$Unique_ID{how04932} $Pretitle{} $Title{World Civilizations: Industrialization And Western Global Hegemony The Industrial Revolution} $Subtitle{} $Author{Stearns, Peter N.; Adas, Michael;Schwartz, Stuart B.} $Affiliation{} $Subject{new revolution industrial industrialization governments political western social began early see pictures see figures } $Date{1992} $Log{See Surrender At Sedan*0493201.scf } Title: World Civilizations: Industrialization And Western Global Hegemony Book: Chapter 29: Industrialization of the West, 1760-1914 Author: Stearns, Peter N.; Adas, Michael;Schwartz, Stuart B. Date: 1992 The Industrial Revolution The essence of the Industrial Revolution was technological change, particularly the application of coal-powered engines (or, later, engines powered by other fossil fuels) to the production process. The new engines replaced people and animals as the key sources of energy in many branches of production. They were joined by new production equipment that could apply power to manufacturing through more automatic processes. Thus spindles were invented that wrapped fiber automatically into thread, and looms mixed thread automatically without direct human intervention. Hammering and rolling devices allowed application of power machinery to metals. And while in early industrialization textile and metallurgical production received primary attention, engines were also used in sugar refining, printing, and other processes. The British Industrial Revolution resulted from a host of factors, including favorable natural resources and strong capital reserves won from previous trade. Industrialization was fed, also, by the late 18th-century crisis. Population pressure forced innovations at all social levels. Enlightenment beliefs encouraged faith in progress and in human ability to dominate nature. They also sanctioned a devotion to improving material life. Here were motivations for inventing new processes and applying them widely. At the same time, the Industrial Revolution built on previous trends in Western society, including the large manufacturing sector and the huge advantages in world trade. Earlier commercialization played a role; British aristocrats were unusually tolerant of commerce, which helped center initial changes in the British Isles. Prior development of science set a basis for artisans to widen their efforts at technical innovation. Governments, already committed to policies of economic growth, also supported industrialization by instituting laws encouraging new inventions and new trading and banking systems. Origins Of Industrialization, 1770-1840 The key inventions of early industrialization developed in Britain during the 18th century. Automatic machinery in textiles was initially intended for manual use in the domestic system. Then in the 1770s the Scottish artisan James Watt devised a steam engine that could be used for production, and the Industrial Revolution was off and running. Within a decade in Britain, the domestic production of key materials, such as cotton thread, was converted to factory-housed machines, at the expense of thousands of home workers, mostly women. Changes of this sort spurred the creation of new industries, to build machines, and also the rapid expansion of coal mining to fuel the new productive fires. Additional inventions followed on the heels of the original set, for a key feature of the Industrial Revolution was recurrent technological change. Early machine spindles were expanded, so that a given worker could supervise even vaster output. American inventors devised a production system of interchangeable parts, initially for rifles, that helped standardize and so mechanize the production of machinery itself. Metallurgy advanced by use of coal and coke, instead of charcoal, for smelting and refining, allowing the creation of larger furnaces and greater output. Technological change was quickly applied to transportation and communication, essential areas now that there were more goods to be moved and more distant markets to contact. The development of the telegraph, steam shipping, and the railway, all early in the 19th century, provided new speed in the movement of information and goods. These inventions were vital in facilitating a new stage in Western penetration of world affairs; they also kept the Industrial Revolution going in the West, by promoting mass-marketing techniques and providing direct orders for rails and other industrial goods. While technological change lay at the heart of industrialization, several basic economic changes were inherent in the process as well. The Industrial Revolution depended on improvements in agriculture. Industrialization concentrated increasing amounts of manufacturing in cities, where power sources could be brought together with labor. City growth was dizzying during the first decades of industrialization, with sleepy villages - such as Manchester, England - growing to cities of several hundred thousand people. This kind of growth depended on better agricultural production, accomplished through improved equipment and seeds, plus growing use of fertilizers. Better agriculture freed up a growing percentage of the labor force for nonagricultural pursuits, and fairly soon in vigorous industrializers, such as Britain, manufacturing output surpassed that of farming in importance. Industrialization also meant a factory system. Steam engines had to be concentrated, for their power could not be widely diffused until the later application of electricity. Factory labor separated work from the home - one of the basic human changes inherent in the Industrial Revolution. It also allowed manufacturers to introduce greater specialization of labor and more explicit rules and discipline, which along with the noisy machines permanently changed the nature of human labor. Industrialization required new amounts of capital, which meant steady improvements in banking, and it required new marketing systems to handle rapidly