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The Industrial Revolution of the late 18th and
early 19th centuries was revolutionary in that it changed --
revolutionized -- the productive capacity of England, Europe and
United States. But the revolution was something more than just new
machines, smoke-belching factories, increased productivity and an
increased standard of living. It was a revolution which
transformed English, European, and American society down to its
very roots. Like the Reformation or the French Revolution, no one
was left unaffected. Everyone was touched in one way or another --
peasant and noble, artisan and captain of industry. The Industrial
Revolution serves as a key to the origins of modern Western
society. As one historian of English Industrial Revolution has
observed, "it was in brief a social revolution: a revolution
and social organization, with social causes as well as social
effects."
 The
INDUSTRIAL
REVOLUTION can be said to have made the European
working-class. It made the European middle-class as well. In the
wake of the Revolution, new social relationships appeared. As Ben
Franklin once said, "time is money." Man no longer
treated men as men, but as a commodity which could be bought and
sold on the open market. This "commodification"
of man is what bothered Karl Marx -- his solution was to
transcend the profit motive by social revolution (see Lecture
24).
There is no denying the fact that the Industrial
Revolution began in England sometime after the middle of the 18th
century. England
was the "First Industrial Nation." As one economic
historian commented in the 1960s, it was England which first
executed "the takeoff
into self-sustained growth." And by 1850, England had
become an economic giant. Its goal was to supply two-thirds of the
globe with cotton spun, dyed, and woven in the industrial centers
of northern England. England proudly proclaimed itself to be the
"Workshop of the World," a position that country held
until the end of the 19th century when Germany, Japan and United
States overtook it.
More than the greatest gains of the Renaissance,
the Reformation, Scientific Revolution or Enlightenment, the
Industrial Revolution implied that man now had not only the
opportunity and the knowledge but the physical means to completely
subdue nature. No other revolution in modern times can be
said to have accomplished so much in so little time. The
Industrial Revolution attempted to effect man's
mastery over nature. This was an old vision, a vision with
a history. In the 17th century, the Englishman, Francis Bacon,
believed that natural philosophy (what we call science) could be
applied to practical problems, and so, the idea of modern
technology was born. For Bacon, the problems this: how could man
enjoy perfect freedom if he had to constantly labor to supply the
necessities of existence? His answer was clear -- machines. These
labor saving devices would liberate mankind, they would save labor
which then could be utilized elsewhere. "Knowledge
is power," said Bacon, and scientific knowledge
reveals power over nature.
The vision was all-important. It was optimistic
and progressive. Man was going somewhere, his life has
direction. This vision is part of the general attitude known as
the idea of progress, that is, that the history of human society
is a history of progress, forever forward, forever upward. This
attitude is implicit throughout the Enlightenment and was made
reality during the French and Industrial Revolutions. With
relatively few exceptions, the philosophes of the 18th century
embraced this idea of man's progress with an intensity I think
unmatched in our own century. Human
happiness, improved morality, an increase in knowledge were now
within man's reach. This was indeed the message, the
vision, of Adam Smith, Denis Diderot, Voltaire, Thomas Jefferson
and Ben Franklin (see Lecture
10).
"Tremble all ye oppressors of the
world," wrote Richard Price -- and tremble they did. The
American and French Revolutions, building on enlightened ideas,
swept away enthusiasm, tyranny, fanaticism, superstition, and
oppressive and despotic governments.
"Sapere Aude!" exclaimed Kant -- dare to
use your own intelligence. With history and superstition literally
swept aside, man could not only understand man and society, man
could now change society for the better. These are all ideas,
glorious, noble visions of the future prospect of mankind. By the
end of the 18th century, these ideas became tangible. The vision
was reality. Even Karl Marx understood this when he wrote,
"Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various
ways; the point, however, is to change it."
