Table of Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS .............................................................................................................. 1

INTRODUCTION ..................................................................................................................... 2

CHAPTER I: OVERVIEW OF THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION IN BRITAIN ................................ 3

OVERVIEW....................................................................................................................................... 3
THE TEXTILE INDUSTRY ....................................................................................................................... 4
OTHER INDUSTRIES AND INVENTIONS .................................................................................................... 5

CHAPTER II: WHY IT STARTED IN BRITAIN .......................................................................... 6

CHAPTER III: EFFECTS ON THE BRITISH SOCIETY ................................................................ 8

WORKING CONDITIONS ...................................................................................................................... 8

CHILD LABOUR.................................................................................................................................. 9
LIVING CONDITIONS ......................................................................................................................... 10
URBANISATION ............................................................................................................................... 10

CHAPTER IV: REACTION TO THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION .............................................. 11

THE LUDDITES ................................................................................................................................ 11

THE GOVERNMENT’S RESPONSE ......................................................................................................... 12

CONCLUSION ....................................................................................................................... 13

BIBLIOGRAPHY..................................................................................................................... 14

ANNEX................................................................................................................................. 15
 Introduction

Modern life has a series of core characteristics that, because of how fundamental they are, are
sometimes regarded as being general constants of human history, but this is not at all the case.
Actually, more often than not, the converse holds true. If we look throughout history, we find
that things like the modern rate of change, the scientific mindset or the predominantly urban
population either did not exist at all or were weakly developed. It is relatively recent that such
aspects gained their current form, and, maybe the most important event that lead to this is the
Industrial Revolution. Comparing the life of a person living at the beginning of the Industrial
Revolution with that of someone living centuries or even millennia earlier reveals no striking
differences; but comparing the life of the same person with that of someone living less than a
century after illuminates the huge extent to which the society evolved. This sparked my interest
in the topic, as I wanted to know what was special about the period of the Industrial Revolution,
and constituted one of the reasons for writing this paper.

Many innovations when they are made give the impression that they would ease the life
of people, but this fails to happen many times. If we are talking about inventions that increase
productivity, rather than decreasing the work input, they merely increase the output with an
equal of even greater input of work, capitalism carefully watches that this happens. In the same
way in the Industrial Revolution all the great inventions did not automatically translate into
better living standards, the opposite holding true. The major thing that I try to clarify in this
paper is how the society and living conditions changed during the Industrial Revolution. I chose
this aspect of the Industrial Revolution, in particular, because it shows that conditions of living
are not every time directly proportional with how scientifically and technologically advanced a
society is.

This paper will explore what the Industrial Revolution implied, in very general terms,
serving as an introduction into the topic; why it happened in Britain, because when analysing a
global phenomenon the ingredients that made it happen hold important cues; how it affected
people's lives, the most important part; and also the reaction that it got from people and the
British government.
Overview of the Industrial Revolution in Britain

Overview
The period marked by the Industrial Revolution witnessed fundamental changes in nearly all
areas of human life. A new industrial economy outstripped the old, agrarian one, which was
rather primitive.

The mindset shaped in the Scientific Revolution flourished as ideas such as being able to
understand the universe though careful probing with the tools of science; and the ensuing
realisation that change could be made through things such as the development of new
technologies and methods of production gained more traction; thus, mechanized equipment
replaced inefficient and laborious hand production methods.

If before the Industrial Revolution people didn't know how to convert between the
different types of energy, their bodies and the bodies of animals being the only way of doing
that, more specifically of converting chemical energy to mechanical energy; during the Industrial
Revolution the invention of the steam engine changed that; it created a new source of
mechanical energy independent of people or animals and also of the geographical position – as
was not the case for other energy sources such as wind or water. Repetitive and time intensive
tasks could then be automated.

Urbanisation was also an important process that happened during that time; people in
search of work migrated to cities, where they could earn a living in the newly created factories.

The rate of change that described this period was unprecedented. For example, from the
invention of the handloom about 2000 years ago, no major improvements have been made to it,
but after the invention, at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, of the flying shuttle1, which
was relatively simple, yet it improved the productivity of the aforementioned handloom twofold,
it took a only 31 only years until the next major invention in the textile industry – the spinning
jenny2, which allowed a worker to spin eight spindles at a time – was made; no more than 5

1
See annex, Figure 1 - Flying shuttle
2
See annex, Figure 3 - Spinning jenny
years later Richard Arkwright comes up with the water frame which hooked up machines to a
water wheel. The following inventions went even further and by 1875 virtually allowed for a
completely automatic production of textiles, that is, spinning with the help of the spinning mule3
and weaving with the help of the power loom4, both of these machines used steam powered
engines.