growing output. Prices of manufactured goods fell because of new technologies that encouraged mass sales. The bigger industrial concerns began to set up nationwide, even with international sales organizations. Shops spread to villages where only occasional peddlers had previously brought in goods - as peasants began to produce more for urban markets, they tended to specialize and, thus, to buy clothing and equipment they once had made themselves. The first department stores opened in Paris in the mid-1830s, another response to the need for sophisticated marketing. Overall, industrialization also promoted the development of increasingly large firms, though small operations might also benefit for a time from the Industrial Revolution's energy. Through the 19th century, large firms tended to promote more efficient use of engines and equipment, while also amassing needed stores of capital and developing efficient marketing and purchasing arrangements. Industrialization gradually promoted an economic organization that featured concentration, bureaucratic management, and a certain impersonality in directing the labor force. Once Britain launched industrialization, other Western nations quickly saw the need to imitate. Britain's industrial power helped the nation hold out against Napoleon and led to huge profits for successful businessmen by the early 19th century. Hence both governments and individual entrepreneurs, in places such as Belgium, Germany, or New England, soon rushed to copy. Since most of the general factors that permitted industrialization were present in these areas as well, including population pressure and an ideology of material progress, industrialization proceeded relatively swiftly throughout much of the Western world. On the European continent, French revolutionary laws helped unleash industrialization by destroying local restrictions on trade, protecting private property, and abolishing artisan guilds that had often tried to defend older production techniques. With guilds and manors destroyed, propertyless workers were commodities, to be used and paid as the market required. Belgium and France began to industrialize in the 1820s, the United States and Germany followed soon thereafter. Industrialization did not immediately sweep all before it, even in Britain; artisan production actually expanded for a time as cities grew, and rural labor remained vital. But the forms of the Industrial Revolution gained ground steadily once implanted in the West, and factory workers and their managers became evermore important minorities in the general labor force. The Disruptions Of Industrial Life The causes of Western industrialization should not mislead us. Even though the phenomenon can be explained through earlier shifts in Western business, outlook, government policy, and labor supply - shifts that also explain why the Industrial Revolution occurred first in the West and often proved difficult to reproduce in other civilizations - the changes involved were massive, and they did not come easily. The Industrial Revolution involved huge movements of people from countryside to city. Families were disrupted in this process, as young adults proved to be the prime migrants. Cities themselves, poorly equipped to begin with and now crowded beyond all precedent, became hellholes for many new residents. Health conditions worsened in poor districts because of packed housing and inadequate sanitation. Crime increased for a time. New social divisions opened up, as middle-class families sought to move away from the center-city poor, beginning a pattern of suburbanization that continued into the later 20th century. Work became more unpleasant for many people. Not only was it largely separated from family, the new machines and factory rules compelled a rapid pace and coordination that pulverized traditional values of leisurely, quality production. First in Britain, then elsewhere, groups of work- ers responded to the new machines by outright attack; for example, Luddite protests, named after a mythical British machine-breaker called Ned Ludd, failed to stop industrialization, but they showed the stress involved. Many busi- ness and farm families were also appalled by the noise, dirt, and sheer novelty involved in the Industrial Revolution. The early Industrial Revolution also forced new constraints on traditions of popular leisure. Factory owners, bent on getting as much work as possible from their labor force to help pay for expensive machines, deliberately reduced recreational aspects of work: They tried to ban singing, napping, drinking, and other customary frivolities on the job. Off the job, new business-led city governments, backed by expanding police forces, attacked popular festivals, animal contests, and gambling in the name of proper discipline and good order. Attempts were made to reduce social drinking as well, but they largely failed in light of workers' insistence on some recreational outlets. Nevertheless, the Industrial Revolution considerably reduced key leisure traditions and community ties, which made the early phases of the experience still more disorienting and grim for many people involved. Family life changed, and in changing revealed some of the wider stresses of the industrialization process. Middle-class people quickly moved to enhance the redefinition of the family already begun in the early modern centuries: The family for them served as an image of affection and purity. Children and women were to be sheltered from the storms of the new work world. Women, traditionally active partners to merchants, now withdrew from formal jobs. They gained new roles in caring for children and the home, and their moral stature in many ways improved, but their sphere was more radically separate from that of men than had been true before. Children, too, were redefined. The middle class led in seeing education, not work and apprenticeship, as the logical role for children to prepare them for a complex