The Industrial Revolution WHAP/Napp

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“The industrial revolution began in Britain around 1700, and although it is called a ‘revolution,’ it took over 150 years to be fully realized in 1860. During this period, the British cotton textile industry grew into the world’s most productive; its railway network became the nation’s principal means of inland transportation and communication; and a new fleet of steam-powered ships enabled Britain to project its new productivity and power around the globe. Economic historians agree, however, that the industrial changes were possible because agriculture in Britain – the basis of its pre-industrial economy – was already undergoing a process of continuing improvement. The transformation was so fundamental that it is called an agricultural revolution.

Britain (along with the Dutch Republic, as the Netherlands was known until 1648) had the most productive and efficient commercial agriculture in Europe. Inventors created new farm equipment and farmers were quick to adopt it. Jethro Tull (1674-1741), as an outstanding example, invented the seed drill that replaced the old method of scattering seeds by hands on the surface of the soil with a new method of planting systematically in regular rows at fixed depths, a horse drawn hoe, and an iron plow that could be set at an angle that would pull up grasses and roots and leave them out to dry. New crops, like turnips and potatoes, were introduced, and farmers and large landlords initiated huge irrigation and drainage projects, increasing the productivity of land already under cultivation and opening up new land. New laws regarding land ownership changed fundamentally the relationships between tenants and landlords. In Britain and the Netherlands peasants began to pay commercial rents to landowners in a business relationship, rather than paying fixed customary rents based on changing market values and performing labor services for them as in the past. Moreover, lands that had been held in common by the village community and had been used for grazing sheep and cattle by shepherds and livestock owners who had no lands of their own were now parceled out for private ownership through a series of enclosure acts.

Enclosures had begun in England in a limited way in the late 1400s. In the eighteenth century the process resumed and the pace increased. In the period 1741-1801, about one-fourth of the land in Britain was converted from community property to private property through enclosures. The results were favorable to landowners, and urban businessmen began to buy land as agricultural investment property. Agricultural productivity shot up. But hundreds of thousands of farmers with small plots and cottagers who had subsisted through the use of common lands for grazing their animals were now turned into tenant farmers and wage laborers. The results were revolutionary and profoundly disturbing to the society. Many of the dispossessed farmers turned to rural or domestic industry to supplement their meager incomes. Merchants would drop off raw cotton to workers’ homes where women would spit it into yarn, which men would then weave into cloth, which merchants would later pick up. Later, rural workers left the land altogether and headed for new industrial jobs in Britain’s growing cities.” ~ The World’s History

1-Why did the industrial revolution begin in Britain? ______

2-How did the agricultural revolution transform Britain? ______

  1. The Industrial Revolution
  1. Began independently in Western Europe, and specifically in Great Britain
  2. Machines greatly increased the output of goods/services
  3. Lying behind increased productivity was not a single invention – spinning jenny, power loom, steam engine, cotton gin – but a “culture of innovation”
  4. But great breakthrough was the steam engine, which provided an inanimate and almost limitless source of power that could be used to drive any machine
  5. Began in the textile industry but spread to iron and steel production, railroads, etc.
  6. Spread beyond Britain to continental Western Europe, United States, etc.
  1. Why Britain?
  1. Most highly commercialized of Europe’s larger countries
  2. Landlords had long ago “enclosed” much agricultural land, pushing out small farmers and producing for market
  3. Agricultural innovations had increased output, lowered prices, freed up labor
  4. Crop rotation, selective breeding of animals, lighter plows, higher-yielding seeds: an Agricultural Revolution occurred in Britain
  5. Policy of religious toleration, welcomed people with technical skills
  6. Government favored British businesses with tariffs to keep out cheap Indian textiles
  7. Checks on royal authority – trial by jury and growing authority of parliament – provided for a freer arena for private enterprise
  8. Britain had a ready supply of coal and iron ore, often located close to each other and within easy reach of major industrial centers
  9. Country’s island location protected it from invasions
  10. Railroads crisscrossed Britain and eventually much of Europe
  1. Social Changes
  1. Initially an enormously painful change, full of social conflict and insecurity
  2. Eventually, it led to higher standard of living and greater civic participation
  3. Aristocrats suffered little in material terms but declined as a class
  4. As urban wealth became more important, landed aristocrats had to make way for businessmen, manufacturers, and bankers – the bourgeoisie
  5. Those who benefited most were merchants /“middle classes”
  6. Politically, merchants were liberals, favoring constitutional government, private property, free trade, and social reform within limits
  7. Agitation resulted in Reform Bill of 1823, which broadened right to vote to many men of middle class, but not to middle-class women
  8. Women in middle-class families were increasingly cast as homemakers, wives, and mothers who were to create a refuge from the cutthroat capitalist world
  9. But overwhelming majority, the workers, suffered the most and benefited the least
  10. Chief among new conditions was rapid urbanization of British society
  11. Cities were vastly overcrowded with wholly inadequate sanitation, periodic epidemics, row houses, few public services, and inadequate water supplies
  12. Long hours, low wages, and child labor were nothing new for the poor, but routine and monotony of work were unwelcome conditions of labor
  13. Trade unions were legalized in 1824 and many workers joined and Socialist ideas also began to spread among laboring classes
  14. A Labour Party, established in 1890s, advocated a reformist program

