The Industrial Revolution

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The Industrial Revolution

• Day 33-36
• McKay 725-750, Palmer 11.52

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Industrial Revolution
Treaty of Paris end 7 Years War
Industrial Revolution Begins
Lists National System of Political
Economy -Mines Act (1842)
Hargreaves invents Spinning Jenny (1765)
Great Exhibition in Crystal Palace
Luddites Revolt
1763 1769 1775 1780 1798 1812 1830
1841 1851
Domestic System
Population explosion begins in GB
James Watt invents Steam Engine
Malthus, Essay on the Principle of Population
Industrial Rev. begins on Continent (1815)
Second Industrial Revolution
Factory Act (1833)
American Revolution Begins
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What do you need to have an Industrial Revolution?

• Stable food base
• Workers
• Wealthy, entrepreneurial class
• Stable/ business-friendly government
• Right geography/ resources
• Technological breakthroughs
• OR
• Autocratic Totalitarian Dictatorship

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Big Ideas

• Industrial Revolution defined
• transition from hand produced, animal powered
  manufacturing to machine produced, coal powered
  manufacturing
• Where?
• England 1st
• Continental Europe after 1815
• Characteristics Effects
• Urbanization
• Rapid Growth in cities
• horrible housing, working, living conditions
  until after 1850
• Manchester Cottonopolis
• Transportation via RR
• Social Revolution
• Bourgeoisie v Proletariat
• Growth of Isms
• Romanticism, Nationalism, Socialsim, Liberlism,
  Conservatism, Communism

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Why did it begin in Great Britain?

• Geography
• No part of GB further than 20 miles from H2O
• Canal network enhanced water transportation
  (after 1770s)
• Natural Resources
• Iron coal deposits
• Stable/ Business Friendly government
• Laissez Faire
• Allowed for innovation, person initiative
• Strong Central Bank and Credit
• No internal tariffs
• Wealthy, innovative commercial class
• Agriculture Revolution
• Low prices for food
• More disposable income
• Large mobile labor force

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The Agricultural Revolution in Britain

• Enclosure Acts (18th and 19th Centuries)
• Series of laws pushed through Parliament during
  late 1700s 1800s which ended Open Field system
• Landowners evicted tenant farmers
• Joining the strips of the open fields to make
  larger compact units of land and fenced or
  enclosed land into one unified farm
• Landowners often experimented with new, more
  efficient ways of farming
• Jethrow Tull
• Advocated drilling seed
• Better husbandry of horses
• By 1870 English farmer produced 300 more than
  1700
• Displaced tenant farmers flocked to cities
  seeking work

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The Gleaners (1857)Jean-François Millet
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Industrialization in Britain Incentives and
Inventions

• England had new colonial markets, control of seas
• Profit, Profit, Profit fueled the search for more
  rapid methods of production
• Ie. Woolen had been a staple export
• but more production possibilities were limited
  (under the Domestic System)
• Cotton Textiles more comfortable but costly
  before late 1700s
• Wealthy land owners (from enclosure) could afford
  to divert some profits to experimenting with
  industry
• Only a country already wealthy from commerce and
  agriculture could have been the first to initiate
  the machine age
• But to make the leap from the domestic system to
  the factory system requires a technological leap

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Inventions in textiles

• Flying Shuttle
• John Kay in 1733 made machine that required 1 not
  2 to weave cloth on loom
• created strong demand for yarn
• Spinning Jenny
• invented in 1760s allowed yarn production to
  increase
• James Hagreaves (hand powered)
• Richard Arkwright (water powered) to operate
  jennies
• Could spin many threads at a time, stronger
• A female dominated job
• jennies overwhelmed loomers with yarn
• Power Looms
• Watered powered machines displaced weavers
• Mill (factory) had to be located near water
  source
• BUT now supply of raw cotton could not meet
  demand
• UNTIL

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Developments in Textiles

• Cotton Gin
• Eli Whitney was a Conn tutor
• While in a Georgia plantation invented a Cotton
  engine to separate seeds from cotton in 1790
• Expands cotton industry slavery in South
• 1820 makes up half of British exports (cotton
  textiles)
• Also led to great expansion in the slave trade
  (in US)

