First Industrial Revolution

12 Key excerpts on "First Industrial Revolution"

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  Tomorrow's People and New Technology

  Changing How We Live Our Lives

  • Felix Dodds, Carolina Duque Chopitea, Ranger Ruffins(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The term ‘Industrial Revolution’ was popularised by English writer Arnold Toynbee in the late 1880s. Toynbee’s lectures on the Industrial Revolution, published in 1884, were the first and most influential attempts to historicise the transition to a machine-based economy, particularly in Britain (Wilso, 2014). This term was later used to describe not one but four distinct periods of industrial revolution throughout history.

  Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum (WEF), describes an industrial revolution as the emergence of:

  New technologies and novel ways of perceiving the world [that] trigger a profound change in social and economic structures. (Schwab, 2017A)

  Simply put, industrial revolutions are the intersection of change between emerging technologies and the way humans live and perceive life.

  According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, a revolution is a sudden, radical, or complete change, often in society and the social structure, frequently accompanied by violence. And industrialisation is the process by which an economy is transformed from a primarily agricultural focus to one based on the manufacturing of goods. Individual manual labour is often replaced by mechanised mass production, and craftsmen are replaced by assembly lines. Characteristics of industrialisation include economic growth, a more efficient division of labour, and the use of technological innovation to solve problems as opposed to dependency on conditions outside human control (Investopedia).

  It is hard to overstate the significance of the First Industrial Revolution – starting around 1760 to 1820. Up until that point, civilisation had made almost no economic progress for most of its existence, and suddenly there was a spike in social and economic progress. For most of human history, the economic growth rate was about 0.1 per cent per year, which allowed for a gradual increase in population but no growth in per capita living standards (Silver, 2012).

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  Events That Changed Great Britain Since 1689

  • Frank W. Thackeray, John E. Findling, Frank W. Thackeray, John E. Findling(Authors)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Greenwood

    (Publisher)

  1 The Industrial Revolution, c. 1750-c, 1850 INTRODUCTION The word revolution often conjures up images of mobs roving the streets of major cities, peasants burning manor houses, armed bands clashing with uniformed troops, and crowned heads rolling in the dust to the delight of their mortal enemies. By this standard, the Industrial Revolution could hardly be considered a revolution. It was not a sudden and violent over- throw of the prevailing status quo; rather, it was a slow, drawn-out process that proved to be by and large peaceful in nature. Nevertheless, the Indus- trial Revolution altered the world more profoundly than anything since the development of agriculture many thousands of years ago. What was the Industrial Revolution? Basically, it was a transformation from the production of goods by hand to the production of goods by ma- chine. It also included a growing concentration of machines within single structures or series of connected structures called factories. The Industrial Revolution began in Great Britain about the middle of the eighteenth cen- tury and gradually spread throughout the world. It continues to evolve to- day as nonindustrialized countries struggle to industrialize and industrialized ones adopt new and more efficient technologies. A unique set of circumstances combined to provide fertile ground for the Industrial Revolution in eighteenth-century Great Britain. For a start, Brit- The power looms for weaving pictured here greatly accelerated the production of textiles. Although the Industrial Revolution provided employment and a rising standard of living, factories were not as clean and orderly as this prmt might suggest. Reproduced from the Collections of the Library of Congress Industrial Revolution 3 ain was blessed with an abundance of natural resources necessary for the industrialization process.

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  The Industrial Revolution in World History

  • Peter N. Stearns(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The most revolutionary period of the industrialization process ends, however, when most workers and managers (whether in factories or smaller workshops) use some powered equipment and operate according to some of the principles of industrial organization. At this point, the larger society has gained an ability to apply industrial procedures to most branches of the economy, and although it may not have done so fully (as with the somewhat laggard French peasants), virtually every major group has faced some serious adjustment to the impact of the industrial revolution. Historically, this point has been reached seventy to one hundred years after serious technological innovation first began. Thus, for example, it is legitimate to peg the end of the U.S. industrial revolution at about 1920, when factory production overwhelmingly dominated other forms in manufacturing and when half the population lived in cities. Vast economic changes were to occur after 1920, extending the transformations the industrial revolution had wrought, but the industrial context was set.