1-Where did the industrial revolution begin? ______

2-What is an industrial revolution? ______

3-How were goods produced prior to the industrial revolution? ______

4-Why did the industrial revolution increase the manufacturing of goods? ______

5-Why was the invention of the steam engine by James Watt significant? ______

6-Why had British landlords “enclosed” their lands? ______

7-What was the enclosure system? ______

8-What natural resources did Britain possess that fueled industrialization? ______

9-Identify additional facts explaining why the industrial revolution began in Britain. ______

10-Why were railroads built and how did railroads transform Britain? ______

11-How were aristocrats affected by the industrial revolution? ______

12-How was the middle class affected by the industrial revolution? ______

13-How were the working classes affected by the industrial revolution? ______

14-What did the middle class generally support in the political arena? ______

15-Why was the Reform Bill of 1823 significant? ______

16-How did the industrial revolution affect the lives of middle class women? ______

17-What class suffered the most and benefitted the least from the industrial revolution? ______

18-Why did this class suffer? ______

19-Define urbanization. ______

20-Discuss the impact of urbanization on Britain’s cities. ______

21-Discuss working conditions in factories. ______

22-What is a union and why did unions become increasingly popular among workers? ______

23-What was the Labour Party? ______

  1. The Industrial Revolution is generally considered to have begun in
(A)France
(B) Germany
(C)England
(D)Belgium
(E)The United States
  1. The widespread application of what device played the largest part in beginning the Industrial Revolution?
(A)The electric turbine
(B)The water wheel
(C)The internal-combustion engine
(D)The windmill
(E)The steam engine
  1. The Enclosure Acts affected the Industrial Revolution by
(A)Driving peasants off their land and thereby creating the workforce needed for factories and mines
(B)Bankrupting wealthy landowners, convincing them to turn to manufacturing
(C)Increasing the land under cultivation, destroying trees, increasing reliance on coal for fuel
(D)Educating peasants and turning them into skilled workers
(E)Setting more land aside for new factories and mines /
  1. What was the first major trade to be fully power-driven and industrialized?
(A)The canning of food
(B)The textile industry
(C)The production of rubber
(D)The manufacture of glass
(E)The leatherworking trade
  1. What effect did nineteenth-century industrialization have on Europe’s aristocratic class?
(A)Industrialization made the aristocratic class more powerful.
(B)Industrialization had very little effect on the aristocratic class.
(C)Industrialization gradually weakened the power and prestige of the aristocratic class.
(D)Industrialization suddenly weakened the power and prestige of the aristocratic class.
(E)Industrialization had no effect at all on the aristocratic class.
  1. Most world historians would agree that the key to European predominance in the world economy during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was
(A) The Industrial Revolution
(B) European medical technology
(C) Spanish control of New World silver
(D) The Enlightenment

Thesis Practice: Continuity and Change over Time

Analyze the economic changes and continuities in Western Europe from 476 C.E. to 1860 C.E.

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