The Industrial Revolution – Study Guide

I. Dawn of the Industrial Age

A. A Turning Point in History

1. In 1750, most people worked the land and lived simple lights without electricity and grew their own food.

2. By the 1850’s many country villages had grown into industrial towns and cities and lived a more modern life.

3. New inventions began to boom and cars, televisions, air travel, antibiotics, trains, steamships, and telegraph wires appeared during the next century.

B. A New Agricultural Revolution

1. The industrial revolution was made possible in part by an agricultural revolution that occurred in Europe.

2. By the 1700s, farmers were creating earthen walls were made to reclaim land from the sea, used fertilizer, mixed different kinds of soils, crop rotation, used seed drills, and began to write in farmer journals.

3. Rich landowners began the process of enclosure, the process of taking over and fencing off land formerly shared by peasant farmers, which increased farm output.

C. The Population Explosion

1. The agricultural revolution contributed to a rapid growth of population and some countries nearly doubled their populations.

2. The population boom was also due to a declining death rate and rising birthrates in Europe.

3. The agricultural revolution reduced the risk of famine, and because they ate better, women were healthier and had stronger babies, and many diseases faded away.

D. An Energy Revolution

1. An “energy revolution” also helped to contribute to the industrial revolution

2. Until the energy revolution, energy for work had to be provided by the muscles of humans and animals.

3. Giant water wheels powered machinery in factories and the steam engine was also developed around this time.

II. Britain Leads the Way

A. Why Britain?

1. The Industrial Revolution began in Britain because of many factors, including the fact that Britain had many natural resources, such as large supplies of coal and iron to help build and power new machines.

2. Britain had a relatively large population and a large number of workers were needed to mine the coal and iron, build the factories, and run the machines, and the new need for workers was covered.

3. Britain had been a center of the Scientific Revolution, and many great scientific minds were in Britain and technology was easily and abundantly developed.

B. The Age of Iron and Coal

1. New technologies in the iron industry were key to the Industrial Revolution.

2. In 1709, Abraham Darby began to use coal instead of wood for smelting iron, and he discovered that coal gave off impurities that damaged the iron, and Darby found a way to remove the impurities from coal.

3. Darby’s experiments led him to produce better-quality and cheaper iron, and by 1779, Abraham Darby III made the world’s first cast iron bridge.

C. Revolutionary Changes in the Textile Industry

1. Under the putting out system, production was slow, and as the demand for cloth grew, inventors came up with a string of remarkable devices that revolutionized the British textile industry.

2. John Kay invented the flying shuttle, which allowed weavers to work so fast that they outpaced spinners, which James Hargreaves solved by producing the spinning jenny, which spun many threads at the same time.

3. Manufacturers built long sheds to house the machines, which were at first powered by water, but later by steam; these places became known as factories, or places that bring together workers and machines to produce large quantities of goods.

D. Revolution in Transportation

1. Turnpikes, which are privately built roads that charged a fee to travelers who used them, began to spring up as methods of moving goods from place to place faster.

2. George Stephenson developed steam powered locomotives to pull carriages along rails in the early 1800s and revolutionized transportation.

3. Scottish builders made the first paddle wheel steamboats to pull barges along canals, and in 1807, Robert Fulton used steam engine technology to pilot the first steam boat up the Hudson River.

E. Looking Ahead

1. In response to growing demand, inventors developed machines that could produce large quantities of goods more efficiently.

2. As the supply of goods increased, prices fell and lower prices made goods more affordable and created more consumers who further fed the demands for goods.

3. The Industrial Revolution changed the way goods were made and affected a person’s whole way of life and by the 1800’s, a tidal wave of economic and social changes swept the industrializing nations of the world.

III. Hardships of Early Industrial Life

A. The New Industrial City

1. The Industrial Revolution brought rapid urbanization, or a movement of people to cities.

2. Almost overnight, small towns around coal or iron mines mushroomed into cities and other cities grew up around the factories.