The first Industrial Revolution started from about 1760 to sometime between 1820 and
1840, though there is some amount of disagreement between the historians.

The textile industry

The textile industry was the first of the affected fields of the Industrial Revolution and would
become its main driver. It was also the top industry in terms of employment, value of output and
capital invested.

The making of cloth for pants, shirts, socks, bedspreads and other domestic items had
always required lots of skill and time. The population boom in England made the demand for
textile items grow exponentially, and the traditional methods of producing textiles did not befit
the new conditions. The imbalance between offer and demand, tipping in favour of demand,
provided an impetus for investors and inventors to take risk, knowing that they will have a
market for their finished product.

Once one innovation was made it welcomed another which in turn would do the same
thing, thus creating a snowball effect. Once the flying shuttle was invented, which doubled the
productivity of a weaver, this enlarged the already big gap between spinning and weaving,
bringing it to a point where eight spinners were necessary to provide the string used by only one
weaver.

It naturally followed that the next invention came to remove the discrepancy between
spinning and weaving. The spinning jenny invented by James Hargreaves in 1764, allowed one
worker to spin eight spindles at a time, effectively putting the output of spinning on a par with
the necessary input for weaving.

3
See annex, Figure 4 - Spinning mule
4
See annex, Figure 2 - Power loom
 Yet, the next two inventions, the water frame and then the spinning mule brought
automation of spinning with them, drastically tipping the balance in favour of spinning.
Weaving, then, was in dire need of a new innovation, which didn't hesitate to come. Edmund
Cartwright who observed the power of the water frame5 on one of his visits to the factory of
Richard Arkwright – the man credited for being the father of the modern factory system – being
impressed by the scale of the production, could not but realise that the abundance of yarn that
would flood the market once the patent on the water frame would expire, would make the
invention of an automated loom economically sound. He went on to create the power loom
which after a lot of refining became very popular, in 1850, only 65 years after he filed for his
patent, there were 250,000 cotton power-looms in Britain.

Other industries and inventions

But this positive feedback loop wasn't limited only to the textile industry. The iron industry also
went through some major innovations which allowed it to stay on top of the large demand
created by the revolution, such as for rails and locomotives.

Long before the Industrial Revolution the supply of wood in the British Isles was meagre;
and by the time of the Industrial Revolution the easily accessible coal was almost all mined.
Deep mines were not feasible due to water seeping in. The steam engine6 invented by Thomas
Newcomen in 1712 even though was highly inefficient allowed for water to be pumped out of
mines and, thus, to create deeper mines. Although this engine was not suitable for any other
application it served as the starting point for the improved steam engine that would later be
developed by James Watt. This new steam engine stood at the core of the Industrial Revolution;
it was used in important technologies for the textile industry such as the spinning mule and the
power loom enabling automation of both spinning and weaving.

This is an example of how changes in one field generate changes in others, fuelling a
continuous evolution. The steam engine which was first invented to solve a problem related to
the extraction of coal also revolutionised the textile industry. The ratio of time input over final
output greatly improved; humans only needed to do mostly maintenance jobs in the textile
industry.

5
See annex, Figure 5 - Water frame
6
See annex, Figure 6 - Newcomen's steam engine
 Also, the great increase in the production of textiles meant that a way of more efficiently
transporting raw materials and the finished product was necessary. Though railways existed in
pre-industrial society – most of them connecting an iron pit or a coal mine with a canal or river –
there were no locomotives, horses being used instead.

The first locomotive was the brainchild of Richard Trevithick, and it was powerful
enough to haul ten tons of bar iron and seventy passengers along rails at a speed of five miles per
hour; yet the invention did not take off.

