The Industrial Revolution

- Disagreement and over when the industrial revolution begins and ends

- Smaller revolutions?

- Hobsbawn 1780-1840

- Ashton 160-1830

- Britain was the first industrial nation

- Morgan argues that the period 1750-1850 was the most important watershed in the economic and social development of Britian

- "Good shape" for the industrial revolution

- Economically susceptible to change 

- Bank of England established

- Consumer Revolution - wage increases

- Developed manufacturing sector than European neighbours

16th/17th-century commercial agriculture increase

- What was the industrial revolution?

1. Birth of industrial Britain, characterised by structural change

2. Agricultural to urban? Too simplistic?

3. 'Short, Sharp, Shock' - dramatic and chaotic

4. National output and "growth"

5. Rise in annual national output

- Growth of the industrial economy enabled by population increases

- England 5.7m (m=million) 1751, 8.7m 1801, 16.8m 1851

- Rapidly growing urban centres

- 1850, life expectancy: 40

- Age of first marriages was higher = fertility increased

- Population growth and decline linked to preventive (moral restraint) and positive checks

- Relationship between demographic growth and food resources

- Geometric growth (1,2,3,4,5,16) vs arithmetic growth (1,2,3,4,5,6)

- People were struggling to catch up with demographic growth

- Why did people live longer (+3 years over 100 years):
1. Medical provision increased
2. Medicine practised differently

- But not a linear (march of progress)
1. Access to health care still related to status
2. Epidemics - TB and Cholera in particular, peer sanitation and drainage

- Vaccine pioneered by Edward Jenner

- Trial and Error approach

- Widely available after 1500

- Increase in consumption of soap - but in industry rather than homes

- Unconvincing?

- Poor sewage

- Back to back houses

- Overcrowded living

- Soot and smoke

- Rise in illegitimacy - was this part of the 'revolution'

- Edward Shorter: Girls working in factories, increasingly mobile, away from home, from familial 'protection' - sexual protection

- Increased opportunities for social liaisons, but female workers still circumscribed by traditional gender roles, still under rule of father

- Argument regarding the increase in legitimate more convincing

- 1,113 factories by 1833

- Broadly speaking, shift from wool to cotton production

- Manchester = 'cottonopolis'

- Driven by desire to create profit and boost productivity 

- New ways of working introduced: regulation, surveillance, obedience

- Regular employment, creation of wage economy 

- Work divided skilled/unskilled. Labour divided on basis of skill/gender/wages

- Factory work generally dangerous and monotonous

- 1844 Factory Act

- Fly shuttle 1733 (John Kay)

- Spinning Jenny 1764 (James Hargreaves)

- Spinning and weaving gendered

- Manufacturer

- Patrician

- Built an industrial village for workers, Sailtaire

- Market gardens, allotments and shops

- Good work in factory rewarded

- Believed it was better for children to work in factories

- Argued that operating machinery less arduous than agricultural work

- Not everyone enthusiastic about industrial revolution e.g. The Luddites

- Factory legislation = slow

- 1833 Factory Act

- 1847 Factory Act

- Working with coal = duty and dangerous

- Although coal a finite resource - Victorians didn't see it like this

- Shift from organic to inorganic economy

-1750-coal 60% England/Wales energy needs 90% by 1850

- Great impact on the iron industry

- Dramatic increase in the production of pig iron

- 28,000 tons in 1750, 180,000 tons by 1800

- Growth in metal working

- Goldstone: Coal only pit to work in economy through the application of technology

Good

- Beneficial to the nation AND the individual

- Work was inside and to some extent regulated (Factory Act

Bad

- Rapid industrialisation and urbanisation were changing the fabric of society to the detriment of the working classes (Toynbee)

- Slums and the relentless discipline of the factory