Engines and machines, the glorious products of
science began to revolutionize the idea of progress itself. If a
simple machine can do the work of 20 men and a quarter of the time
formerly required to the New Jerusalem be far behind? When you
view the Industrial Revolution alongside the democratic
revolutions of 1776 and 1789, we cannot help but be struck by the
optimism so generated. Heaven
on Earth seemed reality and no one was untouched by the
prospects. But, as we will
soon see, while the Industrial Revolution brought its blessings,
there was also much misery. Revolutions, political or
otherwise, are always next blessings. If we can thank the
Industrial Revolution for giving us fluoride, internal combustion
engines, and laser guided radial arm saws, we can also damn it for
the effect it has had on social relationships. We live in the
legacy of the Industrial Revolution, the legacy of the "cash
nexus," where the only connection between men is the one of
money, profit and gain.
The origins or causes of the Industrial Revolution
in England are complex and varied, and like the French Revolution,
the Industrial Revolution is still a subject of a vast historical
debate on origins, developments, growth and end results. This
debate has raged among historians since at least 1884, when Arnold
Toynbee, an English historian and social reformer, published the
short book, Lectures
on the Industrial Revolution in England. Toynbee was in a
fairly good position to assess the revolution in industry --
England had, by the 1880s, endured more than a century of
industrialization.
Still, like any revolution, the Industrial
Revolution leaves us with many questions: was the revolution in
industry simply an issue of new machinery or mechanical
innovation? did young boys and girls work and live shoulder to
shoulder for more than twelve hour a day? was industrial
capitalism nothing more than a clever system devised by clever
capitalists to exploit the labor of ignorant workers? was the
revolution in industry the product of conscious planning or did it
appear spontaneously? I can't answer all these questions in one
lecture -- indeed, an entire course of study on the subject would
perhaps get us no closer to answers to these important questions.
However, we can make one serious confession -- what the Industrial
Revolution accomplished was nothing les than a structural change
in the economic organization of English and European society. This
is what made the Revolution revolutionary. In other words, England,
then the Continent and the United States, witnessed a shift from a
traditional, pre-modern, agrarian society to that of an industrial
economy based on capitalist methods, principles and practices.
In general, the spread of industry across England
was sporadic. In other words, not every region of England was
industrialized at the same time. In some areas, the factory system
spread quickly, in others not at all. Such a development also
applies to the steam engine -- one would think that once steam
engines made their appearance that each and every factory would
have one. But this is clearly not the case. The spread of
industry, or machinery, or steam power, or the factory system
itself was erratic. I imagine the reason why we assume that
industrialization was a quick process is that we live live in an
age of rising expectations -- we expect change to occur rapidly
and almost without our direction. Twentieth century technology is
perhaps most responsible for this attitude. We know that
technology supplies an a constant stream of products that are
"new and improved." We know that the moment we bring
home a top of the line computer that within six months it will
become not necessarily obsolete but "old."
Historians are now agreed that beginning in the
17th century and continuing throughout the 18th century, England
witnessed an agricultural
revolution. The English (and Dutch) farmers were the most
productive farmers of the century and were continually adopting
new methods of farming and experimenting with new types of
vegetables and grains. They also learned a great deal about manure
and other fertilizers. In other words, many English farmers were
treating farming as a science, and all this interest eventually
resulted in greater yields. Was the English farmer more
enterprising than his French counterpart? Perhaps, but not by
virtue of intelligence alone. English society was far more open
than French -- there were no labor obligations to the lord. The
English farmer could move about his locale or the country to sell
his goods while the French farmer always seemed bound by direct
and indirect taxes, tariffs or other kinds of restrictions.
The result of these developments taken together
was a period of high productivity and low food prices. And this,
in turn, meant that the typical English family did not have to
spend almost everything it earned on bread (as was the case in
France before 1789), and instead could purchase manufactured
goods.
There are other assets that helped make England
the "first industrial nation." Unlike France, England
had an effective central bank and well-developed credit market.
The English government let the domestic economy function with few
restrictions and encouraged both technological change and a free
market. England also had a labor surplus which, thanks to the
enclosure movement, meant that there was an adequate supply of
workers for he burgeoning factory system.
