Industrial+Revolution+in+Europe+(1730-Present)

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 Industrial Revolution putting-out system limited liability system stock exchange insurance companies wealth transfer Water meadows four-field system textile industry //Flying Shuttle// //Spinning Jenny//  //Water Frame// //Power Loom// [|Watt Engine]

 Discussion Question: What were the market effects of the technological changes that occurred during the Industrial Revolution? Use evidence and examples to explain your answer.

 As we begin this lecture, I would like to ask that you close your eyes, and briefly try to imagine everything you own. Once you have that picture clearly in mind, try to imagine how much of that you could still have if you had to make it and move it all with your own two hands.

 This is my way of introducing the importance of the Industrial Revolution. The **Industrial Revolution**, which really can best be described as a series of improvements in human productivity through the application of new technologies, is the most important change in human history since the Agricultural Revolutions of about 8,000 BC. These changes began in about 1730 AD, and have lasted into our present time. More importantly, they have impacted human culture, social organization, personal relations, political organization and activities, our concept of time, and even the goals and expectations we set for our lives.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 12pt;"> Before we look at the changes that were involved in the Industrial Revolution, we need to understand some of what life was like in the world before industrialization. We'll start with trying to understand the modes of production - that is, the way people made things - before 1730. In the period before 1730, everything was made by hand. Whether you needed weapons, farm tools, furniture, silverware, or musical instruments, either you had to make it yourself, by hand, or you had to buy it from a master craftsman who made it by hand. Of course, this means that no two of the same object were ever identical. No two violins, before industrialization, were the same at all - this of course is what makes violins by the famous master Antonia Stradivari, who was born in 1644, so valuable - each is a completely unique instrument. But before 1730, the same was true of shovels, rakes, barrels, guns - anything you can think of.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 12pt;"> Around the beginning of the 18th century (also known as the 1700's) some individuals in many places around the world began working what the English came to call the "**putting-out system**". This was, in effect, a very primitive production line without the machines, the automation, or the line. The way it worked was very simple. A principal manufacturer would buy certain raw materials with the intent of turning them into a finished product. But rather than doing all of the work himself, he would "put out" or "let out" the work to individual specialists at each point in the manufacturing process. For example, if the principal wanted to end up with cloth as a final product, he would first purchase wool from a farmer. He would then have that wool transported to a person whose specialty was carding the wool into strands to prepare it for spinning. That carder would more than likely be working out of his home, and be assisted by his wife. Their children did not go to public school, because there was none at the time. So the children would help, too. Normally for such families all time was taken up with the work of agricultural production, but in the off season, or during slow times of the growing process, there would be time to take in work. Since these rural laborers were not regulated by the craft guilds that were present in the cities, their work was often less expensive than city-dwelling craftspeople, and this also helped to make them attractive to the principal.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 12pt;"> In this kind of work, there was no factory schedule, no work schedule. The only time the carder had to worry about was the day in the future when the principal would come back for the finished product. They worked when they could, with no clock to keep time, and were paid when they were done. They did not have the hum of machinery, or of motors in the background. They did not often work at night because candle tallow was expensive and candles did not provide enough light. Once the week was out, the principal would return, pay the carder, then have the wool carried to the spinner, and the same would happen over the next week. Spinners, especially those who could spin large amounts of wool, were very skilled workers. After the spinner, of course, came the weaver. Each of these people might live many miles from each other, and the only thing linking them was the common principal with whom they worked. But each was most often a farmer, as well, growing food to sustain his family, and selling the surplus for extra cash.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 12pt;"> Clearly, the world of the putting-out system was very different from our own. But there were other ways in which life was different from our time, as well. The life of what we might call average people was different in almost every way from that of the elites who governed them. This was not just in terms of income. The elites of the time, in Europe most commonly a landed aristocracy, which had been developed over the course of the Middle Ages, from about 465 to 1517, mostly from groups of warriors who fought over the control of land. Land was the basis of wealth, and in Europe in 1730, more than 80% of the land was controlled by less than 10% of the population. The other 90% of the population had to rent their land, in various ways, from the aristocrats. The money from the trade in produce, and from rents paid by the renters, made the aristocrats, over time, very wealthy. For them, the purchase of huge manor houses was not only a matter of course, but did not require loans (loans could not even be secured by private individuals before the 1730's), and were only some of the expenses they were able to bear. An aristocrat did not work. Instead, the small army of servants that he employed did his work for him. Food was put on his table by those who worked his fields for him. Many of those, particularly in Eastern Europe, did not have the freedom of mobility that the aristocrat