George Stephenson picked up where Trevithick left off and in 1816, he took out patents
on a steam engine locomotive and iron rails. It was after he was commissioned to construct a 30-
mile railway line from Liverpool to Manchester – the largest industrial town in the world – and
the following competition between different locomotives, held on those very rails, which
garnered much attention in England and Europe, that locomotives really took off; Stephenson
and other top competitors, in the aforementioned competition, took offers for their new
locomotives from as far away as Russia. In 1831, just two years after the race, The Liverpool-to-
Manchester railway carried 450,000 passengers, 32,00 tonnes of cotton and 11,000 tonnes of
coal. By 1835, the railway carried 120,000 tonnes of coal.

Stephenson's success was a culmination of over a century of industrial innovation. The

locomotive incorporated the steam engines of Newcomen and Watt, the new iron-refining
innovations and Trevithick's original locomotive. But it also would have not occurred were it not
for the rising cotton industry that created the need for the railroad in the industrial town of
Manchester. Adding to all that, the new locomotives used coal as the main fuel source. The
ultimate triumph of the Industrial Revolution, railroads and locomotives moved people, raw
materials and finished goods rapidly around England. This interaction brought people to the new
industrial cities; gradually increased trade within England, Europe, and the word; and helped turn
England into the wealthiest nation on earth.

Why it started in Britain

The Industrial Revolution started in Britain because it possessed the necessary conditions for it
to kick-start and flourish; there was a long series of historical events that preceded the Industrial
Revolution and laid the path for it. Important characteristics of the socio-politico-economic
status crucial for such a revolution were present.
 One of the most important events that preceded the Industrial Revolution was the British
Agricultural Revolution, without which the Industrial Revolution would have never happened, it
quite literally sown the seeds for the Industrial Revolution. The production of food surplus and
the ensuing population growth played a crucial role. The increase in agricultural productivity
decreased the share of the labour force in agriculture, thus adding to the urban workforce, on
which industrialisation depended. The urban workforce also increased due to population growth;
more than that, it also increased the demand for products such as clothing.

Government policies in England toward property and commerce encouraged innovation

and the spread of global trade. The government created patent laws that allowed inventors to
benefit financially from the "intellectual property" of their inventions. The British government
also encouraged global trade by expanding the navy to protect trade and granting monopolies or
other financial incentives to companies so they would explore the world to find resources.

Financial innovations – such as central banks, stock markets and joint stock companies –
encouraged people, to take risks with investments, trade and new technologies.

The natural resources also played an important role. Coal and iron deposits were plentiful
in Great Britain and proved essential to the development of all new machines made of iron or
steel and powered by coal – such as the steam-powered machinery in textile factories, and the
locomotive.

Navigable rivers and canals in Great Britain quickened the pace and cheapened the cost
of transportation of raw materials and finished products. Adam Smith, the first modern
economist, believed this was a key reason for England's early success. In 1776, in his famous
book An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, he wrote that “Good
roads, canals, and navigable rivers, by diminishing the expense of carriage, put the remote parts
of the country more nearly upon a level with those in the neighbourhood of the town. They are
upon that account the greatest of all improvements.”.

The increase in world trade in the centuries before the Industrial Revolution constituted a
huge opportunity for economic growth as European countries had access to raw material from all
over the world and also had a market for the finished goods. In particular, Britain, through its
Colonial Empire provided a strong impetus to potential producers by giving them a global
market for the surplus of manufactured products.
 The cottage industry which existed in the pre-industrial society served as a model for the
newfactory-based economy of the Industrial Revolution. In the cottage industry system
agricultural families worked at night in their cottages to spin or weave cloth with rudimentary
machines. Merchants would provide raw materials to families, pay the workers for the finished
product, and take the finished goods to the market and keep the profit to themselves. This was a
cheaper way of producing textiles as skilled craftspeople in the towns and cities were paid more;
the rural families appreciated the opportunity to earn extra money and the convenience of
working out of their homes.

When the Industrial Revolution started, work moved from cottages to the new factories,
where the large new machines could be centralized in one location and powered by water or,
later, steam engines. And so, the cottage industry merchants were the forerunners of the factory
practice of relying on cheap labour.

Effects on the British Society

Close to all aspects of daily life went through major changes during the Industrial Revolution.

Working conditions
The population boom that followed the British Agricultural Revolution, as well other aspects of
that revolution, resulted in people flocking to towns and the new factories to get work. This led
to very high unemployment rates for workers in the first part of the Industrial Revolution, due to
the excess labour force. The working class (who made up 80% of society), did not have much
bargaining power as the new factory owners could set the terms of work because there were far
more unskilled labourers, who had few skills and would take any job, than there were jobs for
them.

