Instructions
Write a 5 paragraph essay
You should state your argument/thesis, provide 3 pieces of evidence to support your thesis, and provide a conclusion/summation. This should provide the framework for five paragraphs. If you write more, that’s fine, but I need a minimum of five. For the purposes of this exercise, a paragraph needs to have at least 5 sentences to be considered a paragraph.
Use evidence from the readings in the textbook and my lectures. Make sure you use historical evidence to support your thesis, and that evidence needs to come from the history we have been studying.Industrialization: The Global Context
SEEKING THE MAIN POINT
In what ways did the Industrial Revolution mark a sharp break with the past? In what ways did it continue earlier patterns?
The epic economic transformation of the Industrial Revolution took shape as a very substantial increase in human numbers unfolded ? from about 375 million people in 1400 to about 1 billion in the early nineteenth century. Accompanying this growth in population was an emerging energy crisis, most pronounced in Western Europe, China, and Japan, as wood and charcoal, the major industrial fuels, became more scarce and more costly. In short, ?global energy demands began to push against the existing local and regional ecological limits.?3?In broad terms, the Industrial Revolution marked a human response to that dilemma. It was a twofold revolution ? drawing on new sources of energy and new technologies ? that combined to utterly transform economic and social life on the planet.
In terms of energy, the Industrial Revolution came to rely on fossil fuels such as coal, oil, and natural gas, which supplemented and largely replaced the earlier energy sources of wind, water, wood, and the muscle power of people and animals that had long sustained humankind. It was a breakthrough of unprecedented proportions that made available for human use, at least temporarily, immensely greater quantities of energy. During the nineteenth century, yet another fuel became widely available as Europeans learned to exploit guano, or seabird excrement, found on the islands off the coast of Peru. Used as a potent fertilizer, guano enabled highly productive input-intensive farming practices. In much of Western Europe, North America, Australia, and New Zealand, it sustained the production of crops that fed both the draft animals and the growing human populations of the industrializing world.4
Guided Reading Question
?CONTEXT
What is the significance of the Industrial Revolution in the larger context of human history?
The technological dimension of the Industrial Revolution has been equally significant. Early signs of the technological creativity that spawned the Industrial Revolution appeared in eighteenth-century Britain, where a variety of innovations transformed cotton textile production. It was only in the nineteenth century, though, that Europeans in general and the British in particular more clearly forged ahead of the rest of the world. (See?Controversies: Debating ?Why Europe??) The great breakthrough was the coal-fired?steam engine, which provided an inanimate and almost limitless source of power beyond that of wind, water, or muscle and could be used to drive any number of machines as well as locomotives and oceangoing ships. Soon the Industrial Revolution spread beyond the textile industry to iron and steel production, railroads and steamships, food processing, and construction. Later in the nineteenth century, a so-called second Industrial Revolution focused on chemicals, electricity, precision machinery, the telegraph and telephone, rubber, printing, and much more. Agriculture too was affected as mechanical reapers, chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and refrigeration transformed this most ancient of industries. Sustaining this explosion of technological innovation was a ?culture of innovation,? a widespread and almost obsessive belief that things could be endlessly improved.
Together, these new sources of energy and new technologies gave rise to an enormously increased output of goods and services. In Britain, where the Industrial?Revolution began, industrial output increased some fiftyfold between 1750 and 1900. It was a wholly unprecedented and previously unimaginable jump in the capacity of human societies to produce wealth, to extend life expectancies, and to increase human numbers. Furthermore, industrialization soon spread beyond Britain to continental Western Europe and then in the second half of the nineteenth?century to the United States, Russia, and Japan. In the twentieth century it became a genuinely global process. More than anything else, industrialization marks the past 250 years as a distinct phase of human history.
In the long run, the Industrial Revolution unarguably improved the material conditions of life for much of humankind. But it also unarguably wrought a mounting impact?on the environment. The massive extraction of nonrenewable raw materials to feed and to fuel industrial machinery ? coal, iron ore, petroleum, and much more ? altered the landscape in many places. Sewers and industrial waste emptied into rivers, turning them into poisonous cesspools. In 1858, the Thames River running through London smelled so bad that the British House of Commons had to suspend its session. Smoke?from coal-fired industries and domestic use polluted the air in urban areas and sharply increased the incidence of respiratory illness. (See?the opening image to this chapter.) For many historians, the Industrial Revolution marked a new era in both human history and the history of the planet that scientists increasingly call the Anthropocene, or the ?age of man.? More and more, human industrial activity left a mark not only on human society but also on the ecological, atmospheric, and geological history of the earth.

