The Industrial Revolution in World History

Peter N. Stearns

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000227123
• Edition: 5
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Now in its fifth edition, this book explores the ways in which the industrial revolution reshaped world history, covering the international factors that helped launch the industrial revolution, its global spread and its impact from the end of the eighteenth century to the present day.

The single most important development in human history over the past three centuries, the industrial revolution continues to shape the contemporary world. Revised and brought into the present, this fifth edition of Peter N. Stearns' The Industrial Revolution in World History extends his global analysis of the industrial revolution. Looking beyond the West, the book considers India, the Middle East and China and now includes more on key Latin American economies and Africa as well as the heightened tensions, since 2008, about the economic aspects of globalization and the decline of manufacturing in the West. This edition also features a new chapter on key historiographical debates, updated suggestions for further reading and boxed debate features that encourage the reader to consider diversity and different viewpoints in their own analysis, and pays increased attention to the environmental impacts.

Illustrating the contemporary relevance of the industrial revolution's history, this is essential reading for students of world history and economics, as well as for those seeking to know more about the global implications of what is arguably the defining socioeconomic event of modern times.

1 Introduction

Defining the Industrial Revolution

Assessing the industrial revolution is a historical challenge, but it also has a strikingly contemporary ring. In 2019 a number of economists, concerned about sluggish economic growth rates in the United States and elsewhere, urged the development of a new “science of progress” that would identify factors that promote economic dynamism. In practice, they were urging that the components that launched the industrial revolution be more clearly identified and updated: industrial history, in other words, may be crucial to dynamic policy today.

Many people would worry about this connection, urging that we use industrial history to help identify and explain menacing problems like environmental change or even some of the limitations of contemporary family life. Here too, however, they are saying—correctly—that an array of contemporary concerns cannot be properly evaluated without a grasp of the earlier industrial transformation. Industrial history is, in part, a framework for understanding the world around us today. Indeed—and we will take this up in the final chapter—assessments of the nature of modern life, its pros and cons, rest heavily on an understanding of what the industrial revolution has done and is doing to the human condition.

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The industrial revolution was the most important single development in human history over the past three centuries. It is not, however, a historical episode alone. It continues to shape the contemporary world. Even the oldest industrial societies are still adapting to its impact, for example, in dealing with changes in the roles of women. Newer industrial giants, such as China, repeat elements of the original process but extend its range in new directions.

The phenomenon began about two and a half centuries ago. It has changed the world. Focused on new methods and organizations for producing goods, industrialization has altered where people live, how they play, how they define political issues—even, many historians would argue, how they have sex.

The industrial revolution was a global process from the first. It resulted from changes that had been occurring in global economic relations, and then it redefined those relations still further—and continues to do so.

This book explores what the industrial revolution was and how it recast world history—even beyond the particular societies in which it developed the deepest roots. Industrialization was the most fundamental force in world history in both the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, and it continues powerfully to shape the twenty-first. Outright industrial revolutions occurred in three waves. The first happened in western Europe and the new United States beginning with developments in Britain in the 1770s. A second wave spread over of Russia and Japan, some other parts of eastern and southern Europe, plus Canada and Australia from the 1880s onward. The most recent unfolding began in the 1960s in the Pacific Rim (including China by the 1970s) and, two decades later, in Turkey and India, and in Brazil and other parts of Latin America. Each major wave of industrialization quickly spilled over into other societies that were not industrialized outright, altering basic social and economic relationships. Because industrialization was a global phenomenon from the first, it helps focus key comparisons: between specific revolutionary processes, such as the German and the Japanese, and between societies advancing in industrial growth and those where the process is at least delayed.

The industrial revolution involves fundamental change, but it is an odd kind of revolution. Indeed, some historians take issue with the term itself. This is a transformation that spins out, in any given society, for several decades. In its early stages it may have little measurable impact on overall production rates, which are still determined by more traditional methods of work. Yet the use of new machinery and redefinitions of how labor is organized quickly create a sense of major change, even among groups not directly involved. Fear of threats to established habits and awe at the profusion of goods that industrialization produces intermingle. Characteristic early attempts to protest the new system show that the magnitude of change strikes home—and the failure of these efforts, forcing redefinition of protest itself, demonstrates how unstoppable this economic machine becomes. In this sense, and in the broader sense of altering the whole context of life, this is revolution indeed. Ultimately, industrialization’s role in changing the framework of world history is its most important face.

