This is World Civilization and my name is Dr. Long.
This video is entitled, The Industrial Revolution, and it will particularly focus on the early
decades of the industrial revolution, from the 1780s until 1850s.
We’ll go a little bit beyond as well.
Now the Industrial Revolution is incredibly important to the modern world.
It has changed the goods available; it has changed how we work; and it has changed how
we live.
Economically speaking, the Industrial Revolution is incredibly important to how we live in
the modern world.
The effects of the Industrial Revolution are still with us, particularly in nations that
have industrialized or in developing nations that are currently attempting to industrialize.
The Industrial Revolution began in Great Britain in the 1780s.
It was not a revolution that occurred overnight but rather one that took place over several
decades, and the Industrial Revolution also spread to other parts of Europe and to the
United States during the first half of the 19th century, and later it spread to other
parts of the world as well.
Prior to the Industrial Revolution, prior to the 1780s, the vast majority of the people
in the world were farmers.
Goods were either made at home or by artisans or skilled craftsmen in workshops.
Goods were more expensive and they were less common before the Industrial Revolution.
The Industrial Revolution changed all of this.
The Industrial Revolution changed the amount of goods available for purchase, and it changed
the price; goods became more available and the price fell.
In nations that industrialized during the course of the 19th century, the Industrial
Revolution also led to a huge expansion of department stores.
Department stores are stores with multiple departments, such as women’s clothing; men’s
clothing; housewares; and so forth.
In cities, department stores often replaced small family-owned shops and shopping options
greatly increased.
As I mentioned, industrialization also changed how we work.
Goods – instead of being made by artisans in workshops, are increasingly made in factories
and the workplace and the home become more separate as fewer goods are actually made
at home.
And it also changes, as I mentioned, where we live.
More and more people begin living in cities instead of rural areas, and most everything
you have today is made in factories, and this was not always the case.
Now for the Industrial Revolution to have occurred in the first place, beginning in
the 1780s, several things had to happen first in Europe.
The first, and arguably the sort of foundation of this, was a change in agriculture and this
has been dubbed the Agricultural Revolution, which happened in the decades leading up to
the Industrial Revolution.
The Agricultural Revolution resulted because farmers in Europe were making better use of
land, better use of fertilizer, and the end result was more food was available.
Also, by the end of the 19th century, advances in shipping allowed for grain that was grown
in the United States and Russia; Canada; Australia; and so forth to be imported to Europe as well,
further increasing the food supply.
Now the increase in the food supply had a dramatic effect on the population.
People had better diets; their health improved; more children began living to adulthood.
So between 1780 and 1914 there was an enormous population boom in Europe.
To give you an example of this, in 1800 – excluding Russia – the population of Europe was roughly
187 million people.
By 1914 it had grown to 401 million.
So from 187 in 1800 to 401 million in 1914, and this was also a time when Europe was sending
out millions of immigrants from the British Isles; Germany; Italy; Russia; Poland; and
so forth, to the United States; Canada; Australia; and Argentina.
Now part of the great change of the Agricultural Revolution and the huge population explosion
that it caused was an expansion in cities.
The time period of the Industrial Revolution saw a rapid urbanization in Europe.
Many people moved from the countryside to cities in search of jobs.
Now this happened in Europe, but it also happened in other countries that industrialized such
as the United States, and this changed where people lived.
For instance, by 1815 – or by 1850 rather, Great Britain became the first nation in the
history of the world to have more people living in cities than living in the countryside.
Now this same process would happen in the United States and would occur by 1920.
As I mentioned, the Industrial Revolution began in Great Britain, and the first 2 large
important industries in Great Britain were the textile industry and the iron industry.
By the late 19th century, steel; chemicals; and petroleum would become important as well.
Now iron and textiles were the first 2 big industries in Britain, and iron was the main
metal used for tools and machines, and as the population was growing, there was also
a large demand for textiles.
So this helped the textile industry grow.
Now British products were not only sold in Great Britain but they were also sold around
the world.
So what were some of the factors that allowed the Industrial Revolution to happen in Britain
and then later spread to other countries – what accounted for Britain’s success?
Well, there are a few major factors for this for Great Britain.
First, Britain had a very pro-business atmosphere, one in which those who had new ideas, new
businesses, were encouraged to grow those, that the regulation, the taxes, were fairly
low, and there was actually prestige to succeed in business in Great Britain.
Second, Great Britain had large deposits of coal, particularly in Northern England, and
coal was the main fuel for factories, for railroads, and so forth – and so that gave
them a ready-made fuel source.
You can think of the comparison today, coal in the 19th century would be like oil today
– you know how a country with a lot of oil would be rich in resources.
Also Great Britain was an innovator in technology.
A number of inventions during the Industrial Revolution came in Great Britain – probably
the best example of this was the steam engine, the first major engine that did not rely on
water power.
The steam engine was invented by James Watts, a British engineer and inventor, in 1781,
and that revolutionized the use of engines.
Last are their new ways of working, more efficient ways of working, and this particularly has
been described by a Scottish economist, Adam Smith.
Adam Smith talks about what he calls ‘the division of labor’.
Now the division of labor is taking a task and dividing it into its smallest element
and having everyone do part of it.