Producing Gas from Coal
Coal was central to the Industrial Revolution. An early industrial process in Britain involved the burning of coal to produce ?coal gas,? used for public lighting. This image from 1822 shows that process in action at one such production facility in London. Those who stoked the furnaces often developed various lung diseases and died early.
CONTROVERSIES
Debating ?Why Europe??
The Industrial Revolution marked a dramatic change in the trajectory of human history. But why did that breakthrough occur first in Europe? This question has long been a source of great controversy among scholars.
A ?European Miracle?
Does the answer lie in some unique or ?miraculous? feature of European history, culture, or society? Perhaps, as one scholar recently suggested, Europeans have been distinguished for several thousand years by a restless, creative, and freedom-loving culture with its roots in the aristocratic warlike societies of early Indo-European invaders, which rendered them uniquely open to change and development.5?But critics have questioned both the claims to European cultural uniqueness and causal links between industrialization and developments of the distant past.
Or should we focus more narrowly on the period between about 1400 and 1800 for the origins of this ?European miracle??6?During those centuries distinctive new forms of landowning and farming practices emerged, especially in Britain, which made land and labor available for capitalist agriculture and enabled the accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few. Was this ?agricultural revolution? a prelude to the subsequent ?industrial revolution?? Or perhaps it was the Scientific Revolution, a distinctly European event that generated a new view of the cosmos, that stimulated industrialization.
It turns out, however, that industrial technologies derived from the workshops of artisans and craftsmen rather than from the laboratories of scientists. And so by the early twenty-first century, many historians were thinking in terms of a broader cultural pattern, an eighteenth-century ?Industrial Enlightenment? in which scientific methods and a general belief in an ordered universe mixed with commitment to the ideas of ?progress? and human improvement to foster technological innovation.
And what about Europe?s many relatively small and highly competitive states? Perhaps their rivalries stimulated innovation and provided an ?insurance against economic and technological stagnation,? which the larger Chinese, Ottoman, or Mughal empires lacked. In their struggles with other states, European governments desperately needed revenue, and to get it, European authorities developed an unusual alliance with their merchant classes. Small groups of merchant capitalists might be granted special privileges, monopolies, or even tax-collecting responsibilities in exchange for much-needed loans or payments to the state. Governments granted charters and monopolies to private trading companies, and states founded scientific societies and offered prizes to promote innovation. European merchants and other innovators after the fifteenth century became more independent from state control and enjoyed a higher social status than their counterparts in more established civilizations. Such internally competitive semi-capitalist economies, coupled with a highly competitive system of rival states, arguably fostered innovation in the new civilization taking shape in Western Europe. But at the same time, nearly constant war and the destruction that accompanied it also served as a long-term drain on European resources.
Britain especially benefited from several advantages of the ?European Miracle,? including a spirit of innovation, a lot of easily accessible coal, a growing consumer market, plentiful cheap capital accumulated in agriculture and trade, and its island geography, which frequently shielded it from the worst effects of Europe?s wars. It also had a relatively high-wage workforce, which gave British businesses an extraordinary incentive to invent laborsaving technologies.
The ?Great Divergence?
But was Europe alone destined to lead the way to modern economic life? To many world historians, such views are both Eurocentric and deterministic; they also fly in the face of much recent research. Historians now know that India, the Islamic world, and especially China had experienced times of great technological and scientific flourishing. For reasons much debated, all of these flowerings of creativity had slowed down considerably or stagnated by the early modern era, when the pace of technological change in Europe began to pick up. But these earlier achievements certainly suggest that Europe was not alone in its capacity for technological innovation.
Nor did Europe enjoy any overall economic advantage as late as 1750. Recent scholars have found rather ?a world of surprising resemblances? among major Eurasian societies during the eighteenth century. Economic indicators such as life expectancies, patterns of consumption and nutrition, wage levels, general living standards, widespread free markets, and prosperous merchant communities suggest ?a global economic parity? across the major civilizations of Europe and Asia.7?Thus Europe had no obvious economic lead, even on the eve of the Industrial Revolution. So much for the ?European miracle?!
