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England
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While it's hard to pinpoint a beginning
to the Industrial Revolution, historians generally agree that it basically
originated in England,
both in a series of technological and social innovations. Historians propose
a number of reasons. Among the most compelling is the exponential increase in
food production following the enclosure laws of the eighteenth century;
Parliament passed a series of laws that permitted lands that had been held in
common by tenant farmers to be enclosed into large, private farms worked by a
much smaller labor force. While this drove peasants off the land, it also
increased agricultural production and increased the urban population
of England,
since the only place displaced peasants had to go were the cities. The
English Parliament, unlike the monarchies of Europe,
was firmly under the control of the merchant and capitalist classes, so the
eighteenth century saw a veritable army of legislation that favored
mercantile and capitalist interests.
Because of the strong role of Parliament in English
government and the incredible influence of capitalists and mercantilists,
social values had also been steadily shifting in England.
In continental Europe, the aristocracy represented the
fullest embodiment of social values. They believed that they were born with
higher virtues than the common people, who, because of their birth would
never attain these virtues to the same level. They also believed that the
pursuit of money was a characteristic of common people; the mercantile and
capitalist revolutions throughout Europe, in England, was achieved by the non-aristocratic classes—it was a
middle-class or bourgeois revolution.
The diminished role of the aristocracy in English
government and society, however, allowed for a steady shift in values; the
values of the mercantile and capitalist classes slowly became the norm—the
most important of these values was the pursuit of wealth. Adam Smith's The
Wealth of Nations proposed that the only legitimate goal of national
government and human activity is the steady increase in the overall wealth of
the nation. This is not an idea that would have flown two hundred years
earlier.
Mercantilism had thrived in England
in ways that it hadn't on the continent. In particular, the English had no
internal tariffs or duties on commerce, which wasn't true of any of the
continental European states. Moving goods around in continental Europe
was an expensive affair as you had to pay taxes and duties every hundred
miles or so; moving goods around in England
was cheap, and profits soared. In addition, England
had come to monopolize overseas trade. Every time England
fought a war in the eighteenth century it always acquired new overseas
territory. It completely monopolized trade with the North American
colonies—in fact, one-half of all British exports went to America in the
1780's—but it also began to control the South American and, most importantly,
the Indian trade. All this trade produced the largest merchant marine in the
world as well as a navy to protect this merchant marine fleet. Like Periclean Athens,
England shot
to the forefront of the new capitalist economy primarily through its navy.
The technological innovations followed these social and
economic changes. The first major technological innovation was the cotton
gin. Cotton is a plant grown in America
and India; it
was a small industry through much of the seventeenth century but exploded in
the middle of the eighteenth. Most cotton was produced in British colonies;
because it was a labor-intensive agriculture, it fueled the traffic in
African slaves to the colonies—the cotton shroud that fell over the history
of Africa. The first innovation in cotton manufacture
was the fly-shuttle, which greatly speeded up the process of weaving cotton
threads into cloth. That wasn't enough, though, for cotton had to be
stretched out or spun into threads to begin with; this process was done
slowly, one thread at a time, by a machine called a spinning wheel. This slow
process was mechanized by James Hargreaves, a
carpenter, in what is usually pointed to as one of the typological major
technological innovations of the Industrial Age: the "spinning
jenny." Patented in 1767, the spinning jenny was a series of simple
machines rather than a single machine, and it spun sixteen threads of cotton
simultaneously. These two qualities: multiple machines in a single machine as
well as a machine that was designed not just to speed up work, but to do the
work of several laborers simultaneously, was the hallmark of all subsequent
technological innovations. In 1793, the American, Eli Whitney, invented the
cotton gin which mechanized the separating of seeds from cotton fibers. These
innovations made cotton incredibly cheap and infinitely expandable; since
cotton clothing was tougher than wool, the manufacture of cotton clothing
shot through the roof. By the end of the eighteenth century, the manufacture
of thread and cloth was slowly moving out of the family economy and into
large factory mills, though this transition would not be fully realized until
the middle of the nineteenth century.
While the spinning jenny is frequently pointed to as the
first, major technological innovation of the industrial revolution, the
invention that really drove the revolution in the eighteenth century was
invented several decades earlier: the steam engine. Along with the growth in
the cotton industry, the steel industry began to grow by leaps and bounds.
This was largely due to a quirk in English geography: England
sits on vast quantities of coal, a carbon based mineral derived from ancient
life forms. Coal burns better and more efficiently than wood and, if you have
lots of coal, is infinitely cheaper. The English figured out that they could
substitute coal for wood in the melting of metals, including iron, and
blissfully went about tearing coal from the ground while manufacturers in Europe
looked on jealously.
Mining coal, however, was not an easy task. As you drew
more and more coal out of the ground, you had to mine deeper and deeper. The
deeper the mine, the more it fills with water. In 1712, Thomas Newcomen built a simple steam engine that pumped water
from the mines. It was a single piston engine, and so it used vast amounts of
energy. Because of its inefficiency, nobody could think of any use for it
besides pumping water.
Until a Scotsman named James Watt added a separate cooling
chamber to the machine in 1763; this cooling chamber condensed the steam so
the cylinder itself didn't have to be cooled. Patented in 1769, Watt's steam
engine had the efficiency to be applied to all kinds of industries. He was
not, however, good at doing busines and it was only
when he had teamed up with the businessman, Matthew Boulton,
that the steam engine began to change the face of English manufacture. By
1800, Watt and Boulton sold 289 of these new
engines; by the middle of the next century, the steam engine replaced water
as the major source of motive power in England
and Europe. The changes that the steam engine wrought,
however, is a story for another day.
And it is here, with 289 steam engines pumping and steaming
around England
that we'll leave the story of the Industrial Revolution—half-completed, you
might say. The nineteenth century saw the exporting of the Industrial
Revolution to Europe in the decades after 1830, and
the explosion of factory-based, technology driven manufacture. The Age of Absolutism
and the waning years of the Enlightenment saw Europe
just beginning a new phase in its history, one that would irreperably
severe it from the traditions and certainties of the past.
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