So for instance, prior to the Industrial Revolution if you had an artisan working on a product
he would make that product from scratch, from the ground up.
With Industrial Revolution the division of labor, you’ll have an assembly line on factories
eventually, and each stage in the production will be broken up into its smallest element.
That improves efficiency and it will improve production.
So factories are much more productive in the number of goods they can produce than an artisan’s
workshop.
Likewise, Smith – and he describes all this in his book; The Wealth of Nations talks about
what’s called economies of scale – as factories can produce more and more goods
than an artisan in a workshop, they can also drop the price, which changes the market as
well.
Well, some other things that have benefitted Great Britain were things that facilitated
trade – particularly transportation and communication developments.
For instance, in 1804, British inventor George Stephenson invented the railroad, and the
railroad absolutely revolutionized land transportation.
It was much faster than travel by horse and buggy.
You could move more people, move more goods, and it was actually more comfortable.
By the 1840s and 1850s many nations in the Western world experienced a boom in the construction
of railroads.
Railroads could travel at longer distances and were very, very popular in the 19th century.
In addition to railroads, steamships would also likewise revolutionize water transportation.
Steamships would do what railroads had done on land on water.
Communications also greatly improved in this era.
For instance, Samuel Morse, an American inventor in the 1840s invented the telegraph, which
was the first form of instant communication.
Well the Industrial Revolution spread from Britain to Northern Europe to the United States,
and then began to spread to the rest of the world, and nations that industrialized surely
saw tremendous economic growth.
However, there were negative aspects to the Industrial Revolution, so I want to talk about
this here.
On the negative side, factories that came out of the Industrial Revolution polluted
the environment terribly.
There was little in the way of regulation of this, and so factories produced a great
deal of pollution.
Moreover, conditions for workers in factories; mills; and coalmines were dirty and unsafe.
Poet William Blake in Britain called factories ‘dark, satanic mills’ and unfortunately
that wasn’t much of an exaggeration.
Workers who were hurt or killed on the job simply lost their job with no worker’s compensation
or disability.
Workers had to work very long hours in very monotonous factory jobs; it was physically
demanding.
Shifts were typically 12 to 14 hours a day, 6 days a week – and workers were paid very
low wages, and as a result of this many of them had to have their children work as well.
So child labor was very common.
Workers also lived in dirty slums in these burgeoning cities that were growing so rapidly.
They had no indoor plumbing, entire families were often squeezed into a one-room apartment
with very little privacy, sanitation was terrible, trash and human and animal waste would be
collected or piled up on the streets, and as the British called them – industrial
cities were cesspools; they literally stank.
And while this is discussing on one level, the more important issue is the health impact.
The poor sanitary conditions of the Industrial Revolution led to epidemics of terrible diseases
– cholera – fecal matter that contaminates drinking water, killed tens and tens of thousands
during the 19th century; tuberculosis also was a major killer.
Poverty led to a number of incredible social problems.
Alcoholism was rife.
Many poor young women often turned to prostitution simply to survive, and prostitution was rife
in many industrial cities such as London; Paris; New York.
Venereal diseases, of course, came with this.
So there were definitely downsides to the Industrial Revolution.
Now factory owners, managers, bankers, engineers, inventors, they all made a lot of money and
did very well during the Industrial Revolution.
The benefit of Industrial Revolution was uneven, and industrialization created vast inequalities.
Now workers did react against this.
I’ll give you two examples from Great Britain.
Between 1811 and 1813, a group of British workers called the Luddites protested against
new machines.
Now they’re called the Luddites because they were named after their leader named Ned
Ludd, and their real concern was that new machines that were coming on line in the textile
industry would cause them to lose their jobs.
So they actually went around smashing machinery.
You know we typically think of technology as benefitting people, but technology can
sometimes put people out of a job – and a Luddite today refers to someone who’s
against technology, but the real origin of this were workers fearing losing their jobs.
Also Britain had an important political movement in the – from the 1830s to the 1850s, called
the Chartist Movement, named after their political goals set out in the Charter of 1838.
The Chartists, as they were called, mainly focused on making Britain more democratic
with fairer elections to Parliament; demanding voting rights for all mean, including poor
men who did not own property; and a series of voting laws were actually passed that accomplished
this.
So it gave working-class men a greater say in politics.
Of course, women are still excluded and it will only be later until women win the right
to vote.
So the Chartists did make some gains, particularly voting, and they also spoke out against practices
such as wage cuts.
So this was the beginning of workers becoming politically and socially active to try to
get some of the benefits of the Industrial Revolution for themselves.
So let me conclude with a few takeaway points.
On the positive side, the early decades of the Industrial Revolution led to the invention
of a number of new products and a greater availability of goods.
It also led to growth of cities as well as better transportation and better communication.
Yet the benefits of industrialization came at a terrible cost for workers.
While the Industrial Revolution took place over the course of several decades after 1780,
it would take many more decades for reform to mitigate some of the worst excesses of
industrialization.
For better or worse, however, the Industrial Revolution has come to shape the modern economy
and the modern world, where we live – more in cities today, how we work – more in factories,
and the goods available.
So I’ll stop here.
Thanks for watching.