  The definition of the industrial revolution, thus, includes a massive set of changes that begin when radical innovations in technologies and organizational forms are extensively introduced in key manufacturing sectors and that end, in the truly revolutionary phase, when these innovations are widely, though not necessarily universally, established in the economy at large. Subsequent changes, often quite unsettling, are virtually ensured, but they arise within the contours of an industrial society.

  But what, then, is an industrial society? This is a second definitional issue in expanding the idea of industrial revolution beyond its most basic elements. What kinds of social alterations followed from new machines, factories, stores, and offices? The industrial revolution was a systems change: New technology and organization boosted production and propelled manufacturing over agriculture as the industrial society’s greatest source of wealth and employment. To handle factory and related jobs, and because industrial machines began to take over some of the production previously performed in the countryside, cities grew rapidly. By 1850 half of Britain’s population lived in cities, the first such urban achievement in human history—for even the most effective agricultural societies had never been able to free more than 25 percent of a population from the rural economy.

  A systems change of this sort inevitably, though again gradually, affected every aspect of human and social life. Personal habits changed as people learned a new sense of time and discipline. The status of old people changed. The industrial revolution in Europe and the United States gave the elderly some new functions, such as babysitting for their working adult children, but it diminished their status: jobs became associated with high energy and the ability to learn new techniques, and the elderly were culturally downgraded because they seemed to lack these qualities. The industrial revolution changed the nature of war, too, as was obvious from the U.S. Civil War (1861–1865) onward: industrial war meant more rapid and massive troop movements, devastating weaponry, and greatly increased death and maiming in battle.

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  Economic History

  Made Simple

  • Bernard J. Smales(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Made Simple

    (Publisher)

  SECTION ONE THE EMERGENCE OF THE FIRST INDUSTRIAL NATION 1760-1830 CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION What is Economic History? The study of economic history, as an academic discipline, attempts to provide a systematic and integrated explanation of our economic past. It portrays man's efforts to provide himself with goods and services in order to satisfy his basic needs of food, drink, clothing and shelter. This involves a study of agriculture, industry, trade and commerce, both from the point of view of economic trends and institutional changes. Economic history frequently spills over into the allied fields of political and social history, particularly when it is concerned with the wellbeing of different groups during the course of economic change, but invariably it is much less dependent upon personality. Sir George Clark's definition of economic history is that it. . . 'traces through the past the matters with which economics is concerned. These are the thoughts and acts of men and women in those relations which have to do with their work and livelihood, such relations as those of buyers and sellers, producers and consumers, town dwellers and countrymen, rich and poor, borrowers and lenders, masters and men or, as we say nowadays, employers and employees, and unemployed too. In economic history there is never a definite starting point.' The Concept of an Industrial Revolution Most people refer to the 'Industrial Revolution' in Britain when describing the striking economic changes that took place in the British economy in the second half of the eighteenth and early part of the nineteenth centuries, when Britain was transformed from being mainly an agrarian and rural society to being increasingly an industrial and urban one. It must be remembered, however, that this period only witnessed the rise of modern industry, not the rise of industry as such, since slow and sporadic growth had been taking place long before the eighteenth century.

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  An Economic History of Modern Sweden

  • Lennart Schön(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  The two points of view complement each other to a certain extent, and it is easy to find examples of each. But as generalisations of the main vectors of growth, they are distinct and competing. While the human capital thesis stresses that demand for knowledge generally increased and that everyone obtained a greater return on long-term investment in education, the degradation thesis stresses that knowledge came to be separated from workers and concentrated among engineers and researchers in the business organisation. As a generalisation of twentieth century trends, Braverman’s thesis falls short, given that demands for knowledge and education undeniably increased in all areas. But the thesis is valid in the more limited sense that rapid restructuring rendered much of previous knowledge obsolete, replacing it with both more sophisticated skills in new areas and simplified procedures in old areas.

  Industrial transformation

  The First Industrial Revolution was a breakthrough for the factory system and brought with it growing markets and deregulation of economic policy. But it was largely dependent on agricultural trends for both demand and access to input products. Similarly, agriculture and the rural areas had continued to shape social and political conditions. However, the Second Industrial Resolution was a breakthrough for industrial society. Industry began to set the direction of social development, more clearly. The change was most pronounced in countries that industrialised fairly late in the nineteenth century and therefore underwent a rapid transition from agrarian to industrial society.

