... The courts vary in the number of the houses which they contain, from four to twenty, and most of these houses are three stories high, and built, as it is termed, back to back. There is a wash-house, an ash-pit, and a privy at the end, or on one side of the court, and not unfrequently one or more pigsties and heaps of manure. Generally speaking, the privies in the old courts are in a most filthy condition. Many which we have inspected were in a state which renders it impossible for us to conceive how they could be used; they were with- out doors and overflowing with filth.
The people who lived in such houses were actually the fortunate; the truly unfortunate were those forced to live in cellars. One reformer asked, “How can a hole under- ground of from 12 to 15 feet square admit of ventilation so as to fit it for a human habitation?” Rooms were not large and were frequently overcrowded, as this govern- ment report of 1838 revealed: “I entered several of the ten- ements. In one of them, on the ground floor, I found six persons occupying a very small room, two in bed, ill with fever. In the room above this were two more persons in one bed ill with fever.” Another report said: “There were
A NEW INDUSTRIAL TOWN. Cities and towns grew dramatically in Britain in the first half of the nineteenth century, largely as a result of industrialization. Pictured here is Saltaire, a model textile factory and town founded near Bradford by Titus Salt in 1851. To facilitate the transportation of goods, the town was built on the Leeds and Liverpool canals.
598 C H A P T E R 2 0
63 families where there were at least five persons to one bed; and there were some in which even six were packed in one bed, lying at the top and bottom—children and adults.” 6 Sanitary conditions in these towns were appalling. Due to the lack of municipal direction, city streets were often used as sewers and open drains: “In the center of this street is a gutter, into which potato parings, the refuse of animal and vegetable matters of all kinds, the dirty water from the washing of clothes and of the houses, are all poured, and there they stagnate and putrefy.” 7 Unable to deal with human excrement, cities in the new industrial era smelled horrible and were extraordinarily unhealthy. Towns and cities were fundamentally death traps. As deaths outnumbered births in most large cities in the first half of the nineteenth century, only a constant influx of people from the country kept them alive and growing. Adding to the deterioration of urban life was the adulteration of food. Consumers were defrauded in a vari- ety of ways: alum was added to make bread look white and hence more expensive; beer and milk were watered down; and red lead despite its poisonous qualities was substituted for pepper. The government refused to inter- vene; a parliamentary committee stated that “more ben- efit is likely to result from the effects of a free competition ... than can be expected to result from any regulations.” It was not until 1875 that an effective Food and Drugs Act was passed in Britain. Our knowledge of the pathetic conditions in the early industrial cities is largely derived from an abundance of social investigations. Such investigations began in France
in the 1820s. In Britain the Poor Law Commissioners pro- duced detailed reports. The investigators were often struck by the physically and morally debilitating effects of urban industrial life on the poor. They observed, for example, that young working-class men were considerably shorter and scrawnier than the sons of middle-class families and much more subject to disease. They were especially alarmed by what they considered the moral consequences of such living conditions: prostitution, crime, and sexual immoralities, all of which they saw as the effect of such squalid lives. To many of the well-to-do middle classes, this situ- ation presented a clear danger to society. Were not these masses of workers, sunk in crime, disease, and immoral- ity, a potential threat to their own well-being? Might not the masses be organized and used by unscrupulous dem- agogues to overthrow the established order? One of the most eloquent British reformers of the 1830s and 1840s, James Kay-Shuttleworth, described them as “volcanic ele- ments, by whose explosive violence the structure of soci- ety may be destroyed.” Another observer spoke more contemptuously in 1850:
They live precisely like brutes, to gratify... the appetites of their uncultivated bodies, and then die, to go they have never thought, cared, or wondered whither.... Brought up in the darkness of barbarism, they have no idea that it is possible for them to attain any higher condition; they are not even sentient enough to desire to change their situation. ... they eat, drink, breed, work and die; and... the richer and more intelligent classes are obliged to guard them with police. 8
SLUMS OF INDUSTRIAL LONDON. Industrialization and rapid urban growth produced dreadful living conditions in many nineteenth-century cities. Filled with garbage and human waste, cities often smelled terrible and were extremely unhealthy. This drawing by Gustave Doré shows a London slum district overshadowed by rail viaducts.
