The Industrial Revolution

Industrialization is a long process, still occurring at a global level. The emergence after the 1770s in the English midlands of semi-automated iron mills and textile amills that produced mass amounts of standardized cloth is often considered to be the beginning of the industrial revolution. Steam engines (using coal as fuel) gradually replaced waterwheels and animals as a major power source over the next 50 years. Over half of British textile manufactures were exported by the 1820s.

Growth rates in England averaged only 1.5% a year from the 1770s through 1820s, much of which can be accounted for by the expansion of traditional economic sectors. The growth of canals, railways and the more systematic use of steam in the 1820s led to a more rapid expansion of industrial production. Industrial techniques began to be adopted in northwestern Europe and North America at this time. Once the cycle of mass production got established, it created a snowball effect of growth that was hard to stop. (Diagram)

Conditions of the Industrial Revolution

Industrialization should not be understood as a "natural" stage of human development, but as a unique product of complex and intertwined historical processes. The following list of contributing causes is not exhaustive (some may not even have been necessary). It emphasizes how developments in England were embedded in global processes.

• Resources from the Americas. Asia and Europe were both experiencing population booms that pushed the limits of traditional agriculture and exhausted forest resources. In much of Asia, family members turned away from sideline manufacturing and cash cropping to more intensive subsistence farming (the usual response to food crises). West Europe could draw on forests, wheat, cotton and sugar products from the Americas and East Europe to feed people and provide resources for manufacturing. (Whether or not slave plantations and the Atlantic and Asian trades produced extra capital for English merchants is heavily debated. The amount was surely small, but it perhaps provided just enough surplus to get things rolling).
• Slave labor in the Americas and serf labor in East Europe helped provide materials and foodstuffs at cheap prices. These areas also served as easy markets for manufactured products. In contrast, China implemented policies to strengthen the economies and promote free labor in peripheral parts of its empire, thus decreasing the availability of cheap materials and undeveloped markets for the more economically advanced areas.
• Coal mines in England were easily accessible to population centers. Moreover, the development of pump technology to drain waterlogged mines was important in the development of the steam engine. Chinese mines, on the other hand, were distant, dry, and liable to spontaneous combustion.
• Commercialization, such as growth of cash economies; free and flexible labor; more intensive manufacturing activities; free markets; higher levels of consumption; and institutions such as banks, joint stock arrangements, paper money and contract conventions that facilitated credit, exchange, and the accumulation of capital had advanced gradually throughout Europe and around the world since the 14th century. This can't explain why industrialization began in England because similar processes happened elsewhere, but was surely a necessary precondition.
• Bourgeoisie influence on government policies to protect private property. Commercialization and the fact that many kings were dependent on international bankers and local bourgeoisie to finance and provision the constant wars in Europe made many kings dependent on those bankers and bourgeoisie. This meant that the bourgeois classes were able to push through legal and constitutional reforms that protected private property against royal appropriation, and promote civil courts to judge property disputes. Reforms ultimately included breaking up trade guilds and privatization of communal village lands. The most important protections may have ultimately been those designed to protect the chartered joint stock trading companies. While this form was not so important in the development of the textile mills, it was later adapted to finance railroad construction.
• Free Trade Ideologies. Mercantilist economic theory of the 18th century--practiced very successfully by England--believed a strong country enforced economic policies that promoted the inflow of wealth, and preserved the wealth that already existed in a country. Accordingly, the early textile industry in England was nurtured by high tariffs that virtually prohibited the import of foreign cloths. But once manufacturing was well-estalbished, the important manufacturers began to promote the virtues of free trade theories that would allow them to expand at a global scale.
• Integration of internal markets by breaking down internal trade barriers and tolls was very effective in England. This was linked to the growth of the nation-state, but also facilitated the movement of raw materials, labor and manufactured goods necessary for mass production. Growth of canal and then railroad transportation in the 1820s sped this process along.
• The Indian textile industry started to decline as early as the 1720s, for reasons that are still not well understood. After the East India Company gained control of Bengal in the 1760s it hastened that decline with policies and taxes that were detrimental to Indian cloth merchants and manufacturers, and promoted the growth of cotton as a cash crop. The East India Company also cooperated with the British textile industry in dumping cheap British cloth on the Indian market. Bengal was also a source of revenue, opium and cotton that supported British military and trading activities around the world.
• High wages in northwest Europe (along with higher transportation costs to Asia) rewarded investment in labor saving machinery. In areas of Asia where wages were more globally competitive, merchant capital was better rewarded by providing advances to peasant producers and workshops.
• Scientific methods had been developing in Europe since at least the 16th century. The influence of this is hard to gauge. Most of the technology used in the first fifty years of the industrial revolution had been around for centuries--much of it known in China since at least 1200 CE--and technologies developed in Europe (and Asia) spread quickly around the world. There is also much debate over the relationship of technology and science. It does seem clear, however, that England (where guilds were not so strong as the rest of Europe) had a strong tradition of "tinkering", and that craftsmen had a much closer relationship with systematic scientists such as James Watt than on the continent.

Whatever the causes of initial industrial transformations, they could not have been sustained over the subsequent 50 years without expanded access to labor, resources and markets, both within and outside the national borders of England and other European nations. This access was often shaped by monopolies, tariffs, coerced labor and discriminatory laws.

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