All the changes brought by the Industrial Revolution took place so rapidly that initially there
were no regulations to restrict its negative effects. In the political system at the time, where only
wealthy people were eligible to vote, workers could not fight for rights and reforms. In 1799 and
1800, the British Parliament passed the Combination Acts, which made it illegal for workers to
unionise, or combine as a group, to ask for better working conditions. This shows that workers
weren't very well represented in the political system at that time.
 The first generation of workers found the new working conditions most harsh. Used to
the slow pace of life in the country, they had to adapt to the new conditions in factories, which
were in no way similar to their old lives. They had to do repetitive tasks all day long, and weren't
allowed to chat with their fellows as they were used to doing with their neighbours or family in
the country. Foremen and overseers supervised a new working culture to ensure that workers'
actions were focused and efficient.

The working day lasted from 10 to 14 hours, six days a week, with no paid vacations or
holidays. On top of the long working hours serious health and safety hazards were also present.
In the iron industry, for example, the process of purifying iron demanded that workers toiled
amidst temperatures as high as 54 degrees Celsius, in the coolest parts of the ironworks. Such
working conditions made accidents inevitable. A report commissioned by the British House of
Commons in 1832 commented that "there are factories, no few in number, nor confined to the
smaller mills, in which serious accidents are continually occurring, and in which,
notwithstanding, dangerous parts of the machinery are allowed to remain unfenced". And when
an accident happened the report also adds that the workers were often "abandoned from the
moment that an accident occurs; their wages are stopped, no medical attendance is provided, and
whatever the extent on the injury, no compensation is afforded". This shows that workers not
only didn't receive financial compensation after an accident, but that also they ran the risk of
losing their jobs.

Child labour
Child labour was, unfortunately, integral to the first factories, mines and mills in England.
Machinery allowed unskilled workers to exceed the productivity of skilled craftspeople; a child
could achieve almost the same things as a full-grown adult but at a tenth of his salary, and they
did not try to join workers' unions or go on strike. With all of this in mind it is not surprising,
then, that children were heavily employed in the first factories in history. In 1789, in Richard
Arkwright's (one of the fathers of the modern factory system) new spinning factory, two-thirds of
1,150 factory workers were children.

The working hours and conditions were the same as for adults, thing which reflected in
their health. Doctor Turner Thackrah described the children leaving the Manchester cotton mills
as " almost universally ill-looking, small, barefoot and ill-clad".
 It took a while but eventually observations, such as the above-mentioned one, slowly
made their way to the British government, which began to take action on the issue.

Living conditions
The Industrial Revolution did not only change the working conditions, it affected close to all
aspects of human life. The strict rules pertaining to working in factories also affected private life.
Workers spent all the light of day at work and came home with little energy to play sports or
engage in other recreational activities. The abundance of festivals that dotted the village holiday
calendar were at odds with the new industrial pace and the factory system; workers would suffer
serious consequences if they returned to their villages for festivals because they would interrupt
the efficient flow of work at the factories.

In particular, the quality of life for skilled workers decreased to a very large extent. In the
textile industry, for example, unskilled workers could achieve, with the help of machinery, a
bigger productivity than the skilled craftspeople in the town. This drastically lowered their
income, leading to them living more miserable lives.

During the first 60 years of the Industrial Revolution, the poorest of the poor had the
worst living conditions. In desperation, many turned to the poorhouses set up by the government
through the Poor Law of 1834. One of the most important design factors behind poorhouses was
that it deliberately created very harsh conditions to limit, as far as possible, the number of people
living on relief. Families, including husbands and wives, were separated upon entering the
grounds. They lived like inmates in a prison and had to work all day. One assistant commissioner
of the workhouses commented, "Our object is to establish a discipline so severe and repulsive as
to make them a terror to the poor and prevent them from entering". Despite the way things were
workhouse inmates increased from 78,536 in 1838 to 197,179 in 1843, thing which signals the
desperation among the destitute people.

