Industrial Revolution: World History Unit 2, Lesson 9:

The Napoleonic wars resulted in realization and action taken by countries to improve, largely impacting industrialization in Britain, the United States and Europe. Although the Industrial Revolution began in Britain during the 1700’s it was boosted in the early 1800’s after the Napoleonic wars with industrialization spreading throughout Europe and into North America in the early 1800’s becoming widespead by the mid 1800s.

Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution was the transition to new manufacturing processes in Great Britain, continental Europe, and the United States, in the period from about 1760 to sometime between 1820 and 1840. This transition included going from hand production methods to machines, new chemical manufacturing and iron production processes, the increasing use of steam power and water power, the development of machine tools and the rise of the mechanized factory system. The Industrial Revolution also led to an unprecedented rise in the rate of population growth.

The precise start and end of the Industrial Revolution is still debated among historians, as is the pace of economic and social changes. Eric Hobsbawm held that the Industrial Revolution began in Britain in the 1780s and was not fully felt until the 1830s or 1840s, while T. S. Ashton held that it occurred roughly between 1760 and 1830.

Textiles

Textiles were the dominant industry of the Industrial Revolution in terms of employment, value of output and capital invested. The textile industry was also the first to use modern production methods.

Great Britain

The Industrial Revolution began in Great Britain and many of the technological and architectural innovations were of British origin. By the mid-18th century Britain was the world’s leading commercial nation, controlling a global trading empire with colonies in North America and the Caribbean, and with major military and political hegemony on the Indian subcontinent, particularly with the proto-industrialised Mughal Bengal, through the activities of the East India Company. The development of trade and the rise of business were among the major causes of the Industrial Revolution.

Origin of Industrialization and Mechanization

Rapid industrialization first began in Britain, starting with mechanized spinning in the 1780s, with high rates of growth in steam power and iron production occurring after 1800. Mechanized textile production spread from Great Britain to continental Europe and the United States in the early 19th century, with important centres of textiles, iron, and coal emerging in Belgium and the United States and later textiles in France.

Economics

GDP per capita was broadly stable before the Industrial Revolution and the emergence of the modern capitalist economy, while the Industrial Revolution began an era of per-capita economic growth in capitalist economies. Economic historians are in agreement that the onset of the Industrial Revolution is the most important event in the history of humanity since the domestication of animals and plants.

An economic recession occurred from the late 1830s to the early 1840s when the adoption of the Industrial Revolution’s early innovations, such as mechanized spinning and weaving, slowed and their markets matured. Innovations developed late in the period, such as the increasing adoption of locomotives, steamboats and steamships, hot blast iron smelting and new technologies, such as the electrical telegraph, widely introduced in the 1840s and 1850s, were not powerful enough to drive high rates of growth.

Rapid economic growth began to occur after 1870, springing from a new group of innovations in what has been called the Second Industrial Revolution. These innovations included new steel making processes, mass-production, assembly lines, electrical grid systems, the large-scale manufacture of machine tools, and the use of increasingly advanced machinery in steam-powered factories.

Influence

The Industrial Revolution marks a major turning point in history; almost every aspect of daily life was influenced in some way. In particular, average income and population began to exhibit unprecedented sustained growth. Some economists have said the most important effect of the Industrial Revolution was that the standard of living for the general population in the western world began to increase consistently for the first time in history, although others have said that it did not begin to meaningfully improve until the late 19th and 20th centuries.

Reforms Resulting From The Industrial Revolution

While wealthy industrialists and the emerging middle class often lived in nice houses and could afford the new goods being pumped out by factories, most of the workers who made those goods struggled to make ends meet. They lived in crowded tenement houses, which were apartment buildings with tiny rooms, no ventilation, and poor sanitation.

Some people became concerned: These new living and working conditions created social problems. In the United States and Great Britain, citizens pressured their governments to reform (improve) society. They wanted the government to help the urban poor, fix unsafe work conditions, end child labor, and repair poor sanitation.

Evangelicism

In the United States and Great Britain, reformers were often inspired by a new form of Christianity. This wave of Christianity, Called evangelical Christianity, became popular in the nineteenth century.

Evangelicism emphasized that individuals had the power to change their lives. They could ensure their own salvation and improve their communities. Evangelicism valued the individual’s own religious experience over the learning and authority of the clergy; therefore, it provided inspiration for ordinary people who wanted to create change in society.

But not all reformers were inspired by Christianity. Journalists, union activists, workers, and women may also have been motivated by Enlightenment ideals of liberty, equal rights, and separation of church and state. Some historians argue that evangelical Christianity was democratic because it focused on the power of the individual.

Women’s Rights

Women were very active in reform movements with many influenced by the renewed interest in Christianity that was inspiring a wave of social activism. For example, many women participated in the movement to abolish slavery. That movement was grounded in new evangelical Christian ideas about the equality of all people before God; however, women were often not allowed to engage in public debates or speak at anti-slavery conventions.

When Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were denied the right to speak at the 1840 anti-slavery convention in London, they decided to form a society to advocate for the rights of women. Many of the same biblical passages that women abolitionists used to argue against slavery could also be used to support the equality of women. An important American group that mixed anti-slavery and women’s rights activism was the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, led by Mott and the women of a leading African American family—Charlotte, Harriet, Sarah, and Margaretta Forten.