3. The wealthy and the middle class lived in peasant neighborhoods, and vast numbers of poor struggled to survive in foul smelling slums.

B. The Factory System

1. The factory system differed greatly from farmwork, and a stop-go system was developed by the whistle

2.  Working hours were long and usually lasted 12 to 16 hours and work was sometimes dangerous; if workers became sick or injured, they lost their jobs.

3. Factories and mines hired many boys and girls, who were nimble-fingered and quick-moving, and orphans were often hired out to work.

C. Patience Kershaw’s Life Underground

1. 17 year old Patience Kershaw told about the lives of a child working in mines.

2. Kershaw said that men she worked with beat her if she did not work quickly enough.

3. The Ashley Mine Commission report told of the struggles and hardships of child labor in industrialized factories and led to Parliament passing laws to regulate the employment of children in mines and factories.

D. The Working Class

1. Many families felt lost and bewildered when they moved to new industrial cities, and in time, factory and mine workers developed a new sense of community.

2. Weavers and other skilled artisans revolted against the Industrial Revolution, which cost them their jobs, and they smashed machines and burned factories in England.

3. Many working class people found comfort in a new religious movement, known as Methodism, which stresses the need for a personal sense of faith.

E. The New Middle Class

1. Those who benefited most from the Industrial Revolution were the entrepreneurs who set it in motion and this and a new middle class began to form.  They lived in solid, well furnished homes, dressed well and ate large meals, and began to have an influence over British Parliament.

2. Middle class women were encourage to become “ladies” and took up “ladylike” activities, and was discouraged from doing the physical labor of housework.

3. The new middle class valued hard work and were confident in their abilities, and often looked down on the poor as ignorant or lazy.

F. Benefits and Problems

1. Reformers pressed for laws to improve working conditions during the industrial revolution. 

2. Unions won the right to bargain with employers for better wages and hours, and eventually working class men gained the right to vote and new political parties were formed accordingly.

3. Wages began to rise and workers had enough left after paying rent and buying food and more excesses became available to the middle class.

IV New Ways of Thinking

A. Laissez-Faire Economics

1. Laissez-Faire economics were established by Adam Smith and his ideas had been embraced by industrialists by the 1800s.

2. Thomas Malthus’s writings on population shaped economic thinking for generations by having a pessimistic view on the nature of population, and his opinions on population outgrowing food supplies would eventually prove false by the early 1900s in western countries.

3. David Ricardo, an influential British economist, also believed that families should have few children in order to increase higher wages and encouraged people to be thrifty, hard working, and limit the sizes of their families.

B. The Utilitarians

1. Utilitarianism is the idea that the goal of society should be “the greatest happiness for the greatest number” of citizens.

2.  The idea was preached by Jeremy Bentham and he also strongly supported individual freedom, which he believed ensure happiness.

3.  John Stuart Mills wanted the government to step in to improve the hard lives of the working class, but many of his views were rejected by the middle class.

C. Emergence of Socialism

1. Socialism is a radical solution to the problems of capitalism where the people as a whole, rather than private individuals own and operate the farms, factories, railways, and other large business that produced and distributed goods.

2. Early socialists tried to build self sufficient communities in which all work was shared and all property was owned in common; these people became known as Utopians.

3. Robert Owen was a poor Welsh boy who became a successful mill owner, and who, unlike most industrialists of the time, refused to use child labor and campaigned vigorously for child labor laws and encourage labor unions.

D. The “Scientific Socialism” of Karl Marx

1. In 1848, Marx and Engels published a pamphlet called The Communist Manifest, which gave the first ideas of communism, which is a form of socialism that sees class struggle between employers and employees as inevitable and attempts to share all power and wealth equally.

2. The proletariat are also known as the working class, and Marx regarded them as the “have nots” of society.

3. Many socialist political parties began to emerge in Western Europe, and many Marxist ideas were absorbed into them and the Russian Revolution of 1917 set up a communist inspired government in Russia.