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Steam Power

• Steam Engine
• Invented by Puritan Thomas Newcomen
• Powered water pump for coal mine in 1705
• Considered inefficient a coal guzzler
• James Watt
• Father of the Factory System
• Perfected Newcomens engine
• Worked on Un. Of Glasgow Newcomen engine 1763
• Newcomens wasted 3/4th of its energy
• Came up with idea to use 2 piston chambers
• Utilized John Wilkinsons new method for boring
  holes for cannons
• Watts engine used 1/4th energy
• more efficient engine for factories

English inventor Thomas Newcomen built the first
successful steam engine in 1712. It was used to
pump water out of mines.
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Railroads

• Horse/canals had been used for heavy freight
• Slow, expensive, limited market potential
• Rails had been used in mines to reduce friction
• George Stephenson 1829
• Created the Rocket locomotive on Liverpool and
  Manchester Railway (only reached 16 mph)
• Significance
• Reduced cost/time of shipping
• Broadened markets
• Encouraged larger factories
• Workers who built RR usually settled in city and
  became factory workers

BBC - History - 'Stephenson's Rocket' Animation
Joseph MW Turner (1775-1851) 
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Early Factory Workers

• Worst working conditions in pre 1850 period (in
  England)
• Factory owners used orphaned or abandoned
  children
• Parish officers apprenticed them out
• 5-6 years of age
• Provided food, shelter, schooling
• 14 hour days with no pay
• Brutal discipline
• Very dangerous conditions
• 5 AM to 7 PM
• Treated worse than West Indian slaves (by some
  accounts)

A young "drawer" pulling a coal tub up a mine
shaft
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Early Factory Work Continued

• Easily replaceable
• Brutal life in factory illustrated by A Memoir of
  Robert Blincoe
• Worked as an "indentured servant to cotton
  manufacturer in 1799
• Told he would be fed roast beef plum pudding
  ride horses, make lots of
• Noted 14 hr, 6 day a week
• Severe treatment even with injury (he lost a
  finger)
• Had teeth filed, hung by wrists over machine (had
  to keep his legs up or else)
• No pay as owners believed they were serving the
  nation by providing room and board
• Robert Owens Testimony (see page 746)

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• John Brown, A Memoir of Robert Blincoe (1828) A
  girl named Mary Richards, who was thought
  remarkably handsome when she left the workhouse,
  and, who was not quite ten years of age, attended
  a drawing frame, below which, and about a foot
  from the floor, was a horizontal shaft, by which
  the frames above were turned. It happened one
  evening, when her apron was caught by the shaft.
  In an instant the poor girl was drawn by an
  irresistible force and dashed on the floor. She
  uttered the most heart-rending shrieks! Blincoe
  ran towards her, an agonized and helpless
  beholder of a scene of horror. He saw her whirled
  round and round with the shaft - he heard the
  bones of her arms, legs, thighs, etc.
  successively snap asunder, crushed, seemingly, to
  atoms, as the machinery whirled her round, and
  drew tighter and tighter her body within the
  works, her blood was scattered over the frame and
  streamed upon the floor, her head appeared dashed
  to pieces - at last, her mangled body was jammed
  in so fast, between the shafts and the floor,
  that the water being low and the wheels off the
  gear, it stopped the main shaft. When she was
  extricated, every bone was found broken - her
  head dreadfully crushed. She was carried off
  quite lifeless.

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Impact of Industrialization

• Urbanization
• Cities grew rapidly
• Grew from 10 mil in 1750 to 30 mil in 1850
  (England and Ireland)
• with coal and iron in Midlands and north new
  cities rose
• Manchester and Birmingham

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Impact of Industrialization

• New social paradigm emerged
• Individuals became members of economically
  determined classes (instead of socially
  determined) whose class had conflicting interests
  with other classes
• Marx called this class consciousness
• Factory owners
• Bourgeoisie (in Marxist language)
• Often Presbyterians, Quakers, other
  dissenters(Calvinistic) excluded from life of
  landed gentry
• By 1830 leading industrialist were well educated,
  highly class conscious class
• Investment in factory system was in no way a sure
  thing
• Constant battle to cut costs stay in business
• Increasingly excluded their wives and daughters
  from business
• Women should enhance their femininity, be good
  wife and mother

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Reactions to Industrialism

• Luddites
• Name for a secret reactionary group of weavers
  whose jobs were displaced by Wm Cartwrights
  power loom
• Attempted to destroy machines in hope of halting
  mechanization
• Named for legendary figure Ned Ludd who had
  destroyed stocking-knitting machine
• 150 killed by gov. troops 4/11/1812 at
  Cartwrights mill
• Frame Breaking Act of 1812 made industrial
  sabotage a capital crime