In 1848, the first American convention focused on women’s rights was held in Seneca Falls, New York. Approximately 200 women and 40 men met and adopted the “Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments.” This declaration called for political and economic rights for women; however, it would take 70 more years for women to gain the right to vote in the United States, and progress was equally slow in most other parts of the world.

Labor Reforms

Working conditions and the ability to make enough money to survive were problems with industrialization that many people identified early. In Britain, seeing themselves being replaced by them, the Luddites were a secret society that destroyed new industrial machines in the 1810s.

The machines could make cheaper cloth, or metal, than an artisan. Also, artisans were generally decently paid, but they were being forced to become poorly paid factory workers. So, across Britain and in particular, in the industrialized north, they smashed machines and threatened factory owners until the army put them down.

Women in the Labor Movement

Women were also active in the labor movement. Pauline Newman started working at a garment factory called the Triangle Shirtwaist Company in New York City when she was a child. She became a union organizer and actively campaigned for worker safety in Philadelphia.

Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

In 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist factory burst into flames. It was the deadliest industrial disaster in the history of the city, and one of the deadliest in U.S. history.

The fire resulted in the deaths of 146 garment workers. Most of these workers were recent Italian and Jewish immigrant women ages 14 to 23. Pauline Newman, having worked at the factory for many years, was friends with many of the victims.

When the state of New York established the Factory Investigation Commission (FIC) to inspect shops and guarantee workers’ safety, Newman became one of the FIC’s first inspectors. The fire led to legislation requiring improved factory safety standards. This period saw the growth of unions that fought for better working conditions for factory workers.

Journalism

It was not only the workers themselves pushing for labor reforms. Journalists also wrote articles exposing the problems that existed in American factories.

Author Upton Sinclair hoped to show the American public the horrible effects of capitalism on workers in the Chicago meatpacking industry. His book, “The Jungle,” described how workers lost their limbs, were exposed to dangerous chemicals, and caught infectious diseases while working long hours in cold, cramped conditions.

Sinclair hoped that this would lead to labor reforms; however, his vivid descriptions of the industry did not immediately lead to labor legislation. Public outcry did lead to the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act in 1906.

Housing

Journalists also played an important role in exposing the poor housing that many urban factory workers lived in. These often included tenements—crowded buildings, often hastily put up and with few toilets—where large families often shared tiny apartments.

Glasgow, in Scotland (northern Britain), was one of the first cities to have large tenements, meant to house workers in the industrial dockyards. Because they were cheap housing, they soon spread.

Jacob Riis

Jacob Riis, a Danish-born American journalist wrote about the terrible conditions in New York City’s tenements. He wanted to influence public opinion and get the city’s government to create new housing designs to ease crowding and improve safety.

Riis’ book, “How the Other Half Lives” (1890), described how as many as 12 adults slept in a room that was only 13 feet across. Riis wrote that the infant death rate in these tenements was as high as 1 in 10. Following his reports, the city conducted studies of tenements.

In 1901, city officials passed the Tenement House Law. This set higher standards for safety and sanitation in the tenements. Some of the improvements included higher quality construction materials, mandatory fire escapes, and more windows in order to give residents access to air and light.

Public Health

Reformers also became concerned with public health during this period. One of the first Industrial-era health reforms was the building of sewers and clean water systems in some British cities.

Thomas Hawksley built some of the first urban clean water systems in Britain in the 1870s. He figured out that hooking up pipes to a pump and an engine would keep pressure in the water system stopping dirty water from getting into the pipes. In London, meanwhile, the disease known as cholera killed tens of thousands of people each year until Joseph Bazalgette figured out that a sewer system could keep the water supply cleaner.

New York physician Stephen Smith was similarly concerned with the unhealthy environment in American cities. He was the first to link the spread of typhus and cholera to the unsanitary conditions in New York City.

Smith was gravely concerned about the negative impact the city environment had on human health leading him to organize and direct a sanitary survey of the city. The survey described overflowing public toilets, streets filled with horse manure, and unhygienic slaughterhouses.

Smith testified before the New York Senate and Assembly. One year later, New York passed the first public health legislation in the country.

Smith’s work in New York served as a model for other cities. Soon after, Chicago and Boston followed suit. Public health reformers all over the United States began to pressure their local governments resulting in a new Public Health Act (1875) that ensured the government was responsible for making sure drinking water was safe, sewage waste properly managed, and contagious disease contained.

Education

Reformers were also concerned about the well-being of children during this time. Many children worked in factories instead of attending school. Due to workers’ low wages, an entire family, including small children, would have to work in order for a family to afford food and rent.

In 1832, the British Parliament set up a commission to investigate child labor in factories. As a result, the Factory Act of 1833 regulating excessive child labor and setting limits on how many hours per day children could work was passed. This was the first British government regulation of the industrial workplace, and the government made education mandatory for all children ages 5 to 10 by the 1880s.

Around the same time, the United States established free elementary education in every state. However, the U.S. did not pass a federal law restricting child labor until 1916.

Conclusion

Reform efforts during this time gave birth to a number of important changes in the United States and Great Britain. These included mandatory public education, child labor laws, and eight-hour workdays. Reforms also addressed minimum wage, compensation for workplace accidents, and improved sanitation infrastructure laying the groundwork for later twentieth-century social justice movements like the civil rights and feminist movements and influenced reform movements in other regions of the world.

Lesson 8: Colonialism, Revolution, and Napoleon

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