had - they belonged to the land, in the same way that a shed or a barn or a house might. If the land changed hands, the serfs (bonded peasants) stayed with the land. By contrast with the aristocrats, the serfs were virtual slaves, receiving their room and board for the labor required of them, but nothing more, and the peasants worked their own land on their free time - usually about two out of the week's seven days - and paid the aristocrat who owned the land between 40% and 60% of everything they grew on the land as rent. In addition, they were required to provide special levies of food and work for the aristocrat's holiday feasts, etc... The differences between these classes were vast. The aristocrats were also the ruling class, staffing the government, manning parliament, if there was one, and operating the vast machinery of local government. The peasants had no part in government, and their opinions were not even considered unless their problems impacted the income of the landowning aristocrat. The aristocrat held court, deciding minor legal matters for all of his vassals (serfs and peasants), collected rents, and kept tabs on important goings-on throughout the kingdom through his network of aristocratic friends at his and their parties and picnics. Aristocrats were, by the 1700's, beginning to send their sons to college on a regular basis, though most did not finish - but they were increasingly educated, and interested in literature, mathematics, and philosophy, as well as music and rhetoric and law. Peasants were, for the most part, completely unable to read, and even less able to write. Clearly, then, the differences between the aristocrats and the peasants was so large as to be almost unbridgeable.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 12pt;"> There was another class, growing larger and more robust in this period, though. Today we call them the "middle class" - in the 18th century, they were called "burghers" (people who lived in the burgh, or town) by the Germans, and Bourgeosie (meaning exactly the same thing in French). These burghers were technically commoners, but their status was a bit different from that of peasants. Most of them were shop-keepers or professionals like lawyers and doctors. Most of them owned their own property, or at last the house and shop, and most of them had more income than peasants, but less than aristocrats. Their income was directly related to the amount of business they could do within their trade. For this reason, this class of people was very careful with money. They learned how to make it, and how to account for their income and expenses. As the wealthiest commoners, they paid more tax than almost any other group in Europea society. They came to expect some say in the government because of that. They also valued education - they came to see it as the key to financial advancement, and sent their children to college. By the mid to late eighteenth century, they were in some cases wealthier than the aristocrats, though with no legal right to influence government. This class, in fact, stood in opposition to the aristocracy in many ways. Where the aristocracy saw the spending of money as a sign of wealth and power, the middle class believed in saving and careful use of money. When the aristocracy sent their sons to college, it was for the associations and some familiarity with certain subjects, they rarely did well or stayed long enough to earn a degree. When the middle class sent their children to college, it was to study, and they did study and get a degree - they spent money for results. These differences would become critical, in politics, in economics, in technology, and in nearly every other human pursuit during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 12pt;"> Around 1730 England and Holland began a new period in their economic histories. First, Holland had become one of the foremost colonial states in Europe, trading and holding on to trading outposts in Asia, the Pacific, and the Americas. The Dutch developed some new technologies to deal with the risks and market opportunities this presented them with. First, they created a system with which to spread risk in a company, so that investors could be a part of investments without losing everything. It was called the **limited liability system**, or what is known in the United States as "incorporation" - a system which makes investors responsible for a firm's debts only to the degree to which they have invested in the firm. If a firm then goes bankrupt, investors lose only what they have put into the company, and no more. This greatly reduced the risk of ventures, particularly overseas trading ventures that were risky for many other reasons anyway, and encouraged investment, and a growth in business. In addition, to further reduce risk, investment in companies was made easier through the **stock exchange**, invented in Holland, and through the use of paper money and a central bank, also invented in Holland in the 17th century. Finally, the Dutch (Holland) created **insurance companies**, who would cover the potential losses of overseas or domestic trade, thus further reducing the risk to investors of creating and operating a business. All of these things combined with some critically important changes when they were brought to England to create a perfect environment for the development first of capital (a large money supply) and then of business and eventually machine-assisted manufacturing on a large scale.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 12pt;"> England, not Holland, was first in the Industrial Revolution gate for a number of reasons. First, England's close relationship with the Dutch, and competition with the Dutch in world trade, made possible English knowledge of the Dutch business innovations mentioned above, and gave the English incentive to use them to gain an upper hand in the competition for world trade and empire. The English also were in the process of deploying some new ideas of their own to take advantage of their new possibilities as their empire grew.