Industrialization

The Birth of Modern
Industrial Society
Europe 1815-1850

✵Industrial Revolution, term
usually applied to the social and
economic changes that mark
the transition from a stable
agricultural and commercial
society to a modern industrial
society relying on complex
machinery rather than tools.

✵Dramatic changes in the social and
economic structure took place as
inventions and technological innovations
created the factory system of large-scale
machine production and greater economic
specialization, and as the labouring
population, formerly employed
predominantly in agriculture (in which
production had also increased as a result
of technological improvements),
increasingly gathered in great urban
factory centres.

The above pictures shows an inventor and in the
background are inventions that were created during the
Industrial Revolution. What are some of the inventions?

✵In Britain, goods and services
grew enormously.
✵Between 1796 and 1830, cotton
manufacturing increased threefold.
✵By 1850, cotton industry
employed 500 000 people!
✵Output of coal increased from
14.5 million tonnes in 1815 to 45.5
million tonnes in 1848.

✵Output of iron doubled from 0.9
million tonnes in 1835 to 1.8
million tonnes in 1848.

✵Transportation also expanded:
1838 there were 869 kilometres of
railway; by 1850 there were 10 655
kilometres.

✵Britain was transformed from a
primarily agricultural economy to
the world’s first industrial nation.
✵In 1760, 41% of working men
were in agriculture.
✵By 1840, only 29% still worked in
this sector.
✵Industry rose from 20% to 31.5%
during this period.

Industrial Discipline
✵Factory workers subjected to strict
discipline.
✵Employers expected workers to
arrive on time, match rhythm of
machines, and meet piecework targets.
✵Workers were fined for undesirable
behaviour: swearing, drinking,
gambling.

✵Rules at Samuel Oldknow’s mill,
1797:
✵The horrid and impious Vice of
profane CURSING and SWEARING
- and the Habits of Losing Time - and
DRUNKENNESS - are becoming so
frequent and notorious; that unless
speedily checked, they may justly
provoke the Divine Vengeance to
increase the Calamities…

✵Rules at Samuel Oldknow’s mill, 1797:
✵NOTICE is hereby given, That all the Hands…
must be subject to the following RULE: That when
any person, either Man, Woman, or Child, is heard
to CURSE or SWEAR, the same shall forfeit One
Shilling - And when any Hand is absent from Work
(unless unavoidably detained by Sickness, or Leave
being first obtained), the same shall forfeit as many
Hours or Work as have been lost; and if by the Job
or Piece, after the rate of 2 shillings and 6 pence per
Day. Such forfeitures to be put into a Box, and
distributed to the Sick and Necessitous, at the
discretion of their employer.

✵Most important development was rise
of factory-based cotton textile
production.
✵Britain imported 1.1 million kilograms
of raw cotton in 1760, 10 million
kilograms in 1787, and 121 million
kilograms in 1837.
✵Only possible because of
technological breakthroughs that
allowed cotton spinning to be done on
power-driven machines: spinning jenny.

✵Spinning jenny invented c. 1765.
✵Britain outpaced India, which
had been major producer at this
time.
✵By 1790s, British machines
could spin 45 kilograms of cotton
in 300 hours compared with 50
000 hours required by Indian
hand technology.

✵Initially, new, large factories
were located on rivers, because
water was the most important
source of power until late 19th
century.
✵Once steam-powered machines
were available, cotton factories
were established in urban areas.
✵Most important: Manchester.

✵Population exploded from 10
000 in 1717 to 70 000 in 1787, and
300 000 in 1851.

✵Great importance: recognition
of production by the breaking
down of skilled tasks into a
number of simple, unskilled ones
that could be performed more
quickly and cheaply.
✵Process of division of labour
described by Adam Smith in his
Wealth of Nations (1776):

✵To take for an example…the trade of
pin-maker…[I]n the way in which this
business is now carried on…it is divided
into a number of branches of which the
greater part are likewise peculiar trades.
One man draws out the wire, another
straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth pins
it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving
the head; to make the head requires two
or three distinct operations…

✵[A]nd the important business of making
a pin is, in this manner, divided into about
eighteen distinct operations…I have seen a
manufactory…where ten men only were
employed…[and] could make…upwards
of forty-eight thousand pins a day…But if
they had all wrought…independently, and
without any of them having been educated
in this particular business, they could not
each of them have made twenty, perhaps,
not one pin in a day.

