American History: A Survey (Brinkley), 13th Edition

Chapter 7: THE JEFFERSONIAN ERA

America in the World

The Global Industrial Revolution

While Americans were engaged in a revolution to win their independence, they were also taking the first steps toward an at least equally important revolution—one that was already in progress in England and Europe. It was the emergence of modern industrialism. Historians differ over precisely when the industrial revolution began, but it is clear that by the end of the eighteenth century it was well under way in many parts of the world. By the end of the nineteenth century, the global process of industrialization had transformed the societies of Britain, most of continental Europe, Japan, and the United States. Its social and economic consequences were complex and profound, and continue today to shape the nature of global society.

For Americans, the industrial revolution was largely a product of rapid changes in Great Britain, the nation with which they had the closest relations. Britain was the first nation to develop significant industrial capacity. The factory system took root in England in the late eighteenth century, revolutionizing the manufacture of cotton thread and cloth. One invention followed another in quick succession. Improvements in weaving drove improvements in spinning, and these changes created a demand for new devices for carding (combing and straightening the fibers for the spinner). Water, wind, and animal power continued to be important in the textile industry; but more important was the emergence of steam power—which began to proliferate after the appearance of James Watt's advanced steam engine (patented in 1769). Cumbersome and inefficient by modern standards, Watt's engine was nevertheless a major improvement over the earlier "atmospheric" engine of Thomas Newcomen. England's textile industry quickly became the most profitable in the world and it helped encourage comparable advances in other fields of manufacturing as well. Despite the efforts of the British government to prevent the export of English industrial technology, knowledge of the new machines reached other nations quickly, usually through the emigration of people who had learned the technology in British factories.

America benefited the most from English technology, because it received more immigrants from Great Britain than from any other country. But English technology spread quickly to the nations of continental Europe as well. Belgium was the first, developing a significant coal, iron, and armaments industry in the early nineteenth century. France—profiting from the immigration of approximately fifteen thousand British workers with advanced technological skills—had created a substantial industrial capacity in textiles and metals by the end of the 1820s, which in turn contributed to a great boom in railroad construction later in the century. German industrialization progressed rapidly after 1840, beginning with coal and iron production and then, in the 1850s, moving into large-scale railroad construction. By the late nineteenth century, Germany had created some of the world's largest industrial corporations. In Japan, the sudden intrusion of American and European traders helped cause the so-called Meiji reforms of the 1880s, and 1890s, which launched a period of rapid industrialization there as well.

Industrialization changed not just the world's economies, but also its societies. First in England, and then in Europe, America, and Japan, social systems underwent wrenching changes. Hundreds of thousands of men and women moved from rural areas into cities to work in factories, where they experienced both the benefits and the costs of industrialization. The standard of living of the new working class, when objectively quantified, was usually significantly higher than that of the rural poor. Many of those who moved from farm to factory experienced some improvement in nutrition and other material circumstances, and even in their health. But there were psychological costs to being suddenly uprooted from one way of life and thrust into another, fundamentally different one. Those costs could outweigh the material gains. There was little in most workers' prior experience to prepare them for the nature of industrial labor. It was disciplined, routinized work with a fixed and rigid schedule, a sharp contrast to the varying, seasonal work pattern of the rural economy. Nor were many factory workers prepared for life in the new industrial towns and expanding cities. Industrial workers experienced, too, a fundamental change in their relationship with their employers. Unlike rural landlords and local aristocrats, factory owners and managers—the new class of industrial capitalists, many of them accumulating unprecedented wealth— were usually remote and inaccessible figures. They dealt with their workers impersonally, and the result was a growing schism between the two classes—each lacking access to or understanding of the other. Working men and women throughout the globe began thinking of themselves as a distinct class, with common goals and interests. And their efforts simultaneously to adjust to their new way of life and to resist its most damaging aspects sometimes created great social turbulence. Battles between workers and employers became a characteristic feature of industrial life throughout the world.

Life in industrial nations changed at every level. Populations in industrial countries grew rapidly, and people began to live longer. At the same time, industrial cities began to produce great increases in pollution, crime, and—until modern sanitation systems emerged—infectious disease. Around the industrial world, middle classes expanded and came, in varying degrees, to dominate the economy (although not always the culture or the politics) of their nations.

Not since the agrarian revolution thousands of years earlier, when many humans had turned from hunting to farming for sustenance, had there been an economic change of a magnitude comparable to that of the industrial revolution. Centuries of traditions, of social patterns, and of cultural and religious assumptions were challenged and often shattered. The tentative stirrings of industrial activity in the United States in the early nineteenth century, therefore, were part of a vast movement that over the course of the next century was to transform much of the globe.

http://www.historyguide.org/intellect/lecture17a.html - "The Origins of the Industrial Revolution in England," Steven Kreis

1
Review "The Origins of the Industrial Revolution in England" above. Why did the Industrial Revolution happen in England first? What historical factors led to its becoming "the first industrialized nation"? Why was it unlikely that this would have occurred in America first?

http://www.geocities.com/couple_colour/Worker/ - "The Life of the Industrial Worker in 19th Century Britain"

http://history.hanover.edu/courses/excerpts/111sad.html - The Sadler Committee Report (1832)

2
Look over the two links above. How did the Industrial Revolution change the lives of English working people? Does this experience seem comparable to what happened to workers here in America? Could a book like Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist be plausibly set in America?

http://www.taisho.com/industry.html - Meiji Period: Industrial Beginnings

3
Although the Industrial Revolution began as an English phenomenon, it spread quickly around the world, including the Far East. Review the website above on the Meiji period in Japan. How and why did the Industrial Revolution establish a foothold in Japan? How did it affect Japanese workers?
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