Trade and Empire
But if there was little that was economically distinctive within Europe itself, perhaps it was the spoils of empire and the benefits of global trade after 1500 that allowed Europeans to accumulate the wealth that funded industrial enterprises back home. European empires provided access to an abundance of raw materials ? timber, fish, maize, potatoes, slave-produced sugar and cotton ? far more than that of other early modern empires. Moreover, these empires generated a global economy that funneled the trade of the world through Europe, offering access to the raw materials and markets of the planet. Demand for Asian goods, including porcelain and especially cotton cloth, also spurred manufacturers in Europe to produce similar items, while production for overseas markets further sparked industry in Europe. The new wealth spawned a growing middle class in Europe whose members bought the products of the Industrial Revolution. As one scholar has put it, ?The industrial revolution . . . emerged from the exploitive advantages Europe was already gaining in the world?s markets.?8?So rather than something distinctive about European society, perhaps it was Europe?s increasing engagement with the wider world that sparked industrialization.
Many or most of these factors likely played some role in Europe?s industrialization. But in considering the ?Why Europe?? question, historians confront the relative importance of internal and external factors in explaining historical change. Was industrialization primarily spurred by some special combination of elements peculiar to Western Europe, or were broader global relationships of greater significance? Arguments giving great weight to internal features of European life seem to congratulate Europeans on their good fortune or wisdom, while those that contextualize it globally and point to the unique character of European imperial trade and exploitation are rather more critical. Furthermore, the former seem to imply a certain long-term inevitability to European prominence, while the latter see the Industrial Revolution as more of a surprise, the outcome of a unique conjuncture of events . . . in short, luck.

The First Industrial Society
Wherever it took hold, the Industrial Revolution generated, within a century or less, an economic miracle, at least in comparison with earlier technologies. The?British textile industry, which used 52 million pounds of cotton in 1800, consumed 588 million pounds in 1850, as multiple technological innovations and factory-based production vastly increased output. Britain?s production of coal likewise soared from 5.23 million tons in 1750 to 68.4 million tons a century later.9?Railroads crisscrossed Britain and much of Europe like a giant spider web (see?Map 17.1). Most of this dramatic increase in production occurred in mining, manufacturing, and services. Thus agriculture, for millennia the overwhelmingly dominant economic sector in every civilization, shrank in relative importance. In Britain, for example, agriculture generated only 8 percent of national income in 1891 and employed fewer than 8 percent of working Britons in 1914. Accompanying this vast economic change was an epic transformation of social life. ?In two centuries,? wrote one prominent historian, ?daily life changed more than it had in the 7,000 years before.?10?Nowhere were the revolutionary dimensions of industrialization more apparent than in Great Britain, the world?s first industrial society.

MAPPING HISTORY
Map?17.1?The Early Phase of Europe?s Industrial Revolution
From its beginning in Great Britain, industrialization had spread by 1850 across Western Europe to include parts of France, Germany, Belgium, Bohemia, and Italy.
READING THE MAP:?Which industrialized regions are most far removed from sources of coal and iron?
INTERPRETING THE MAP:?Note the relationship between sources of coal and iron, railways, and industrialized regions. Then identify regions where the addition of further railway lines might facilitate industrialization.
The social transformation of the Industrial Revolution both destroyed and created. Referring to the impact of the Industrial Revolution on British society, historian Eric Hobsbawm wrote: ?In its initial stages it destroyed their old ways of living and left them free to discover or make for themselves new ones, if they could and knew how. But it rarely told them how to set about it.?11?For many people, it was an enormously painful, even traumatic process, full of social conflict, insecurity, and false starts even as it offered new opportunities, an eventually higher standard of living, and greater participation in public life. The human gains and losses associated?with the Industrial Revolution have been debated ever since. Amid the arguments, however, one thing is clear: not everyone was affected in the same way.

Railroads
The popularity of railroads, long a symbol of the Industrial Revolution, is illustrated in this early nineteenth-century watercolor that shows a miniature train offered as a paid amusement for enthusiasts in London?s Euston Square.