  The Second Industrial Revolution made towns the emblem of the new society. The emergence of industrial towns was supported by the fresh opportunities for mass production of goods that emerged in the late nineteenth century. Expanded railway networks and faster ships made it easier to distribute growing volumes of goods over long distances, allowing greater centralisation of production. New, more flexible systems of energy supply also contributed to the process. Access to raw materials and energy had less of an impact on the location of production facilities, while the importance of proximity to markets and skills increased. Concentration in growing cities and a rising standard of living created expanding markets for industrial goods. Growth of industrial towns was supported by the emergence of complementarity between technical advances in production and expansion of the market.

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  Management, Organisations and Artificial Intelligence

  Where Theory Meets Practice

  • Bartosz Niedzielski, Piotr Buła(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  1 Industrial revolution – from Industry 1.0 to Industry 4.0

  DOI: 10.4324/9781003184027-1

  1.1 Genesis and development of Industry 4.0

  From the evolutionary perspective, the development of Industry 4.0 started at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries, with the transition from craft and manufacture production to mechanized factory production, which became the First Industrial Revolution (Industrial Revolution 1.0). A pioneer of those early transformations was James Watt, a Scottish engineer and inventor from Glasgow, who, in the winter of 1763, received a lucrative, though difficult to complete order regarding improvements in one of the first steam pumps in the UK (Pottin & Dietz, 2018). As it turned out later, for Watt the task became the idée fixe, which did not leave him in subsequent years. The inventor received help from a friendly plumber, whose involvement and – for those times – primitive tools resulted in the design of the steam engine, which was the device’s central drive unit. Watt’s achievement, which was an improvement on the atmospheric steam engine developed by Thomas Newcomen,1 was thereby regarded as a breakthrough in industrial technology and proclaimed a worldwide industrial revolution. In recognition of his achievement, in 1769 Watt was awarded his first patent by the King of England.

  In the context of the above, it should be noted that the First Industrial Revolution, beginning around 1760 and ending around 1840, was and is an important part in the world’s economic history, which paved the way for its future development. It began an era of mechanization and the use of a number of (at the time) innovative technical inventions, primarily for the production of energy. The changes that occurred at that time also revolutionized people’s thinking about the workplace and methods of performing work. With mechanization, it was possible to produce the same things in factories eight times faster than before. As a result, for the first time in the world’s history the individual and his/her “costly” work were being substituted by steam machines driven by cheap coal. From the economic point of view, this substitution led to reductions in the earlier costs of production and an almost exponential growth in work efficiency, which was reflected in related profits. Work automation related to the application of the steam machine in the mining industry, or later in textiles, was the largest breakthrough in the history of production. Importantly, the achieved effect was further strengthened by the discoveries that humanity experienced at the beginning of the 19th century, primarily James Neilson’s2 “hot blast” or George Stephenson’s3

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  Economic Growth

  • Steven Durlauf, L. Blume, Steven Durlauf, L. Blume(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Industrial Revolution The Industrial Revolution is an ambiguous term, freighted with multiple meanings, interpreted differently by different writers. First, it describes the extraordinary transformation the British economy experienced between 1760 and 1850. In these years Britain moved from being a largely self-sufficient, self-sustaining, and still principally agrarian society, to being an economy where a substantial fraction of food, raw materials and energy was imported, or mined from the earth as coal, and where the great majority of the population was engaged in industry and commerce. But second, and more importantly, it has come to mean the general move in the world economy in about 1800 from the pre-industrial economy, which experienced extremely low rates of efficiency growth, to the modern economy, where efficiency growth is rapid and persistent. That shift from low rates of efficiency advance to rapid rates had nothing inherently to do with industry or industrialization. Efficiency advance in agriculture has been as rapid as in the rest of the economy since 1800. So for the more general use of the term ‘Industrial Revolution’ the ‘industrial’ component is a misnomer, but a misnomer that we have to live with. The Industrial Revolution of the historians The ‘Industrial Revolution’ more traditionally describes a specific period in British history, most commonly taken as 1760 to 1850. In 1760 Britain was a prosperous but still heavily agrarian economy, with half the labour force employed in agriculture. Foreign trade was insubstantial. Britain was largely self-sufficient in staple foods. The main imports were Mediterranean or tropical products such as sugar and spices, wines, raisins, coffee and tea. The main export was woollen cloth produced by domestic weavers or handloom workshops. London was already a huge city with over 750,000 inhabitants, but the other towns in England circa 1760 were mostly small.