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Manchester

• Poster city for the ills of industrialization
• Population
• 1772 25,000 by 1851 455,000
• No legal status (had no legal method of
  incorporating cities until 1835)
• IE. No representation in Parliament
• Yet rotten boroughs did
• This created problems providing public services
  to rapidly growing urbanization
• Dirty, dark, sooty, drab, cloudy climate
• Tenements, entire families in 1 room, swarming
  with ragged children (who had nicknames only)

Manchester, England ("Cottonopolis"), pictured in
1840, showing the mass of factory chimneys
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Manchester (1650)
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View from Kersal Moor towards Manchester by
Thomas Pether, circa 1820. The town was primarily
a rural landscape just before the onset of the
Industrial Revolution
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Manchester (1801)
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Manchester from Kersal Moor, by William Wyld in
1857, a town now dominated by chimney stacks as a
consequence of the Industrial Revolution
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Experiences of the workers

• Were the conditions of the workers worse?
• Yes (during Early Industrial Rev)
• Purchasing power remained same until 1820
• Food prices rose faster than wages
• By 1850 there was significant economic
  improvement for workers
• BUT
• Workers worked more hours
• 250 days per year (1760)
• 300 days per year (1830)
• Averaged 11 hr. work day
• Diets improved
• Potatoes, fruits, dairy products more available
• Clothing improved
• underwear, cotton
• BUT Housing deteriorated

A Punch cartoon of 1844 entitled Capital and
Labour contrasts the luxurious life of a
mineowner with the harsh working conditions in
the pits. Although the Industrial Revolution
brought Britain as a whole greater material
prosperity, it also caused massive social
upheavals
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Changing working conditions/Family structure

• Putting Out system (17th century-early 1800s)
• Completed in spurts
• Saint Mondays was informal day off
• End of week family pulled all-nighter to meet
  Saturday deadline
• Involved entire family unit
• Males were weavers
• Females spinners
• Children cleaned wool/cotton
• Allowed nursing mothers flexibility
• Monotony of factory system unattractive
• Could only get poor and orphaned children
• 1802 law forbade the use of pauper children

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Changing working conditions/Family structure

• Factory System (1790-1832)
• Family economic unit was retained in the mills
• Mill owners bargained with head of family paid
  him for work of entire family
• Mines
• Men hewed coal, women hauled it, children sorted
  it
• Allowed parents to continue to raise children
• Testimony of Robert Owen and other reformers led
  to changes
• Factory Act of 1833
• Limited workday for 9-13 year olds to 8 hours
• 14-18 to twelve
• Elementary school required for children under 9
  (paid for by factory owner)
• Led to rapid decline in employment of children
• Broke up the family economic unit

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Sexual Division of Labor

• Pre-industrial Europe had defined divisions of
  labor by sex
• After 1833 a new pattern of separate spheres
  emerged
• Men became primary breadwinner
• Women expected to concentrate on child care,
  craftwork at home
• Women who did work
• Usually stopped after 1st child
• Were from poorest families or widowed
• Usually confined to low-paying jobs
• Why did this happen?

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Reasons for Separate Spheres

• Relentless clock managed factory system did not
  mesh well with nursing, child care
• Domestic work (cooking, cleaning, shopping) in
  urban poverty was time consuming
• Victorian morality
• Factory and mine prevented constant supervision
  of the morals of boys and girls
• Mines Act of 1842
• Prohibited underground work for all women and
  boys under 10 (see McKay 752)

How you doin?
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The Chartist Movement

• Chartist Movement
• Early labor movement in England
• Six Points (Chartist Goals)
• Main goals
• universal male suffrage
• secret vote
• No property qualification for elected members of
  Parliament
• Payment of Members of Parliament
• Led a petition signing drive
• Petition with nearly 2 million signatures
  presented to House of Commons 1839
• Ignored by Parliament
• Movement faded away after 1848

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Great Exhibition

• Great Exhibition of 1851
• First worlds fair which featured latest
  breakthroughs in machinery/industry/ inventions
• Held in Crystal Palace
• Constructed of glass/iron
• Cast plate glass technique invented in 1848
  allowed for strong, cheap glass
• Astonished visitors
• Visited by 6 million
• Showcased Great Britain as the workshop of the
  world
• 20 of entire world manufactured goods