1 The Crystal palace Exposition 1851: benefits and cost of Industrial Revolution

2 Definition of IR "self-sustained economic growth by means of perpetual technological revolution and social transformation"

and the example of cotton manufacturing

Key inventions, Hargreaves Spinning Jenny, Arkwright water frame 1768, Crompton's mule of 1781, and the power loom.

3 Factory System. Specialized machines and specialized tasks under one roof, vertical integration of the productive process, destruction of the cottage industry and "putting out" model.

4 Causes of the Industrial Revolution A) an advanced agricultural economy B) entrepreneurial attitudes to technology C) government

5 Some human results

Full text of sections 4 and 5 below

A ) Except in Ireland and Scotland, Great Britain possessed a relatively developed agricultural economy. What does "Developed" mean here. It was developed to the extent that landowners had already tried to increase agricultural productivity by turning to new farming techniques, such as crop rotation, and much more importantly tried to get land usage under their direct financial control by getting rid of a landowning peasantry who worked small plots in perpetuity. One can no longer speak of a substance agriculture in England by 1750 because there was a national market in foodstuffs. Transportation and communications were relatively cheap, (no part of England in more than 70 miles from the sea) and what is more their were no internal tariffs or check to the flow of goods or bodies. Compare this to Germany were there were a maze of independent states each with differing currencies and 67 duties on 3 classes of goods.

There was no ideological block of aristocracy that resisted economic progress or local ones holding peasants to the land in traditional ways. There was also a national market in cheap labor composed of the disposed peasants from the land. In sum, no major obstacles existed to the transfer of labor or capital from non-industrial to industrial pursuits. Most large British land owners already saw their land as a source of profit rather than a traditional trust for future generations. More in the way of speculation is a relative tendency, even among the aristocracy to see wealth and status in terms of cash rather than in land itself. The French abolished Feudalism by force, the English had already got rid of it by trade and markets

If you compare the situation with the continent, with France and Germany, you can see that the nobility was see oriented towards the maintenance of privilege and the consumption of luxury goods rather than the production of capital. When the industrial revolution came to the continent after 1850 it was largely from above and from the state, with governmental support of large companies such as Krupps of Siemens in Germany; you couldn't rely, in other words, on private capital being liquid enough to go into novel productive enterprises.

Finally the national climate was morally obtuse, or shall we say morally blind, to the effects of the agricultural revolution upon those who comprised its basic motor, the work force. Since we are living through similar times (I think) with an theory of social existence based on a theory of expendable displaced population ... how many people care about the origins and outcomes of NYC's homeless population .... in the same way there was in 18th century England an average indifference to rates of rural vagrancy, and to the incredibly brutal laws coverings tramps and poachers. The cultural attitudes of the elite was one of possessive individualism; the pursuit of self interest in accord with the common good (Locke) and contradiction between passions and the interests (Adam Smith.)

B) Technology. The place of technological innovation in Britain's industrial "take off" is still subject to much debate. Despite the reputation of Newton and Boyle England did not have an especially advanced base of scientific knowledge. Prussia was more strictly scientifically oriented than England and there the state promoted all forms of scientific inquiry at a level unheard of on England. France too had better technical training institutions and was able to employ very advanced techniques for many areas of production: weaving, glass blowing, silk manufacture and salt mining, for example. The marvels of technology had been on display long before Watts steam engine..in 16th century clocks for example. As early as 1764 French chiming pocket watches only 1/2 inch in diameter were made to weigh less than a quarter. The technological problems of the early industrial revolution were fairly simple. They required no class of men with specialized scientific qualifications, but merely a sufficiency of men with ordinary literacy, familiarity with simple mechanical devices and the working of metals, practical experience and initiative. The centuries since 1500 had certainly provided such a supply.

Most of the new technical inventions and productive establishments could be started economically on a small scale, and expanded piecemeal by successive addition. That is to say, they required little initial investment, and their expansion could be financed out of accumulated profits. Industrial development was within the capacities of a multiplicity of small entrepreneurs and skilled traditional artisans. No twentieth-century country setting about industrialization has, or can have, anything like these advantages. This does not mean that there were no obstacles in the path of British industrialization, but only that they were easy to overcome because the fundamental social and economic conditions for it already existed, because the eighteenth-century type of industrialization was comparatively cheap and simple, and because the country was sufficiently wealthy and flourishing to be untroubled by efficiencies which might have crippled less fortunate economies.