The British Aristocracy
Individual landowning aristocrats, long the dominant class in Britain, suffered little in material terms from the Industrial Revolution. In the mid-nineteenth century, a few thousand families still owned more than half of the cultivated land in Britain, most of it leased to tenant farmers, who in turn employed agricultural wage laborers to work it. Rapidly growing population and urbanization sustained a demand for food products grown on that land. For most of the nineteenth century, landowners continued to dominate the British Parliament.
Guided Reading Question
?CHANGE
How did the Industrial Revolution transform British society?
As a class, however, the British aristocracy declined as a result of the Industrial Revolution, as have large landowners in every industrial society. As urban wealth became more important, landed aristocrats had to make way for the up-and-coming businessmen, manufacturers, and bankers, newly enriched by the Industrial Revolution. By the end of the century, landownership had largely ceased to be the basis of great wealth, and businessmen, rather than aristocrats, led the major political parties. Even so, the titled nobility of dukes, earls, viscounts, and barons retained great social prestige and considerable personal wealth. Many among them found an outlet for their energies and opportunities for status and enrichment in the vast domains of the British Empire, where they went as colonial administrators or settlers. Famously described as a ?system of outdoor relief for the aristocracy,? the empire provided a cushion for a declining class.

The Middle Classes
Those who benefited most conspicuously from industrialization were members of that amorphous group known as the middle class. At its upper levels, this middle class contained extremely wealthy factory and mine owners, bankers, and merchants. Such rising businessmen readily assimilated into aristocratic life, buying country houses, obtaining seats in Parliament, sending their sons to Oxford or Cambridge University, and gratefully accepting titles of nobility from Queen Victoria.
Guided Reading Question
?CHANGE
How did Britain?s middle classes change during the nineteenth century?
Far more numerous were the smaller businessmen, doctors, lawyers, engineers, teachers, journalists, scientists, and other professionals required in any industrial society. Such people set the tone for a distinctly?middle-class society?with its own values and outlooks. Politically they were liberals, favoring constitutional government, private property, free trade, and social reform within limits. Their agitation resulted in the Reform Bill of 1832, which broadened the right to vote to many men of the middle class, but not to middle-class women. Ideas of thrift and hard work, a rigid morality, ?respectability,? and cleanliness characterized middle-class culture. According to Samuel Smiles?s famous book?Self-Help, an enterprising spirit was what distinguished the prosperous middle class from Britain?s poor. The misery of the poorer classes was ?voluntary and self-imposed ? the results of idleness, thriftlessness, intemperance, and misconduct.?12
Women in such middle-class families were increasingly cast as homemakers, wives, and mothers, charged with creating an emotional haven for their men and a refuge?from a heartless and cutthroat capitalist world. They were also expected to be the moral centers of family life, the educators of ?respectability,? and the managers of household consumption as ?shopping? ? a new concept in eighteenth-century Britain ? became a central activity for the middle classes. An?ideology of domesticity?defined homemaking, child rearing, charitable endeavors, and ?refined? activities such as embroidery, music, and drawing as the proper sphere for women, while paid employment and the public sphere of life outside the home beckoned to men.

The Industrial Middle Class
This late nineteenth-century painting shows a prosperous French middle-class family, attended by a servant.
Male elites in many civilizations had long established their status by detaching women from productive labor. The new wealth of the Industrial Revolution now allowed larger numbers of families to aspire to that kind of status. With her husband as ?provider,? such a woman was now a ?lady.? ?She must not work for profit,? wrote the Englishwoman Margaretta Greg in 1853, ?or engage in any occupation that money can command.?13?Employing even one servant became a proud marker of such middle-class status. But the withdrawal of middle-class women from the labor force turned out to be only a temporary phenomenon. By the late nineteenth century, some middle-class women began to enter the teaching, clerical, and nursing professions, and in the second half of the twentieth century, many more flooded into the labor force. By contrast, the withdrawal of children from productive labor into schools has proved a more enduring phenomenon as industrial economies increasingly required a more educated workforce.