future and, it was hoped, to maintain their innocence until they were prepared to cope with business or professional life. The working-class family changed as well, though it could not afford all these indulgences. Young children, increasingly unnecessary on the job, were often sent to school. Women worked from adolescence until marriage, when they were often pulled away because of the demands of shopping, home care, and motherhood. Even when on the job, working-class women were more likely to be sent into domestic service in middle-class households than to factories, though there was an important minority of female factory hands. The working class, in sum, developed its own version of separate spheres, in part simply to compensate for the new distinction between jobs and home. Family life became more important than ever before, to provide homemaking services but also to offer some hope of emotional satisfaction in a confusing world. Marriages encountered new stresses, but the marriage rate went up fairly steadily. The changes in family roles and values show how deeply the Industrial Revolution could reach into personal life, particularly for factory workers but also for other groups. The changes were not all bad, and many people found ways to use family satisfactions or community institutions such as neighborhood taverns to help compensate for a loss of power at work. Yet considerable confusion and anxiety remained; even businessmen, actively building the new industrial world, might be fearful of the effects of change. As a leading French industrialist noted, "Progress is not necessarily progressive. If it were not inevitable, it might be better to stop it." Industrial Revolution And Political Revolution The strands of political and industrial upheaval, initially somewhat separate, began to intertwine in the West by the 1830s. Both revolutions had of course responded to some of the same changes and crises in Western society. But their courses had not at first overlapped: Industry centered in Britain where politics was relatively stable, while political revolution elsewhere had actually detracted from economic development. Yet there were important links. In the first place, political revolution helped clear the way for industrialization in places such as France. Revolutionaries did not deliberately plan industrial development, but many of them did hope for a more favorable business climate. By attacking the aristocracy, they increased the prestige of business life. By abolishing manorialism and guilds they created a labor force more open to market activities and freer to move to new work locations. Standardized law codes and more rational systems of measurement also promoted economic change. As in Russia early in the 20th century, the West's era of revolution resulted from the slowness of change at the top and created the conditions for more rapid innovation thereafter. The early phases of industrialization, in turn, had strong political implications. Groups that benefited from industrial change usually sought a growing voice in government. This was a key pressure behind the British Reform Bill of 1832 that enfranchised the middle classes and gave them a means of representing their own interests in Parliament and in city administrations. A key result was a new tariff system in Britain that reduced protection for agriculture (and by facilitating food imports helped keep wages low). Other groups became more politically active as a slightly less obvious adjustment to industrialization. Lawyers, for example, and in many places also doctors, sought through political life a prestige and income that would help them compensate for the growing wealth and prestige of leading businessmen. Professional groups also pressed governments to provide better training and licensing facilities, in order to reduce competition from "unauthorized" practitioners. Governments at various levels had to consider the process of industrialization in other respects. All major Western states shifted their economic policies to some extent during the first half of the 19th century. Some were not eager to embrace the Industrial Revolution outright, but all saw the need to sponsor certain activities that would help keep pace with Britain. All Western governments, for example, encouraged railway development; Prussia built many lines directly, while the United States government gave large land grants to promote a national rail system. All governments began to organize technical fairs and to promote engineering and science education. Most governments took an interest in education more generally, on grounds that a more literate work force would be more productive. Thus France, soon after the Revolution of 1830, began to encourage (though not yet require) primary schools throughout the nation, while state governments in the northern United States moved soon thereafter to make education compulsory. Another area that cried out for government attention involved urban conditions. Again by the 1830s, governments began to build new sewer systems, to promote some housing regulation and in general to launch the process of making the new cities minimally habitable. They also developed formal urban police forces, another vital extension of government power. Important groups in the 19th century argued, in one version of the new liberal movement, that government activities should on balance decline. Many revolutionaries urged that governments should pull out of religious affairs, reduce economic regulation in the interest of promoting free competition, and even let the poor fend for themselves. In fact, only two Western governments actually scaled down their activities in the early 19th century: Britain and Norway. Other governments responded to political and industrial pressures by rebalancing their functions - with a net increase in the government role. Political and industrial revolution intertwined in one final respect in the first half of the 19th