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manufacturers, the Barclays and Lloyds who were bankers, and the Trumans and Perkins who were brew- ers were all Quakers. These were expensive trades and depended upon the financial support that co-religionists in religious minorities provided for each other. Most his- torians believe that a major reason members of these reli- gious minorities were so prominent in business was that they lacked other opportunities. Legally excluded from many public offices, they directed their ambitions into the new industrial capitalism. It is interesting to note that in Britain in particular aristocrats also became entrepreneurs. The Lambtons in Northumberland, the Curwens in Cumberland, the Nor- folks in Yorkshire, and the Dudleys in Staffordshire all invested in mining enterprises. This close relationship between land and industry helped Britain to assume the leadership role in the early Industrial Revolution. By 1850, in Britain at least, the kind of traditional entrepreneurship that had created the Industrial Revolu- tion was declining and was being replaced by a new busi- ness aristocracy. This new generation of entrepreneurs stemmed from the professional and industrial middle classes, especially as sons inherited the successful busi- nesses established by their fathers. It must not be forgot- ten, however, that even after 1850 a large number of small businesses existed in Britain and some were still founded by people from humble backgrounds. Indeed, the age of large-scale corporate capitalism did not begin until the 1890s (see Chapter 23). Increasingly, the new industrial entrepreneurs—the bankers and owners of factories and mines—came to amass much wealth and play an important role alongside the traditional landed elites of their societies. The Indus- trial Revolution began at a time when the pre-industrial agrarian world was still largely dominated by landed elites. As the new bourgeoisie bought great estates and acquired social respectability, they also sought political power, and in the course of the nineteenth century, their wealthiest members would merge with those old elites.
l New Social Classes: Workers in the Industrial Age
At the same time the members of the industrial middle class were seeking to reduce the barriers between them- selves and the landed elite, they also were trying to sep- arate themselves from the laboring classes below them. The working class was actually a mixture of different groups in the first half of the nineteenth century. In the course of the nineteenth century, factory workers would form an industrial proletariat, but in the first half of that century, they by no means constituted a majority of the working class in any major city, even in Britain. According to the 1851 census in Britain, there were 1 million agri- cultural laborers and 1 million domestic servants, but only 811,000 workers in the cotton and woolen industries. Even one-third of these were still working in small workshops or in their own homes.
Within the cities, artisans or craftspeople remained the largest group of urban workers during the first half of the nineteenth century. They worked in numerous small industries, such as shoemaking, glovemaking, bookbind- ing, printing, and bricklaying. Some craftspeople formed a kind of aristocracy of labor, especially those employed in such luxury trades as coachbuilding and clockmaking who earned higher wages than others. Artisans were not fac- tory workers; they were traditionally organized in guilds where they passed on their skills to apprentices. But guilds were increasingly losing their power, especially in indus- trialized countries. Fearful of losing out to the new facto- ries that could produce goods more cheaply, artisans tended to support movements against industrialization. Industrialists welcomed the decline of skilled craftspeople, as one perceptive old tailor realized in telling his life story:
It is upwards of 30 years since I first went to work at the tailoring trade in London.... I continued working for the honorable trade and belonging to the Society [for tailors] for about 15 years. My weekly earnings then averaged £1 16s. a week while I was at work, and for several years I was seldom out of work... no one could have been happier than I was.... But then, with my sight defective... I could get no employment at the honorable trade, and that was the ruin of me entirely; for working there, of course, I got “scratched” from the trade society, and so lost all hope of being provided for by them in my helplessness. The work- shop... was about seven feet square, and so low, that as you [sat] on the floor you could touch the ceiling with the tip of your finger. In this place seven of us worked. [The master] paid little more than half the regular wages, and employed such men as myself—only those who couldn’t get anything better to do.... I don’t think my wages there averaged above 12s. a week.... I am convinced I lost my eyesight by working in that cheap shop.... It is by the ruin of such men as me that these masters are enabled to under- sell the better shops.... That’s the way, sir, the cheap clothes is produced, by making blind beggars of the work- men, like myself, and throwing us on the parish in our old age. 11
Servants also formed another large group of urban work- ers, especially in major cities like London and Paris. Many were women from the countryside who became utterly dependent upon their upper- and middle-class employers.