Effects
✵Division of labour meant that
skills were lost and pay was
lowered.
Wages in shillings
1833, Britain

Demographic Changes
✵Population of England grew
to 8.7 million by 1801 and 16.8
million by 1851.
✵Attributed to declining death
rates, increased life expectancy,
age of marriage, and women
having more children.

✵Industrialization made marriage
a possibility for more people, but
family was still economic unit.
✵Industrialization removed
production from household to
make people dependent on wage
labour.
✵Wives and children also had to
contribute.

✵Factory towns had major
problems - overcrowding, terrible
living conditions, lack of
sanitation.
✵Also seen as opportunities.
✵Families left country villages to
move to towns/cities because
they believed there were better
jobs there!

✵Some employers were interested
in the welfare of their workers,
such as Robert Owen (1771-1858).
✵He was a self-made businessman
and reformer who set up model
living conditions for his workers -
hours of labour were limited,
schools were established, and
decent housing was introduced.

✵Women worked while they were
single, but left wage employment
after marriage, especially once
they had children.
✵Married women’s tasks were to
keep house, prepare food, and
care for children.
✵When families needed more
income, children went to work.

✵People were used to work and home
being in the same place and it was
normal for parents and children to
work together.
✵Working day ranged from 12 to 16
hours.
✵Women and children regardless of
where they worked, had the most
exploitative working condition and
the lowest rates of pay.

✵Machine altered age-old employer-
employee relationship.
✵Prior to 19th century, most people knew
their employers and had some sort of
personal relationship with them.
✵Now labour became depersonalized.
✵Employers hired women and children
because they were more easily managed
and because their hands were smaller
and could reach in machines clogged
with cotton!

✵New class of workers came
into being and problems with
employers grew more intense.
✵Karl Marx (1818-1883) called
new class proletariat.
✵Proletariats owned labour,
thus were at the mercy of
employers and market.

Industrial Novel
✵Developed a new social
purpose in 19th century.
✵Literacy rates were increasing,
public education was underway,
and increasing middle class
welcomed novels that portrayed
contemporary life.

✵Novelists in England,
notably Charles Dickens
(1812-1870) wanted to expose
the effects of
industrialization.
✵Dickens’ Hard Times (1854),
is set in the fictional
Coketown:

✵It was a town of red brick, or of
brick that would have been red if the
smoke and ashes had allowed it; but,
as matters stood it was a town of
unnatural red and black…It was a
town of machinery and tall chimneys,
out of which interminable serpents of
smoke trailed themselves forever and
ever, and never got uncoiled.

✵It had a black canal in it, and a
river that ran purple with ill-smelling
dye, and cast piles of building full of
windows where there was a rattling
and a trembling all day long, and
where the piston of the steam-engine
worked monotonously up and down,
like the head of an elephant in a
state of melancholy madness.”

Worker Resistance
✵Worker resistance took many forms:
individual and collective, organized and
non-organized, peaceful and violent.
✵Efforts were hindered by the state
(favoured employers).
✵Governments in the name of
“freedom” and “individualism”
prevented workers from forming
organizations, or unions.

✵In England, unions were
illegal between 1799 and 1824.
✵In France the Le Chapelier
Law banned unions from 1791
to 1848.
✵A dramatic, widespread form
of resistance in early industrial
period was machine breaking.

✵Most famous, known as
Luddism, took place in textile
districts of northern England
between 1811 and 1817.
✵Small, disciplined bands
moved around the countryside
at night and attacked
establishments of employers.

✵At the height of the violence,
1811-1812, government sent
twelve thousand troops north
to the factory towns.
✵Luddism has been called
“collective bargaining by riot.”

Industrialization

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