Debate #1: Was this a real revolution?

There are four related reasons to fuss a bit over use of the word “revolution” to describe the process of industrialization that first began in Great Britain. This is not the most important debate industrialization inspires, but it reflects some of the complexities involved.

Point 1: the word revolution is overused in modern culture. We are recurrently told about revolutions in skin care or sports equipment. Have historians of industry, eager to highlight the importance of their subject, fallen victim to verbal hyperbole?

Then there is the fact that people involved in what we call the industrial revolution did not quickly adopt the term. In the great French political revolution of 1789, participants began talking about revolution almost immediately. As early as July, 1789, right when things were heating up, the popular press in France was talking explicitly about the revolution that was taking shape. But in Britain it was a full century before the term “industrial revolution” was introduced. To be sure, French observers by the 1830s (accustomed to revolutions) were talking about a révolution industrielle to describe what they saw in Britain and, often, hoped could occur in their own country. Still, there was a revealing lag. Why was it harder for participants to see the revolutionary qualities of industrialization than to apply the term to political upheaval?

And historians themselves have muddied the picture in several important ways. First, as we will discuss further in debate #2, it is increasingly claimed that major manufacturing changes preceded the industrial revolution in Europe, and later in Japan, by raising production levels and intensifying work habits well before “revolutionary” technology like the steam engine. A related complication: it was once assumed that modern consumerism was the result of industrialization, but now it turns out that in Western societies it was the other way around, at least in terms of an initial consumer push. So was the “revolution” just extending existing trends? And if so, was it revolutionary?

Most important, many historians, working on the British and other early cases, have painstakingly demonstrated that measurable changes were in many ways surprisingly slow—which is one reason that even scholars who adopt the word revolution admit that it takes several decades. The economic historian N.F.R. Crafts, for example, working on the exemplary British case, has substantially revised downward any notion of rapid early growth in gross domestic product, and even in industrial production more explicitly. He sees British manufacturing only growing about 1.5 percent per year in the four decades after 1760, and less than 3 percent annually in the three decades after 1800. Similar findings have been advanced for France, where it is also acknowledged that the industrial revolution took shape unusually slowly. Obviously, major technological change initially impacted only a small part of overall manufacturing, and even less of the total economy—hence the modest growth.

Given these facts—which are generally accepted now for the early instances—can one nevertheless make the claim that the term “revolution” fits? The term continues to be widely used, and while partly this is a matter of habit, the fact is that argument can still be mounted. Overnight revolution, clearly not, but massive transformation, almost certainly yes. But how can the hesitations be batted away? Some suggestions would include: think of cumulative impact over time; think of some rapid, dramatic effects at least in a few industrial sectors (including effects, through exports, on economies elsewhere); think of the sheer range of human conditions that would quickly be drawn in, beyond the manufacturing economy itself. What is the best argument that, despite some caveats, the idea of revolution still fits?

For Further Reading: Peter Temin, “Two Views of the British Industrial Revolution,” Journal of Economic History 57 (1977); David Greasley and Les Oxley, “Endogenous Growth or ‘Big Bang’: Two Views of the First Industrial Revolution,” Journal of Economic History 57 (1977); C.K. Harley and N.F.R. Crafts, “Cotton Textiles and Industrial Output Growth during the Industrial Revolution,” Economic History Review 48 (1995). And of course, the rest of this book.

From the beginning, industrialization has been a set of human changes, and historians’ understanding of this human side has informed some of the most exciting research findings of recent decades. Researchers note that among the big factors and large processes there were individual faces, some excited, some in pain. Early developers in factory industry had to depart from their parents’ habits, an approach that often required considerable personal sacrifice and generated familial strain. For example:

• In northern France in the early 1840s, Louis Motte-Bossut set up a large mechanical wool-spinning factory. His parents had run a much smaller, more traditional textile operation, manufacturing with only a simple sort of machinery; they prided themselves on being able to watch over every detail of their operation and directly supervise a small labor force. Motte-Bossut, in contrast, aspired to make France the factory equal of England—during a visit there he had illegally taken away the plans for state-of-the-art factory equipment. His large factory quickly became one of the leaders in the region, but his parents would not set foot in it, judging its scale and its riskiness to be genuinely immoral.
• In Germany, Alfred Krupp was born in 1812 into a successful merchant family in the city of Essen. His father, however, a poor businessman, had decimated the family fortune; Friedrich Krupp had twice set up steel-manufacturing plants with swindling partners, the outcome being his failure and public disgrace. Alfred was sent to work in a factory at age thirteen, while his sister labored as a governess. In 1826 Alfred began his own firm on the basis of his meager inheritance, manufacturing scissors and hand tools. No technical genius, but bent on avoiding his father’s mistakes, Krupp applied a single-minded devotion to his firm’s success. As a result, he built one of the giant metallurgical firms during the crucible decades of German industrialization.
• Chung Ju Yung was a South Korean villager who in the 1940s, at age sixteen, walked 150 miles to Seoul to take a job as a day laborer. He soon moved into modest business activity and began to help build South Korea’s industrial revolution. By the 1980s, when Chung was in his sixties, his firm, Hyundai, had 135,000 employees and forty-two overseas offices, engaging in activities ranging from automobile manufacture to the construction of huge petroleum supertankers.

The entrepreneurs who masterminded part of the industrialization process came from varied backgrounds. Rags-to-riches stories were not unknown, but the most consistent thread involved the ability to recognize the potential of new technology and to break through some of the economic habits that had dominated the previous generation. This ability was as characteristic of factory owners from business families, like Motte-Bossut, as of manufacturers from peasant or worker origins.

Factory owners formed only part of industrialization’s human story, of course. Workers also shaped the industrial revolution, and they, too, faced change, often involuntarily, in making their contribution. Children formed one category. They had always worked, in most social groups. They assisted their parents on the farm and in the household and provided some of the menial labor for craft manufacturing, often under strict employer control. They continued to work in the early factories but in a much less personal atmosphere, amid the dangers of powered machinery and the new demands for physical exertion or unrelenting pace. Government hearings held in Great Britain a few decades after the industrial revolution began there pinpointed what was probably the most shocking exploitation of child labor: Children had moved from providing supplemental labor to being beasts of burden. For the growing cotton factories in Lancashire—greedy for workers and particularly interested in the “small and nimble fingers” of children to help tend the machines at low cost—gangs of children were recruited from the urban poorhouses. Many came from families displaced from rural manual manufacturing by the expansion of the very factories they now served. As factory hands, they were housed in miserable dormitories and often beaten to spur production. Shifts of children worked day and night, alternating with time in the dormitory. As an 1836 report suggested, “It is a common tradition in Lancashire that the beds never get cold.” Not surprisingly, some children committed suicide, having been driven to physical and emotional despair.

Women were another category. Persis Edwards came to the new textile factories of New Hampshire in the 1830s from a farm background. Like most of the new factory hands, she expected to work only a few years, saving most of her wages to send back to her rural family or to accumulate a nest egg for her marriage. In 1839 she wrote to a cousin that she liked her job “very well—enjoy myself much better than I expected.” However, she complained (doubtless judging by the standards of labor she had grown up with) that the work made her feel “very much confined, could wish to have my liberty a bit more.” Another female relative commented in a letter a bit more bleakly, noting that factory women had lower status than their peers who taught school or made dresses in an artisanal shop; her personal reaction was equivocal: “I was so sick of it at first. I wished a factory had never been thought of but the longer I stay the better I like [it].”

By 1907, during the first phase of Japanese industrialization, 62 percent of the factory labor force was female, mostly drawn from distant agricultural villages. As in Europe at an earlier time, a growing population plus the decline of rural manufacturing jobs made peasant families eager to send some of their number to the cities, regardless of the stress involved in adjusting to new settings and new work. Factory recruiters contracted with fathers or brothers in Japanese peasant families, giving them a fee for the commitment of a daughter or sister to what was a system of near-slavery. Factory women worked twelve hours a day, received food and dormitory housing, and had to buy most of their goods in the company store. They were granted only a small amount of spending money, because the factory directors had found that any financial latitude prompted the women to run away. Most of the women probably hoped to return to their native village to marry a farmer, but more often they stayed in the cities, marrying a worker or falling into prostitution. An English social worker visiting Tokyo commented on the lives of these industrial women: “Female factory workers not only lived in a desert of thought but also their physical environment [was] a kind of desert as well.”