Perhaps only so lucky an industrial power as this could have ever afforded that distrust of logic and planning (even private planning, that faith in the capacity to muddle through, which became so characteristic of Britain in the nineteenth century. We shall see below how some of the difficulties of growth were overcome. The important thing to note at the outset is that they were never crucial.

The puzzle lies in the relationship between making profit and technological innovation. It is often assumed that an economy or private enterprise has an automatic bias towards innovation, but this is not so. It has a bias only towards profit. It will revolutionize manufactures only if greater profits are to be made in this way than otherwise. But in pre-industrial societies this is hardly ever the case. The available and prospective market and it is the market which determines what a businessman produces - consists of the rich, who require luxury goods in small quantities, but with a high profit-margin per sale, and the poor, who - if they are in the market economy at all, and do not produce their own consumer goods domestically or locally have little money, are unaccustomed to novelties and suspicious of them, unwilling to consume standardized products and may not even be concentrated in cities or accessible to national manufacturers. What is more, the mass market is not likely to grow very much more rapidly than the relatively slow rate of population increase. It will make more sense to dress princesses in haute couture models than to speculate on the chances of capturing peasants daughters for artificial silk stockings. The sound businessman, if he has any choice, will produce very expensive jeweled timepieces for aristocrats rather than cheap wristwatches, and the more expensive the process of launching revolutionary cheap goods, the more he will hesitate to risk his money in it.

A French millionaire in the mid nineteenth century-, operating in a country in which the conditions for modern industrialism were relatively poor, expressed this admirably. 'There are three ways of losing your money,' said the great Rothschild, 'women, gambling and engineers. The first two are pleasanter, but the last is much the most certain.' Nobody could accuse a Rothschild of not knowing the best way to the biggest profits. In a non-industrialized country it was not through industry.

C Government This brings us to the third factor in the genesis of the Industrial Revolution, government.

Here the advantage of Britain over her potential competitors is quite evident. Unlike some of them (such as France) she was prepared to subordinate all foreign policy to economic ends. Her war aims were commercial and (what amounted to much the same thing) naval. Unlike others (such as the Dutch, her economic aims were not completely dominated by commercial and financial interests, but shaped also, and increasingly, by the pressure group of manufacturers, originally the fiscally important woolen industry, later the rest.

This tussle between industry and commerce (represented most dramatically by the East India Company) was decided in the home market by 1700, when British producers won protection against Indian textile imports, it was not won in the foreign market until 1813, when the East India Company was deprived of its monopoly in India, and that subcontinent opened to deindustrialization and the massive import of Lancashire cottons. Lastly, unlike all its other rivals, British policy in the eighteenth century was one of systematic aggressiveness - most obviously against the chief rival, France. Of the five great wars of the period, Britain was clearly on the defensive in only one.

The result of this century of intermittent warfare was the greatest triumph ever achieved by any state:the virtual monopoly among European powers of overseas colonies, and the virtual monopoly of worldwide naval power. Moreover, war itself - by crippling Britain's major competitors in Europe - tended to boost exports, peace, if anything, tended to slow them up.

5) Human consequences of the Industrial Revolution

A) Industrial labor began to impose a regularity, a monotony and the routine in which workers were yoked to the demands of machine technology

B) It created a class of workers bound to their work only by capital, that is by wage. The idea of other satisfactions in work, the its product or the activity itself was diminishes in purely exchange orientated activity. The pre-industrial values of tradition, custom and community were dissolved.

C) In the colonies it started to develop the exploitation of primary resources, minerals crops for the metropolitan core often at the expense of traditional industries. Colonial peoples were viewed as captive markets for mass produced goods

D) Labor was concentrated in factories and in cities, creating overnight new forms of extensive poverty..slums with inadequate water, sanitation, epidemics of cholera, typhoid, high rates of infant mortality. The life of the laborer seemed to get worse, more brutal, even if the standard of living as measured in wages went up over time.