century. Some lower-class groups, already mobilized through an interest in political rights, began to turn to the government as a means of compensating for industrial change and to revolt when the government seemed unresponsive. Artisans and workers in Britain generated a new movement to gain the vote in the 1830s and 1840s; this Chartist movement hoped that a democratic government would regulate new technologies and promote popular education. Artisans in France and Germany increased their revolutionary ardor because of their growing fears of displacement through industrialization. The political mood of the West became more fervent by the 1840s under the twin impact of unfulfilled popular revolutionary demands and the pressures and anxieties promoted by early industrialization. The 1848 Revolutions The result was a final, extraordinary wave of revolutions in 1848 and 1849. Paris was again the center. In a popular uprising that began in February 1848, the French monarchy was once again expelled, this time for good, and a democratic republic was briefly established. Urban artisans pressed for serious social reform - perhaps some version of socialism and certainly government-supported jobs for the unemployed; groups of women schoolteachers, though fewer in number, agitated for the vote and other rights for women. This revolution, then, started on a more radical basis than had the great uprising of 1789, with a wider array of social demands and a democratic, rather than simply liberal, political platform. Moreover, revolution quickly spread to other centers. Major revolts occurred in Germany, Austria, and Hungary. Revolutionaries in these areas sought liberal constitutions to modify conservative monarchies; artisans pressed for social reforms that would restrain industrialization; peasants sought a complete end to manorialism. Revolts in central Europe also pressed for nationalist demands, with German nationalists seeking the unity of their country, and various nationalities in Austria-Hungary, including Slavic groups, seeking greater autonomy. A similar liberal-nationalist revolt occurred in various parts of Italy. Significant agitation developed in other parts of western Europe. The revolutionary fires burned only briefly. Nowhere did revolution win the kind of success the great French Revolution had achieved, partly because significant political changes had already been introduced. The social demands put forth by artisans and some factory workers, either for socialist gains or for a return to older guild structures, were quickly put down; not only conservatives but middle-class liberals opposed these efforts. Nationalist agitation also failed for the moment, as the armies of Austria-Hungary and Prussia restored the status quo to central Europe and Italy. Democracy persisted in France, but a nephew of the great Napoleon soon replaced the liberal republic with an authoritarian empire that lasted until 1870. Peasant demands were met, and serfdom was now fully abolished throughout western Europe. Many peasants, uninterested in other gains, now supported conservative forces. [See Surrender At Sedan: Louis Napoleon's letter of surrender at Sedan - Painted by Anton Von Werner.] The substantial failure of the revolutions of 1848 drew the revolutionary era in western Europe to a close. Failure taught many liberals and working-class leaders that revolution was too risky; more gradual methods should be used instead. Improved transportation reduced the chance of food crises, the traditional trigger for revolution in Western history. Bad harvests in 1846 and 1847 had driven up food prices and helped promote insurgency in the cities, but famines of this sort did not recur in the West. Many governments also installed better riot control police. The ongoing social changes brought by industrialization also played a role in ending political revolution in the West. The artisan class, whose sense of organization and older values had been crucial to revolts, began to decline as factory industry continued to gain ground. Artisans did not disappear, but they lost some of their sense of mission. Many began to concentrate on personal advancement, or a solid but moderate craft trade unionism that sought improvements within the system rather than a different system. While many grievances continued on the part of new and old social groups, the belief that political upheaval could stem the tide of industrialization began to fade. Finally, the experience of decades of recurrent revolution, plus industrialization itself, created new social divisions that made uprisings more difficult. The period of revolution had been predicated on old-style social divisions that pitted commoners against the privileges of the aristocracy, and on other institutions, such as unreconstructed monarchies or established churches that did not give ordinary people a voice. Divisions of interest obviously existed among commoners, depending on wealth or on urban as opposed to rural residence, but there could also be some shared interest in attacking the structures of the old regime. By 1850 an industrial class structure had come to predominate. Earlier revolutionary gains had reduced the legal privileges of the aristocracy, while the rise of business had eroded aristocrats' economic dominance. With industrialization social structure came to rest less on privilege and birth, and more on money. Key divisions by 1850 pitted middle-class property owners against workers of various sorts. The old alliances that had produced the revolutions were now dissolved. New social cleavages would produce important unrest, but not in the classic revolutionary mold. An era of transition had ended. Through intended and unanticipated results of earlier revolutions and the steady gains of an industrial economy, a new society had been created in the West - a society that, somewhat surprisingly, made revolution almost obsolete in the West from 1850 through the later 20th century.