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 12pt;"> One of the key realities within England after 1730 was an extraordinary run of good weather, which meant that English farmers were able to produce bumper crops from their land for long periods of time. The surplus crops they produced went either to increase their own, or their landlords' wealth, and as the amount of wealth (not money) grew, it became necessary to use that wealth in some new way. Along with that came improvements in the use of land that made the creation of new wealth easier, and even greater surpluses were realized. Another source of new wealth was the fact that many in England who had the means were going overseas to own or manage a plantation of some sort or other in the colonies. New money flowed in from the Americas, where profits were large in part due to the fact that there was little or no labor cost - slaves did all the work - though replacement cost was somewhat high, because slaves lasted on average 7 years before dying of overwork, or some local disease. New money also came in from India, where farmers were being encouraged to ruin their land growing tobacco and cotton until the soil was exhausted. Tea, sugar (eventually planted also in Hawaii), pepper, all became profitable cash crops which helped create new money, and **transfer much of the wealth of the colonies to the European colonizers**.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 12pt;"> With the new wealth, they had gained from farming or from the colonies, many people came home and bought themselves new land, new lordships, and had to deal with more problems of production than before. This led to the second of the great innovations, one that we can call the second, or new, agricultural revolution. This was a revolution in production because of new farming technologies. Chemists, part of the scientific revolution, were creating chemical fertilizers for the first time, increasing the productivity of many farm crops. **Water meadows** - a process of allowing running water to cover a field of grass about 1 inch deep, prevented grazing lands from freezing in winter, and allowing cows to be fed in much larger numbers, thus increasing dairy and meat production. The use of clover and beans to increase the nitrogen in soil, and thus improve the yields of other crops, and the switch from a three-field system to a **four-field system** in which the fallow land was put under clover and used to feed bees, or made a water meadow or used for beat production to feed livestock, thus making the improvement of the soil also profitable.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 12pt;"> All of these changes improved farm production so much that the increase in raw materials, including, but not limited to food - cotton, wool, flax, and other materials were included as well - overwhelmed the craft industries of the time. There were not enough carders and spinners to turn all the wool into thread, and not enough weavers to turn the thread into cloth, for instance. These kinds of bottlenecks, where the increase in commodity production outran the ability of craft industries to exploit it, were common.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 12pt;"> Along with this came the Dutch revolution in banking and investment structures that were mentioned earlier. England in 1694 adopted a central bank which could issue paper money, and had the gold reserves to back it up. This "Bank of England" set interest rates, issued paper money and coinage, and offered loans to both government and private individuals. This provided a place for wealth to accumulate, and to be distributed, so that if a farmer, for example, through the new growth discussed earlier, amassed enough wealth in terms of land or tools, or market power, the Bank of England could loan that farmer money on the expectation that his wealth was available to back him up. The use of interest made the investors of the bank interested in making such loans, and the use by the bank of money, rather than real-estate, as a means to provide loans and pay debts made wealth itself more mobile. It was no longer locked in the property ownership of individuals, but could be used, and reused. Over time, this increased the value of the money, and increased the business activity as money was exchanged more and more frequently for goods and services.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 12pt;"> Once again, combined with the increased wealth and production of agriculture, and the increased mobility of money with the advent of the Bank of England, the kingdom of England also had a relatively light tax burden, which meant that those accumulating wealth were required to share less of it with the government than people from other European countries.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 12pt;"> The technological part of the Industrial Revolution really did not begin until the 1760's, and even then there was little of what we, today, would call technology. Still, the first to revolutionize its production system based on technology was the **textile (cloth-making) industry**. Before 1800, the cloth-making industry was, as I mentioned earlier, a hand-manufacturing industry. It was dominated by skilled workers who worked on contract mostly in the putting-out system, and mostly as part, but not all, of their income-making activities, all of which were carried out from their homes.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 12pt;"> In 1733, John Kay invented a system to fix the bottleneck in the system where spinners were making too much thread and weavers could not keep up. His invention is known as the **//Flying Shuttle//**, and it was simply a spring-loaded weaving shuttle that allowed a weaver to shoot the shuttle across the warp of the cloth over larger distances than the hand-system had been able to, thus taking the width of bolts of cloth from around 2-3 feet to up to 9 feet. This effectively doubled or tripled the amount of thread necessary and the amount of cloth a weaver could make.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 12pt;"> The next bottleneck in the production process was the fact that as weavers created more cloth, they needed more thread, but hand-spinning was not able to keep up either with demand, nor with the supply of new wool created by the boom in agricultural production. This problem was first addressed by James Hargreaves' **//Spinning Jenny//** in 1764, more than 30 years after the Flying Shuttle. The Spinning Jenny was a machine, but it still was not automated, nor did it work under its own power. It was hand-driven, and could spin up to 30 times more thread than the old hand-driven single spindle spinning wheel method. In 1769, a tinkerer by the name of Richard Arkwright connected Spinning Jenny to a water wheel, and created what came to be known as the **//Water Frame//**. Where the Spinning Jenny had increased the production of a single spinner from one to 30 spindles, the Water Frame increased production to hundreds of spindles being wound simultaneously, and only being watched by one or two individuals. This both decreased the cost of spinning, and increased the amount of thread manufactured, thus increasing income and profit. All of that, of course, meant that weaving was once more where the bottleneck occurred.