Urbanisation
Urbanisation was one of the defining features of the Industrial Revolution. If in pre-industrial
society 80 percent of people lived in rural areas, already by 1850, after the First Industrial
Revolution, the urban population outnumbered the rural inhabitants. The people who migrated
from villages to towns, due to the Agricultural Revolution and other factors, served as cheap
labour force which stimulated the booming new industries.
 Despite it boosting economy, urbanisation also had myriad negative consequences.
Between the most notable of them was the filthy state of towns and cities, which lacked proper
sewers and drains and were overpopulated; this will reflect in the people's health.

The densely packed and poorly constructed neighbourhoods contributed to the fast spread
of disease. On top of that, the medical practices of that time were likely to worsen the situation
as they used remedies popular during the Middles Ages (which were bad), such as bloodletting.
Coupled with poor nutrition and other factors all these contributed to an alarmingly low average
life expectancy, being only 37 in London.

Reaction to the Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution sparked and developed so quickly that at the beginning there were no
laws to regulate the new industries. No laws prevented businesses from hiring seven-year-old
children to work full time in coal mines or factories; no laws regulated what factories could do
with their biohazard waste; no laws regulated a minimum working wage. The British society,
between 1790 and 1850, became a prime example of what a country with free-market capitalism
becomes when it has no constraints.

When the government finally did intervene, it did so usually on the side of owners, in the
name of public safety and order; this way in 1799 workers' unions were outlawed.

With the government and owners initially unwilling to enact reforms (sometimes they did
quite the opposite) workers had to respond in their own ways. Sometimes they did this by
rebelling, and sometimes by experimenting with new ways to organise work and society (Robert
Owen's utopian socialism and Karl Marx's socialism).

The Luddites
Chant no more your old rhymes about bold Robin Hood
His feats I but little admire
I will sing the achievements of General Ludd,
Now the Hero of Nottinghamshire.
Many of the unemployed people were skilled workers, such as hand weavers, whose talents and
experience became useless because they could not compete with the efficiency of the new textile
machines. These desperate people wanted to improve on their situation but because the political
system was not working in their favour, they had nothing to do but resort to rebellion.

The Luddite Rebellion constituted the most dramatic uprising against the negative effects
of the Industrial Revolution in Britain. It began around what was left of the deforested Sherwood
Forest, Nottinghamshire, the land of the fabled Robin Hood. There rebels were skilled weavers
and other pre-industrial artisans who saw in the new textiles machines the destruction of their
traditional craft, their livelihood and their community.

The way in which the Luddites acted is that they wrote anonymous letters to factory
owners containing specific requests and a warning of the consequences to come if those requests
are not met. These consequences included raiding factories at night and destroying the new
textile machines that took away their jobs. The name of the group comes from the way they
singed their letter with "King Ludd" or "Ned Ludd".

Initially the Luddites had some successes but eventually the rebellion was stifled.

The government’s response

Several decades have passed after the beginning of the Industrial Revolution when the
government started to respond to the changes in society brought by it. It started with things such
as the legalisation of trade unions in 1824 and the Factory Act of 1833 which regulated excessive
child labour (the first ever government regulation of the industrial workplace). After outbreaks of
cholera and other infectious diseases the government also started to concern itself with better
sanitation in cities, by ensuring the existence of safe water and sewers.
 Conclusion

The Industrial Revolution was one of the most consequential events in human history. It
kickstarted a period of fast, continuous progress, which lasts to this day. The mentality that it
bolstered – which is that the understanding of the world is possible through the means of science
and life can be improved through de development of new tools, technologies and methods of
production – was powerful enough to transform countries, such as Great Britain, into leading
economic powers.

Despite the progress, from a material point of view, that Great Britain, and other
countries, underwent, during the Industrial Revolution it cannot be stated that conditions of life
drastically improved; in fact, in the first part of the revolution they got noticeably worse. Things
such as child labour, heavy pollution of the environment, filthy and overcrowded cities, no
minimal wages were all realities of the revolution.

The harsh conditions of the Industrial Revolution compelled people to resort to more
extreme means of making their voices heard, such as through rebellion, because the government
failed to enact the necessary reforms. Eventually the government could no longer ignore the
unacceptable conditions in which people worked and lived; and started to take action to alleviate
the problems brought by the Industrial Revolution in order to improve the standards of living for
people.
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Annex

Figure 1 - Flying shuttle

Figure 2 - Power loom Figure 3 - Spinning jenny

Figure 4 - Spinning mule

Figure 5 - Water frame

Figure 6 - Newcomen's steam engine