The Industrial Age

7 Key excerpts on "The Industrial Age"

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  eBook - ePub

  World Past to World Present

  A Sketch of Global History

  • Peter N. Stearns(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Part II

  The Industrial Age

  DOI: 10.4324/9781003198185-10

  Passage contains an image

  9     The Nature of Industrial Society

  DOI: 10.4324/9781003198185-11

  There is little question that the most important single development in world history over the past 300 years was, and is, the industrial revolution and its ramifications, both within major societies and in the relationships among these societies. This chapter focuses on what this was all about, and how industrialization is still requiring adaptations even today.

  A tension exists between the importance of the industrial revolution and the challenge of fitting it into a historical survey. For while industrialization begins at an identifiable time and place – Britain, late 18th century – it ultimately became a global phenomenon, spread out over more than two centuries. This complicates placement in a chronological narrative, which is why it is useful to extract industrialization for separate examination before returning to a more standard account, beginning with the late 18th-/19th-century period itself.

  A sense of regional stages may help clarify the global angle: initial industrialization centered on Britain, then the West more generally, including the United States. Stage two opened by the end of the 19th century, embracing Russia and Japan. A further expansion involved the Pacific Rim, by the 1960s. Then the end of the 20th century saw the process clearly extend to China – quickly one of the great contemporary industrial powerhouses, India, Turkey, Brazil, Mexico: the recent list is a long one.

  The main point, ultimately, is the global involvement in industrial transformation. For what is involved here is a major alteration of a host of human behaviors, comparable only to the replacement of hunting and gathering with agriculture so many centuries in the past. (There’s an obvious invitation here to compare the patterns discussed in this chapter with those described in Chapter 2.

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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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  Steel

  A Design, Cultural and Ecological History

  • Tony Fry, Anne-Marie Willis(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  This history of invention and innovation was linked to the rise of what was to become the most powerful empire (Britain) and then the most powerful economy (United States) the world had ever seen. Technological advances dramatically increased the mechanization of “labor power,” which not only underpinned the expansionary force of the material “inputs and output” that underscored the second industrial age—the machine age—but also generated environmental and social impacts. Moreover, these developments also marked a change in the nature of time. This occurred through the circular dynamic of an ever-faster speed of industrial output that led to a speed-up of much else: life as lived; raw material utilization; increasing volumes of production; the movement and global distribution of goods; the exchange of money; the traffic of information; and the division between the colonizers and the colonized. Iron and steel were part of the very fabric of these changes, THE PROTO-MODERN 105 and to simply view them as materials is to abstract them from the complex environment from whence they came and from the ecologies of which they were elementally formative. 10 China update: Other developments and the modern Before continuing with this narrative gloss on the modem, it is worth again briefly looking elsewhere to provide a perspective that allows us to view this dominantly European history somewhat differently. Our earlier account of iron-making in early China sought to show that there is no unified narrative of the history of iron and steel or, even more problematically, of their “development.” Taking this further, it can be observed that the very notion of what is taken to be “the developed” has been a construct of modernity that was mobilized against other pathways to futures. “Development” became inscribed in economic and political theory on the presumption that a modern capitalist economy and culture was the future that all peoples in all places should have.

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  The Global West: Connections & Identities

  • Frank Kidner, Maria Bucur, Ralph Mathisen, Sally McKee(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  In many ways the world we know—running by the clock, fast paced, full of mass-pro-duced consumer goods, accepting constant change as normal—is a direct outcome of the Industrial Revolution, which began in the late eighteenth century and continued throughout the nineteenth century. Industrialization rearranged economies, altered the rhythm of daily life, and changed attitudes, first in Europe and North America, then around the world. establish control over a great deal of the world in the new imperialism. The initial effects of industrialization were usually horrible—pollution, crowded and unsanitary cities, and the disruption of family life. Peasants had lived by the natural rhythms of the seasons, sunrise, and sun-set, but the clock and precisely measured time ruled over the industrial world. By the mid-nineteenth cen-tury, some benefits of industrialization were evident— an increase in affordable consumer goods, the growth of middle-class prosperity, and, in some cases, even higher wages for industrial workers. Thus, in just half a century, industrialization altered both lifestyles and attitudes, sometimes positively, often negatively, but always permanently. 21-1a Industrialization on the European Continent In the late eighteenth century, as Britain’s manufac-tured goods began to enter continental European markets in increasing numbers, European states became alarmed. Believing that a strong economy was the basis of political power, France restricted British imports until the Eden Treaty of 1786, after which British cloth swamped the French market. Eden Treaty Treaty between France and Great Britain in 1786 permitting the import of British manufactured goods into France. Copyright 2019 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).

