HY 106 Lecture Notes - Lecture 36: Blast Furnace, Fourteen Hours, Claude Monet
Chapter 22: The Revolution in Energy and Industry
The Industrial Revolution in England
1. Eighteenth-Century Origins
1. The expanding Atlantic economy of the eighteenth century served
mercantilist England well and the colonial empire, helped by strong
position in Latin America and in the African slave trade provided a
growing market for English manufactured goods
2. It was much cheaper to ship goods by water and no part of England was
more than 20 miles from navigable water and in the 1770s, a canal-
building boom enhanced this natural advantage and provided easy
movement of Englandās enormous deposits of iron and coal, critical raw
materials in Europeās early industrial age
3. Agriculture played a central role in bringing about the Industrial
Revolution; English farmers second only to Dutch in 1700, and
continually adopted new methods
1. The result, especially before 1760, was a period of bountiful crops
and low food prices and families could spend more on manufactured
goods (instead of all food)
2. Demand for goods within Britain complemented the demand from
the colonies
4. England had other assets that gave rise to industrial leadership
1. England had an effective central band and well-developed credit
markets
2. The monarchy and the aristocratic oligarchy, which had jointly ruled
since 1688, provided stable government and let the domestic
economy operate with few controls, encouraging personal initiative,
technical change, and a free market
3. English had a large class of hired agricultural laborers, rural
proletarians whose numbers increased during the enclosure
movement and these rural wage earners were relatively mobile and
along with cottage workers formed a potential industrial labor force
for capitalist entrepreneurs
5. All the factors combined to initiate the Industrial Revolution, coined by
people in the 1830s to describe the burst of major inventions and
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technical change; technical revolution together with an impressive
quickening annual rate of industrial growth
1. Industry had grown at only 0.7 percent between 1700 and 1760,
while industry grew at the rate of 3 percent between 1801 and 1831
(industrial transformation)
2. The decisive quickening of growth probably came in the 1780s, after
the American war for independence (longer process than the
political revolutions)
3.
6. The Industrial Revolution was not complete in England until 1850 but
had no real impact on the continental countries until after 1815
2. The First Factories
1. The first decisive breakthrough of the I.R. was the creation of the worldās
first large factories in the English cotton textile industry and technological
innovations in the manufacture of cotton cloth led to a system of
production and social relationships
2. The putting-out system of merchant capitalism was expanding across
Europe in the eighteenth century (most developed in England) but under
the pressure of growing demand, the systemās limitations first began to
outweigh its advantages (after 1760)
3. Constant shortage of thread in the textile industry focused attention of
improving spinning, as wool and flax was hard to spin with the improved
machines
1. Cotton was different and cotton textiles had first been imported into
England from India and by 1760, there was a tiny domestic industry
in northern England
2. After many experiments, James Hargreaves invented his cotton-
spinning jenny in about 1765 and barber-turned-manufacturer
named Richard Arkwright invented (or possibly pirate) another kind
of spinning machine, the water frame
3. Hargreavesās jenny was simply, inexpensive, and hand operate; up
to 24 spindles were mounted on a sliding carriage and each spindle
spun a fine thread when the woman moved the carriage back and
forth and turned a wheel to supply power
4. Arkwrightās water frame acquired a capacity of several hundred
spindles and demanded water power; water frame required
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specialized mills, but could only spin coarse, strong thread, which
was put out for respinning on cottage jennies
5. Samuel Crompton invented another technique around 1790 that
required more power than the human arm and cotton spinning was
concentrated in factories
4. Cotton goods became much cheaper and were bought by all classes and
families in cottage industry could now obtain thread spun on the jenny or
obtain it from a factory
5. Wages of weavers, how hard pressed to keep up with the spinners, rose
markedly until about 1792 and were among the best-paid workers in
England
6. One result of the prosperity was a large numbers of agricultural laborers
became handloom weavers and was an example of how further
mechanization threatened certain groups of handicraft workers, for
mechanics and capitalists soon sought to invent a power loom to save
on labor costs; Edmund Cartwright invented the power loom in 1785 and
handloom weavers received good wages until at least 1800
7. Working conditions in the early factories were worse than those of
cottage workers
1. Until the late 1780s, most English factories were in rural areas,
where they had access to waterpower and employed small
percentage of all cotton textile workers
2. People were reluctant to work in them because they had low pay
and factory owners turned to young children as a source of labor
(abandoned by parents)
3. Under care of local parishes, parish officers often īapprenticedī
orphans to factory owners where the parish saved money and
factory had workers
8. Apprenticed as young as five, children were forced by law to labor for
their īmasterī for as many as fourteen years and were housed, fed, and
locked up nightly in houses
1. The young workers received little or no pay and hours were
commonly fourteen hours a day, six days a week; harsh physical
punishment maintained discipline
2. Wholesale coercion of orphans as factory apprentices constituted
exploitation and attracted the conscience of reformers and
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