England faced increasing pressure to produce more
manufactured goods due to the 18th
century population explosion -- England's population nearly
doubled over the course of the century. And the industry most
important in the rise of England as an industrial nation was
cotton textiles. No other industry can be said to have advanced so
far so quickly. Although the putting-out system (cottage industry)
was fairly well-developed across the Continent, it was fully
developed in England. A merchant would deliver raw cotton at a
household. The cotton would be cleaned and then pun into yarn or
thread. After a period of time, the merchant would return, pick up
the yarn and drop off more raw cotton. The merchant would then
take the spun yarn to another household where it was woven into
cloth. The system worked fairly well except under the growing
pressure of demand, the putting-out system could no longer keep
up.
There was a constant shortage of thread so the
industry began to focus on ways to improve the spinning of cotton.
The first solution to this bottleneck appeared around 1765 when James
Hargreaves (c.1720-1778), a carpenter by trade, invented his
cotton-spinning jenny. At almost the same time, another innovator
by the name of Richard
Arkwright (1732-1792) invented another kind of spinning
device, the water frame. Thanks to these two innovations, ten
times as much cotton yarn had been manufactured in 1790 than had
been possible just twenty years earlier. Hargreaves jenny was
simple, inexpensive and hand-operated. The jenny had between six
and twenty-four spindles mounted on a sliding carriage. The
spinner (almost always a woman) moved the carriage back and forth
with one hand and turned a wheel to supply power with the other.
Of course, now that one bottleneck had been relieved, another
appeared -- the weaver (usually a man) could no longer keep up
with the supply of yarn. Arkwright's water frame was based on a
different principle. It acquired a capacity of several hundred
spindles and demanded more power -- water power. The water frame
required large, specialized mills employing hundreds of workers.
The first consequence of these developments was that cotton goods
became much cheaper and were bought by all social classes. Cotton
is the miracle fiber -- it is easy to clean, spin, weave and dye
and is comfortable to wear. Now millions of people who had worn
nothing under their coarse clothes could afford to wear cotton
undergarments.
Although the spinning jenny and water frame
managed to increase the productive capacity of the cotton
industry, the real breakthrough came with developments in steam
power. Developed in England by Thomas
Savery (1698) and Thomas
Newcomen (1705), these early steam engines were used to pump
water from coal mines. In the 1760s, a Scottish engineer, James
Watt (1736-1819) created an engine that could pump water three
times as quickly as the Newcomen engine. In 1782, Watt developed a
rotary engine that could turn a shaft and drive machinery to power
the machines to spin and weave cotton cloth. Because Watt's engine
was fired by coal and not water, spinning factories could be
located virtually anywhere.
Steam power also promoted important changes in
other industries. The use of steam-driven bellows in blast
furnaces helped ironmakers switch over from charcoal (limited in
quantity) to coke, which is made from coal, in the smelting of pig
iron. In the 1780s, Henry
Cort (1740-1800) developed the puddling furnace, which allowed
pig iron to be refined in turn with coke. Skilled ironworkers
("puddlers") could "stir" molten pig iron in a
large vat, raking off refined iron for further processing. Cort
also developed steam-powered rolling mills, which were capable of
producing finished iron in a variety of shapes and forms.
Aided by
revolutions in agriculture, transportation, communications and
technology, England was able to become the "first industrial
nation." This is a fact that historians have long
recognized. However, there were a few other less-tangible reasons
which we must consider. These are perhaps cultural reasons.
Although the industrial revolution was clearly an unplanned and
largely spontaneous event, it never would have been
"made" had there not been men who wanted such a thing to
occur. There must have been men who saw opportunities not only for
advances in technology, but also the profits those advances might
create. Which brings us to one very crucial cultural attribute --
the English, like the Dutch of the same period, were a very
commercial people. They saw little problem with making money, nor
with taking their surplus and reinvesting it. Whether this
attribute has something to do with their Calvinism (the
"Protestant work ethic," as Max Weber put it) or with a
specifically English trait is debatable, but the fact remains that
English entrepreneurs had a much wider scope of activities than
did their Continental counterparts at the same time.
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