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 12pt;"> To solve that bottleneck, in 1785 Edmund Cartwright invented what he called the **//Power Loom//** - an automated device that could weave fabric at tremendous speeds, with only one or two attendants. This meant that not only did weaving companies have to pay less for labor, they could also hire unskilled workers to do most of what was necessary, with the exception of the repair of machines, which was carried out by skilled engineers.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 12pt;"> This great success, though, at solving the production problems involved in manufacturing more and cheaper textiles (cloth) meant that a new need for an energy source became the last bottleneck - the last place where the needs of production could be solved. If someone could invent a machine that could drive these other new machines as relentlessly as a waterwheel, without tiring like humans or animals, that could keep production moving even faster than it now was by the 1780's, then even more cloth could be made at an even lower cost.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 12pt;"> The solution to this problem came with a device created in 1712, even before the other machines were invented, called the [|Newcomen Engine] after its inventor. Around the 1770's, a Newcomen Engine repairman and engineering professor at the University of Glasgow in Scotland, James Watt, improved the Newcomen Engine, making it far more efficient. His "**[|Watt Engine]**" became the first really useful engine in the textile and other manufacturing industries. With new machines like the spinning Jenny or the Power Look connected to these new Watt Engines, the power to increase production was almost infinite. The number of people working in these plants was regularly decreased, and the work they had to do both increased (longer hours) and was simplified.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 12pt;"> Eventually, in the 19th Century, the Watt engine was applied to ships, then to ground transportation devices, which eventually became trains. As it was applied to transportation, the steam engine once again revolutionized the way goods were made and distributed. Prior to the application of the steam engine to transportation, the average speed of humans on land was about 3 mph. That is not to say they could not go faster - they frequently did - but sustained movement of goods over long distances, speed averaged to about 3 mph. The steam locomotive and train, and the steam powered ship, changed this speed altogether, and on a continuing basis. In 1829, for example, the world's fastest rail locomotive, powered by steam, had reached what, for the time, was the staggering speed of 19mph. This seems almost cute to us today, so we often overlook the fact that it was more than 6 times the speed of transportation that people were used to. Many worried that the power of acceleration would push people to the back of their seats and crush them against the wall. Speed on railroads did not develop as quickly as we might like to think - it was not until the 1940's, for example, that a locomotive was made in the United States that could haul a train at faster than 50mph.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 12pt;"> The use of steam for ships was, early on, as much of a problem as it was a solution. The need to carry enough coal to feed the early engines meant that ships could carry very little cargo. They had to fill their holds, and even their decks, with coal in order to complete a transpacific crossing. This meant trade was very difficult, and it was one of the reasons for opening up port facilities in the Pacific Islands and Japan - so that they could act as coaling stations for the long journeys to Asian sources of raw materials and customers.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 12pt;"> Ultimately, the results of these technological achievements, not all of them, as we have seen, related specifically to machines, were huge. Great Britain (England) came, after 1850, to produce more than 2/3 of all world coal, and 19% of all world cotton - more than the craftspeople of Chinal, with more than 100 times England's population, were able to produce. In fact, by 1850, from 1730, England's manufacturing output had increased by a factor of ten. In the same way, by 1850, England had creted a national market, where trains reached every corner of the nation, making a, for the time, huge market in which farmers and manufacturers could sell their goods to people far from the point of production, thus significantly increasing their customer base, and the money flow in the economy. Last, but perhaps most important, the goods that commoners had never been able to purchase in the past - extra clothing, metal tools, even some food, became available in cheap form because of mass production and efficient transportation. A market of scale was born.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 12pt;"> As should be clear by now, the development of agriculture technology and of empire helped produce both the wealth, and the need, for new technologies. Experimentation with new agriculture technology increased that need and wealth even further. The creation of the Bank of England as a central bank stabilized the economy and helped it grow by providing currency - money - a system of mobile exchange that allowed the growing wealth of the country to be easily transferred and moved. Finally, the development of mechanical technology in the form not just of steam engines but of machines for manufacture, increased the production capabilites of English industry to the point where formerly expensive goods were made affordable to the common people for the first time.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 12pt;"> In the process of going through these changes so quickly. Human society was changed drastically as well. Those changes are the subject of another lecture.