The human meaning of the industrial revolution obviously varied in all sorts of ways. Industrialization that occurred early, like Britain’s, brought the strains of sheer novelty, as techniques were explored that had no precedent. Later industrializers could copy, but they faced the competition of existing industrial nations, which imposed stresses as well. Industrialization in the context of Japanese culture had an impact different from that in France, with a distinctive mix of opportunities and problems in each case. Comparison is essential, along with the core components. At least as important is the fact that the industrial revolution varied with the type of group and type of individual involved. Factory owners could see industrialization in terms of progress and opportunity, though they might, depending on personality, have anxieties and worries as well. Newly recruited or compelled workers had less margin in their adjustments to the industrial economy, and they were readier to think in terms of deterioration and disorientation—though, as the New England factory women suggested, adjustments were possible, and real benefits were discernible. Finally, a third group, initially the largest, saw industrialization developing around them—in Britain in 1800, in Japan in 1900—and had to decide how it would alter their lives even as they remained in the countryside or labored in traditional artisanal shops or commercial businesses.

This book deals with the unfolding of the industrial revolution in its various major settings around the world and with its international impact outside leading centers. It also, at various points, suggests some of the debates the industrial revolution inspires, some purely historical though challenging, some still important in contemporary life. Key topics are the processes industrialization involved, the causes that promoted it, and the ways in which it transformed a range of international relationships. The discussion will not, however, lose sight of the human dimension: The industrial revolution meant change—a more decisive set of changes than most people had ever experienced historically. It meant opportunity, excitement, stress, and degradation, and these diverse features formed an essential part of the conversion from an agriculturally based to an industrially based society.

Technology and Work Organization

The industrial revolution constituted one of those rare occasions in world history when the human species altered its framework of existence. Indeed, the only previous development comparable in terms of sheer magnitude was the Neolithic revolution—the conversion from hunting and gathering to agriculture as the basic form of production for survival. Both the industrial revolution and the Neolithic revolution brought fundamental changes in how people worked, where they lived (settled communities rather than nomadic bands, then cities instead of rural communities and farms), what potential economic surplus was available, and how many people could be supported around the world. These changes inevitably had ramifications reaching into almost every aspect of human experience—into the habits of thought and the relations between men and women as well as into systems of production and exchange. The full story of the industrial revolution is precisely the examination of these multiple impacts.

The essence of the industrial revolution, however, was fairly simple. Stripped to its bare bones, the industrial revolution consisted of the application of new sources of power to the production process, achieved with the transmission equipment necessary to apply this power to manufacturing. And it consisted of an increased scale in human organization that facilitated specialization and coordination at levels preindustrial groupings had rarely contemplated and that often increased the intensity of work quite apart from technology.

The industrial revolution progressively replaced humans and animals as the power sources of production with motors powered by fossil fuels (supplemented by waterpower and, very recently, by nuclear power). The key invention in Europe’s industrial revolution was the steam engine, which harnessed the energy potential of coal. Later industrial revolutions also used electric and internal combustion motors (developed by the 1870s) and petroleum as well as coal. Before the industrial revolution, almost all production in manufacturing and agriculture relied on equipment powered by people or draft animals, with some small assistance from waterwheels. Except for waterwheels, used mainly to mill grain, almost all tools were designed for manual use. Animals often pulled plows for farming, but planting and harvesting were done by hand, by workers aided by simple tools like sickles. Looms for weaving cloth were powered by foot pedals, and the fibers were strung by hand. The industrial revolution progressively introduced steam or other power to the production process and steadily increased the proportion of the process accomplished by equipment without direct human guidance. Power looms thus not only replaced foot pedals but also crossed threads automatically after a worker initially attached them to the frame. Machine tending involved making sure the thread supply remained constant and dealing with snapped threads or other breakdowns; the cloth itself did not have to be touched by hand until it was gathered. Dramatic new sources of power—vastly more potent than what people and animals could provide, and transmitted to the product by semiautomatic machinery—were the technological core of the industrial revoluti...