Explaining the Industrial Revolution

• The worldwide setting for this epochal economic shift is a significant growth in the human population from around 375 million in 1400 to over 1 billion in the early nineteenth century. As wood and charcoal, the main industrial fuels, got scarcer and the world's population grew, a developing energy crisis arose, most notably in Western Europe, China, and Japan, as wood and charcoal, the primary industrial fuels, became scarcer and the world's population grew.

• Of course, all of this had a growing influence on the environment. Coal, iron ore, petroleum, guano, and other nonrenewable raw resources were massively extracted to feed and fuel industrial machines, altering the landscape in many areas. Rivers became toxic cesspools as sewers and industrial garbage poured into them.

• Access to massive new sources of energy, on the other hand, resulted in a massive growth in the output of products and services. Between 1750 and 1900, industrial production in Britain, where the Industrial Revolution began, grew fiftyfold.

• Early hints of the Industrial Revolution's technological inventiveness may be found in eighteenth-century Britain when a range of inventions transformed cotton textile production. However, it was not until the nineteenth century that Europeans in general, and the British in particular, began to decisively outperform the rest of the globe.

Why Europe

• For thousands of years, Europeans have been defined by a restless, innovative, and freedom-loving culture that has its origins in the aristocratic warlike cultures of early Indo-European invaders. 4 While acknowledging the West's unique characteristics, many global historians have questioned claims that Europe alone was destined to lead the path to contemporary economic life.

• While there is still much dispute, many current historians believe the Industrial Revolution erupted suddenly and abruptly between 1750 and 1850. (see Map 17.1). Two interconnected variables explain why this process took place in Europe and not elsewhere. One can be seen in specific patterns of internal European growth that have promoted innovation.

• Asia, home to the world's wealthiest and most sophisticated cultures, was the first stop on European exploratory expeditions. “Not so much about bringing things European to the Chinese, but more about getting outstanding Chinese innovations to us,” German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) advised Jesuit missionaries in China.

• Europeans discovered a silver windfall in the Americas, allowing them to trade in Asian marketplaces. They also discovered lumber, fish, corn, potatoes, and a variety of other resources to support a burgeoning population. Later, slave-produced cotton provided low-cost raw materials to the growing textile industry, white sugar, which was also produced with slave labor, provided low-cost calories to European workers.

• Thus, a background for comprehending Europe's Industrial Revolution is provided by the confluence of new, highly marketed, competitive European cultures with a unique worldwide network created by them.

The Middle Class

• Members of the amorphous group known as the middle class reaped the greatest benefits from industrialization. This middle class included highly rich manufacturing and mine owners, bankers, and merchants at its top echelons. Buying country estates, securing seats in Parliament, and sending their sons to Oxford, such rising merchants easily integrated into aristocratic society.

• As “shopping” — a novel term in eighteenth-century Britain — became a key pastime for the middle classes, they were also supposed to be the moral centers of family life, the instructors of “respectability,” and the administrators of home spending. Homemaking, child-rearing, charity endeavors, and “refined” pastimes like needlework and music were all characterized by an “ideology of domesticity.”

• As Britain's industrial economy grew, it also spawned a substantial lower middle class, which included clerks, salesmen, bank tellers, hotel employees, secretaries, telephone operators, police officers, and others engaged in the burgeoning service industry.

Social Protest

• Industrial life “was a rocky wilderness, which they had to make habitable by their efforts,” according to laborers. 21 These attempts came in a variety of shapes and sizes. Around 1 million workers, primarily craftsmen, had established a variety of "friendly societies" by 1815. These working-class self-help organizations offered illness insurance by collecting dues from members.

• Socialist ideas of different types increasingly spread among the working class, challenging capitalist society's assumptions. A rich British cotton textile manufacturer, Robert Owen (1771–1858), advocated for the development of tiny industrial communities where employees and their families would be properly treated.

• The combined effect of Europe's industrial, political, and scientific revolutions found expression in his writings. Both the socioeconomic conditions against which Marx railed and the vast riches he believed would enable socialism were generated as a result of industrialization.

• It was a great, powerful, prophetic, utopian vision of human freedom and community that inspired socialist groups of workers and intellectuals in the second half of the nineteenth century, amid the dismal hardness of Europe's industrialization.

• Such sentiments resonated among more radical trade unionists and some middle-class intellectuals in Britain in the late nineteenth century, and much more so in a rapidly industrializing Germany and elsewhere. The British working-class movement, on the other hand, was not outwardly revolutionary at the time.