As Britain?s industrial economy matured, it also gave rise to a sizable?lower middle class, which included people employed in the growing service sector as clerks, salespeople, bank tellers, hotel staff, secretaries, telephone operators, police officers, and the like. By the end of the nineteenth century, this growing segment of the middle class represented about 20 percent of Britain?s population and provided new employment opportunities for women as well as men. In just twenty years (1881?1901), the number of female secretaries in Britain rose from 7,000 to 90,000. Almost all were single and expected to return to the home after marriage. For both men and women, such employment represented a claim on membership in the larger middle class and a means of distinguishing themselves clearly from a working class tainted by manual labor. The mounting ability of these middle classes to consume all manner of material goods ? and their appetite for doing so ? were among the factors that sustained the continuing growth of the industrializing process.

The Laboring Classes
The overwhelming majority of Britain?s nineteenth-century population ? some 70 percent or more ? were neither aristocrats nor members of the middle classes. They were manual workers in the mines, ports, factories, construction sites, workshops, and farms of an industrializing Britain. Although their conditions varied considerably and changed over time, it was the?laboring classes?who suffered most and benefited least from the epic transformations of the Industrial Revolution. Their efforts to accommodate, resist, protest, and change those conditions contributed much to the texture of the first industrial society.
The lives of the laboring classes were shaped primarily by the rapid urbanization of the industrial era. Liverpool?s population alone grew from 77,000 to 400,000 in the first half of the nineteenth century. By 1851, a majority of Britain?s population lived in towns and cities, an enormous change from the overwhelmingly rural life of almost all previous civilizations. By the end of the century, London was the world?s largest city, with more than 6 million inhabitants.
These cities were vastly overcrowded and smoky, with wholly insufficient sanitation, periodic epidemics, endless row houses and warehouses, few public services or open spaces, and inadequate and often-polluted water supplies. This was the environment in which most urban workers lived in the first half of the nineteenth century. By 1850, the average life expectancy in England was only 39.5 years, less than it had been some three centuries earlier. Nor was there much personal contact between the rich and the poor of industrial cities. Benjamin Disraeli?s novel?Sybil, published in 1845, described these two ends of the social spectrum as ?two nations between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are ignorant of each other?s habits, thoughts and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones or inhabitants of different planets.?

The Urban Poor of Industrial Britain
This 1866 political cartoon shows an impoverished urban family forced to draw its drinking water from a polluted public well, while a figure of Death operates the pump.
The industrial factories to which growing numbers of desperate people looked for employment offered a work environment far different from the artisan?s shop or the tenant?s farm. Long hours, low wages, and child labor were nothing new for the poor, but the routine and monotony of work, dictated by the factory whistle and the needs of machines, imposed novel and highly unwelcome conditions of labor. Also objectionable were the direct and constant supervision and the rules and fines aimed at enforcing work discipline. In addition, the ups and downs of a capitalist economy made industrial work insecure as well as onerous.
In the early decades of the nineteenth century, Britain?s industrialists favored girls and young unmarried women as employees in the textile mills, for they were often willing to accept lower wages, while male owners believed them to be both docile and more suitable for repetitive tasks such as tending machines. A gendered hierarchy of labor emerged in these factories, with men in supervisory and more skilled positions, while women occupied the less skilled and??lighter? jobs that offered little opportunity for advancement. Nor were women welcome in the unions that eventually offered men some ability to shape the conditions under which they labored.
Thus, unlike their middle-class counterparts, many girls and young women of the laboring classes engaged in industrial work or found jobs as domestic servants for upper- and middle-class families to supplement meager family incomes. But after marriage, they too usually left outside paid employment because a man who could not support his wife was widely considered a failure. Within the home, however, many working-class women continued to earn money by taking in boarders, doing laundry, or sewing clothes in addition to the domestic and child-rearing responsibilities long assigned to women.