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  Shaping World History

  • Mary Kilbourne Matossian(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  1 The growth process was gradual, not explosive. It depended upon the use of new technologies that intensified resource use.

  Certain regions in England, notably Lancastershire, led the way. By the early nineteenth century other regions in western Europe had also become centers of innovation: the Rhineland, Alsace, Flanders, Swiss alpine areas, Salerno, and Moscow-Ivanovo. Industrial growth was not a coordinated national effort.

  During the first wave of technological innovation, mechanics with a hands-on knowledge of machines made small improvements in them. James Watt of Scotland was an artisan who made and sold calculating instruments. He is deservedly famous for improving the steam engine, but others without scientific training, such as George Stephenson, also made important contributions.

  The Search for Explanations

  Many scholars have proposed plausible theories to explain the First Industrial Revolution (c. 1780–1870), but all these theories have proved disappointing. The First Industrial Revolution was not driven by overseas commerce, as Floud and McCloskey discovered.2 Nor was it driven primarily by an abundant supply of cheap labor; sustained population growth occurred many times in the past without an Industrial Revolution. In fact, in the case of printing with movable type, invented in 1450, there was a labor shortage at the time: Gutenberg sought a means to replace scarce labor.

  It is true that in Great Britain population growth and industrial growth moved upward together. On a world history scale, this burst of population growth was extraordinary. Did it have any causal connection with the Industrial Revolution?

  By about 1600 Great Britain had become a great commercial power. It achieved dominance in European commerce by 1700. The British navy ruled the seas, facilitating commerce abroad. By 1769, when Watt made his famous invention, many British businessmen were rich, savvy, and ambitious.

  Moreover, Britain already had large and advanced communication and transportation systems, that is, infrastructure. This infrastructure included print shops, canals, all-weather roads, bridges, vehicles, and ships. Road improvements made possible regular postal service.

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  Western Civilization

  Beyond Boundaries

  • Thomas F. X. Noble, Barry Strauss, Duane Osheim, Kristen Neuschel(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  Scientific and rational methods altered production processes, removing them from the home—where entire families had often participated—to less personal workshops and factories. Significant numbers of workers left farming to enter mining and manufactur- ing, and major portions of the population moved from rural to urban environments. Machines replaced or supplemented manual labor. * Mechanical production often meant that skilled artisans lost not only their livelihood but their craft identity as well; it also drew women and children out of the home and into factories. New modes of production offered unprecedented opportunities for manufac- turers, merchants, and entrepreneurs to create and amass wealth at levels previously unimaginable. Mechanization also caused pollution and environmental destruction. The Industrial Transformation of Europe, 1750–1850 Preconditions for Industrialization ◆ ◆ What factors allowed Europe to industrialize before the rest of the world? New Modes of Production ◆ ◆ Which inventions appear to have been the most important in launching industrialization? Social, Cultural, and Environmental Impacts ◆ ◆ What impact did industrialization have on the environment and on social classes? Responses to Industrialization ◆ ◆ What did workers gain and lose as a result of industrialization, and how did they respond? Chapter Overview 20 *Phyllis Deane, The First Industrial Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), p. 1. Copyright 2012 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.