/ WORKING CONDITIONS FOR THE INDUSTRIAL WORKING CLASS Workers in the new industrial factories also faced wretched working conditions. We have already observed the psy- chological traumas workers experienced from their employers’ efforts to break old preindustrial work patterns and create a well-disciplined labor force. But what were the physical conditions of the factories? Unquestionably, in the early decades of the Indus- trial Revolution, “places of work,” as early factories were called, were dreadful. Work hours ranged from twelve to sixteen hours a day, six days a week, with a half hour for lunch and dinner. There was no security of employment and no minimum wage. The worst conditions were in the
The Industrial Revolution and Its Impact on European Society 601
cotton mills where temperatures were especially debilitat- ing. One report noted that “in the cotton-spinning work, these creatures are kept, fourteen hours in each day, locked up, summer and winter, in a heat of from eighty to eighty-four degrees.” Mills were also dirty, dusty, and unhealthy:
Not only is there not a breath of sweet air in these truly infernal scenes, but... there is the abominable and perni- cious stink of the gas to assist in the murderous effects of the heat. In addition to the noxious effluvia of the gas, mixed with the steam, there are the dust, and what is called cotton-flyings or fuz, which the unfortunate creatures have to inhale; and... the notorious fact is that well constitu- tioned men are rendered old and past labor at forty years of age, and that children are rendered decrepit and deformed, and thousands upon thousands of them slaughtered by consumptions, before they arrive at the age of sixteen. 12
Thus ran a report on working conditions in the cotton industry in 1824. Conditions in the coal mines were also harsh. The introduction of steam power meant only that steam- powered engines mechanically lifted coal to the top. Inside the mines, men still bore the burden of digging the coal out while horses, mules, women, and children hauled coal carts on rails to the lift. Dangers abounded in coal mines; cave-ins, explosions, and gas fumes (called “bad air”) were a way of life. The cramped conditions—tunnels often did not exceed three or four feet in height—and constant dampness in the mines resulted in deformed bodies and ruined lungs. Both children and women were employed in large numbers in early factories and mines. Children had been an important part of the family economy in pre- industrial times, working in the fields or carding and spin- ning wool at home with the growth of cottage industry. In the Industrial Revolution, however, child labor was exploited more than ever and in a considerably more sys- tematic fashion (see the boxes on pp. 602–603). The own- ers of cotton factories appreciated certain features of child labor. Children had an especially delicate touch as spin- ners of cotton. Their smaller size made it easier for them
to crawl under machines to gather loose cotton. Moreover, children were more easily broken to factory work. Above all, children represented a cheap supply of labor. In 1821, 49 percent of the British people were under twenty years of age. Hence, children made up a particularly abundant supply of labor, and they were paid only about one-sixth or one-third of what a man was paid. In the cotton facto- ries in 1838, children under eighteen made up 29 per- cent of the total workforce; children as young as seven worked twelve to fifteen hours per day six days a week in cotton mills. Especially terrible in the early Industrial Revolution was the use of so-called pauper apprentices. These were orphans or children abandoned by their parents who had wound up in the care of local parishes. To save on their upkeep, parish officials found it convenient to appren- tice them to factory owners looking for a cheap source of labor. These children worked long hours under strict dis- cipline and received inadequate food and recreation; many became deformed from being kept too long in unusual positions. Although economic liberals and some indus- trialists were against all state intervention in economic matters, Parliament eventually remedied some of the worst ills of child abuse in factories and mines (se
20-Industrial-Revolution
Course: Geography Honours
University: Creighton University
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