Social Protest
For workers of the laboring classes, industrial life ?was a stony desert, which they had to make habitable by their own efforts.?15?Such efforts took many forms. By 1815, about 1 million workers, mostly artisans, had created a variety of ?friendly societies.? With dues contributed by members, these working-class self-help groups provided insurance against sickness, a decent funeral, and an opportunity for social life in an otherwise-bleak environment. Other skilled artisans who had been displaced by machine-produced goods and forbidden to organize in legal unions sometimes wrecked the offending machinery and burned the mills that had taken their jobs. (See?Zooming In: The English Luddites and Machine Breaking.) The class?consciousness of working people was such that one police informer reported that ?most every creature of the lower order both in town and country are on their side.?16?Others acted within the political arena by joining movements aimed at obtaining the vote for working-class men, a goal that was gradually achieved in the second half of the nineteenth century. When trade unions were legalized in 1824, growing numbers of factory workers joined these associations in their efforts to achieve better wages and working conditions. Initially their strikes, attempts at nationwide organization, and threat of violence made them fearful indeed to the upper classes. One British newspaper in 1834 described unions as ?the most dangerous institutions that were ever permitted to take root, under shelter of law, in any country,?17?although they later became rather more ?respectable? organizations.
Socialist ideas of various kinds gradually spread within the working class, challenging the assumptions of a capitalist society. Robert Owen (1771?1858), a wealthy British cotton textile manufacturer, urged the creation of small industrial communities where workers and their families would be well treated. He established one such community, with a ten-hour workday, spacious housing, decent wages, and education for children, at his mill in New Lanark in Scotland.
Of more lasting significance was the socialism of?Karl Marx?(1818?1883). German by birth, Marx spent much of his life in England, where he witnessed the brutal conditions of Britain?s Industrial Revolution and wrote voluminously about history and economics. His probing analysis led him to conclude that industrial capitalism was an inherently unstable system, doomed to collapse in a revolutionary upheaval that would give birth to a classless socialist society, thus ending forever the ancient conflict between rich and poor. (See?Working with Evidence?for the various expressions of a socialist tradition inspired by Marx.)
Guided Reading Question
?CHANGE
How did Karl Marx understand the Industrial Revolution? In what ways did his ideas have an impact in the industrializing world of the nineteenth century?
In Marx?s writings, the combined impact of Europe?s industrial, political, and scientific revolutions found expression. Industrialization created both the social conditions against which Marx protested so bitterly and the enormous wealth he felt would make socialism possible. The French Revolution, still a living memory in Marx?s youth, provided evidence that grand upheavals, giving rise to new societies, had in fact taken place and could do so again. Moreover, Marx regarded himself as a scientist, discovering the laws of social development in much the same fashion as Newton discovered the laws of motion. His was therefore a ?scientific socialism,? embedded in these laws of historical change; revolution was a certainty and the socialist future was inevitable.
It was a grand, compelling, prophetic, utopian vision of human freedom and community ? and it inspired socialist movements of workers and intellectuals amid the grim harshness of Europe?s industrialization in the second half of the nineteenth century. Socialists established political parties in most European states and linked them together in international organizations as well. These parties recruited members, contested elections as they gained the right to vote, agitated for reforms, and in some cases plotted revolution.
In the later decades of the nineteenth century, such ideas echoed among more radical trade unionists and some middle-class intellectuals in Britain, and even more so in a rapidly industrializing Germany and elsewhere. By then, however, the British working-class movement was not overtly revolutionary. When a working-class political party, the?Labour Party, was established in the 1890s, it advocated a reformist program and a peaceful democratic transition to socialism, largely rejecting the class struggle and revolutionary emphasis of classical Marxism. Generally known as ?social democracy,? this approach to socialism was especially prominent in Germany during the late nineteenth century and spread more widely in the twentieth century, when it came into conflict with the more violent and revolutionary movements calling themselves ?communist.?
Improving material conditions during the second half of the nineteenth century helped move the working-class movement in Britain, Germany, and elsewhere away from a revolutionary posture. Marx had expected industrial capitalist societies to polarize into a small wealthy class and a huge and increasingly impoverished proletariat. However, standing between ?the captains of industry? and the workers was a sizable middle and lower middle class, constituting perhaps 30 percent of the population, most of whom were not really wealthy but were immensely proud that they were not manual laborers. Marx had not foreseen the development of this intermediate social group, nor had he imagined that workers could better their standard of living within a capitalist framework. But they did. Wages rose under pressure from unions; cheap imported food improved working-class diets; infant mortality rates fell; and shops and chain stores catering to working-class families multiplied. As English male workers gradually obtained the right to vote, politicians had an incentive to legislate in their favor, by abolishing child labor, regulating factory conditions, and even,