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  The Economics of the Industrial Revolution (Routledge Revivals)

  • Joel Mokyr(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  1 The Industrial Revolution and the New Economic History JOEL MOKYR 1 Almost a century has passed since the publication of Arnold Toynbee’s famous Lec-tures on the Industrial Revolution (1884).2 Historians of all persuasions have since come to the conclusion that the Industrial Revolution in Britain constituted a new point of departure in human history, an event of such moment to daily life that it compares to the advent of monotheism or the development of language. Conse-quently, a vast literature has emerged dealing with its various aspects, written by his-torians, economists, and sociologists, both left wing and right wing, English and foreign. Little agreement has emerged among the experts about the fundamental questions. There is, first, the mere question of definition: what exactly was the Indus-trial Revolution?3 Of the many attempts to sum up what the Industrial Revolution meant, Perkin’s is perhaps the most eloquent. In his words, it was “a revolution in men’s access to the means of life, in control of their ecological environment, in their capacity to escape from the tyranny and niggardliness of nature ... it opened the road for men to complete mastery of their physical environment, without the inesca-pable need to exploit each other” (Perkin, 1969, pp. 3-5). More changed in Britain than just the way in which goods and services were produced. The nature of family and household, the status of women and children, the role of the church, how people chose their rulers and supported their poor, what they knew about the world and what they wanted to know-all of these were transformed. It is a continuing project to discover how these noneconomic changes affected and were affected by economic change. The Revolution was, in Perkin’s irresistible phrase, a “more than industrial revolution.” By focusing on economics we isolate only a part, though a central part, of the modernization of Britain.

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  The Industrial Revolution and Work in Nineteenth Century Europe

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

    (Publisher)

  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. 2 Palmer points out that the new wealth did not depend on concentrated industry, but ‘represented the flowering of the older merchant capitalism, domestic industry and mercantilist government policies’. 3 Then came the nineteenth century: The processes of industrialization in the long run were to revolutionize the lives of men everywhere. In the short run, in the generation following the peace of Vienna, the same processes had 48 SOCIAL CHANGE IN MODERN EUROPE pronounced political effects. The Industrial Revolution, by greatly enlarging both the business and the wage-earning classes, doomed all attempts at ‘reaction/attempts, that is, to undo or check the consequences of the French Revolution. Industrialization made the flood of progress too powerful for conservatism to dam up. It hastened the growth of that worldwide economic system whose rise in the eighteenth century has already been observed. And since industrialization first took place in western Europe, one of its early effects was to widen the difference between eastern and western Europe, and so to weaken the efforts made, after the defeat of Napoleon, to organize a kind of international union of Europe. 4 This ‘industrial revolution’, in Palmer’s account, centred on the shift to machine production in factories. The combination of industrialization and the French Revolution ‘led after 1815 to the proliferation of doctrines and movements of many sorts’. 5 The ‘isms’ began; European political history took the shapes of liberalism, radicalism, republicanism, socialism, conservatism, nationalism and occasionally humanitarianism.

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  Gender in History

  Global Perspectives

  • Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  Gender in History: Global Perspectives , Third Edition. Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks. © 2022 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2022 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Companion website: www.wiley.comgowiesner-hanksgenderinhistory3e Chapter Eight The Modern World (1800 CE –2021 CE ) “Modern” has many meanings and many starting points. One starting point is about 1500, with the divide between “medieval” and “early modern” in the era of Columbus and Luther. Modern art and architecture began in the late nineteenth century, and modern (or modernist) literature did as well. But many historians would say that what really created the modern world was industrialization, which led to a dramatic increase in productivity through the use of machines and fossil fuels. Beginning about 1800, indus-try transformed the world politically, economically, socially, and physically, and allowed the nations that industrialized to dominate those that did not in a new wave of imperialism through military conquest. Together industry and imperialism facilitated greater inequality, both within one nation or region and among them. Industry facilitated long-distance migration on a huge scale and massive destruction of human life in “modern” total war-fare. It also led to growth in movements calling for social change, some with egalitarian goals and others that advocated segregation, racial exclusion, and even selective breeding. In the twentieth century, the industrial economy was augmented by a postindustrial one, in which service jobs became more common than those in production. Struggles for political liberation brought an end to empires, but not to enormous disparities of wealth, as industrial and postindustrial jobs followed low wages around the world in the ever-more-connected network of global capitalism. People continued to move as well, transforming cities into mega-cities and increasing religious, linguistic, social, and ethnic diversity and blending.

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