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  Design and Culture

  A Transdisciplinary History

  • Maurice Barnwell(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Purdue University Press

    (Publisher)

  1 INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 1750–1870 Steam, Iron, and Glass FROM FIELD TO FACTORY Agriculture was the prime economic force in Britain for centuries — its dominance began to wane with the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. 1 Thomas Carlyle, a young, unknown Scottish writer, composed “Signs of the Times,” which was published in the Edinburgh Review in June 1829. The phrase found popular support among prominent novelists of the day. “A lengthy era of rural, agronomic civilization was chang-ing precipitously. Opinions and beliefs that had seemed fixed certainties and were almost univer-sally shared became broadly challenged. Profound changes in science and technology fostered and fueled stunningly swift changes in the ways in which multitudes of people gained their living, organized their lives, and conducted their expe-rience.” 2 Carlyle’s concerns were repeated in his later works Chartism (1839) and Past and Pres-ent (1843). Carlyle was not alone. Three other distin-guished writers, Friedrich Engels, William Cob-bett, and Benjamin Disraeli, as well as novelists Thomas Hardy, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gas-kell, and George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), were also critics of the times. All foresaw the dra-matic and fundamental changes that would be created by industrial capitalism and that “its im-pact was not only economic, but also cultural, bringing the nation to the very brink of a preci-pice.” 3 Here is but one representative quote from Thomas Carlyle: Were we required to characterise this age of ours by any single epithet, we should be tempted to call it, not an Heroical, Devo-tional, Philosophical, or Moral Age, but, above all others, the Mechanical Age. It is the Age of Machinery, in every outward and inward sense of that word; the age which, with its whole undivided might, forwards, teaches and practises the great art of adapt-ing means to ends. Nothing is now done directly, or by hand; all is by rule and calcu-lated contrivance.

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  The Industrial Revolution and Work in Nineteenth Century Europe

  • Lenard R. Berlanstein(Author)
  • 2003(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Not long ago, historians thought, and taught, a Europe peopled mainly by an immobile, traditional peasant mass, dominated by church and state, which broke apart after 1750 with an industrial revolution followed by a series of democratic revolutions. THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION AND WORK 47 Witness the 1950 edition of Robert R. Palmer’s first-rate survey, A History of the Modern World. 1 Palmer’s presentation of modern Europe outside of Italy begins with the fifteenthcentury New Monarchs (Henry VII, Louis XI and others) who established royal power and stable government, and thus laid a political foundation for a commercial revolution. The commercial revolution includes an expansion of cottage industry, . in which rural people produced at home on orders from local merchants. As a result of rising prices, peasants prospered and landlords faltered in western Europe; in eastern Europe, however, landlords themselves retained control of production, thereby taking advantage of price rises while subordinating manorial workers to their personal control. Palmer’s reconstruction continues: as monarchs fortified their states for war, conquest and internal control, worldwide exploration and the growth of scientific thinking combined to generate prosperity and modern ways: the greatest social development of the eighteenth century, with the possible exception of the progress of knowledge, was the fact that Europe, or the Atlantic region of Europe north of Spain, became incomparably more wealthy than any other part of the world. The new wealth, in the widest sense, meaning conveniences in every form, was produced by the increasing scientific and technical knowledge, which in turn it helped to produce; and the two together, more wealth and more knowledge, helped to form one of the most far-reaching ideas of modern times, the idea of progress.

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  Debating the Industrial Revolution

  • Peter N. Stearns(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  3 Initial explanations: Working the Industrial Revolution into British and European history T his chapter sketches the history of early efforts to explain industrialization, and more generally to work the Industrial Revolution into serious historical coverage. The goal is to provide a baseline for understanding the more recent evolution of historical explanations and the emergence of more focused debates. Early historical treatment directly raised three kinds of causation questions that set the stage for later analysis. First, was there a temptation to jump too readily at some explanations that might turn out to involve more correlation than cause? This might be an understandable confusion in getting started in analysis, but it also explains why more recent analysis had to change the focus considerably. Second, was the list of components adequate? Early treatments sought to identify possibly relevant ideas about policy; investment sources; labor sources; and developments in the transportation field. What did this list leave out? Did it generate a useful sense of prioritization among the core factors? And finally, inevitably, geography again: all the early treatments assumed that industrialization was a Western phenomenon, and some paid attention only to Britain. What were some early differences between a Western and a British approach, in looking for causes, and what limitations resulted from leaving out the rest of the world? 35 DEBATING THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 36 The Industrial Revolution entered quite gradually into standard historical coverage. The term itself was introduced into England by British intellectual Arnold Toynbee only in the 1880s (though German Marxists had identified it earlier). Even after that, however, most historians of Britain and modern Europe preferred to focus on political events and major wars and diplomatic alignments.

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