The Industrial Revolution was a major turning point in world history. Historian Eric Hobsbawm believes that it represents the seminal event in the history of man.1 While not all scholars agree with Hobsbawm, most support the claim that it ranks alongside the Neolithic Revolution in terms of its dramatic effect on all aspects of human life. In the Neolithic example, man made the transition from being a hunter and gatherer and adopted agriculture as the means to sustain life and organize his world. Neolithic man settled down and formed agricultural communities and then early cities and survived on the agrarian surplus provided by the new economic realities. Likewise, within the short span of three generations, the Industrial Revolution marks a major historical discontinuity. It stimulated the first major transformation of lifestyle in thousands of years because of the emerging technological developments, new enterprises and their related business organizations, the restructuring of labor, and massive demographic shifts that created a modern urban society with its foundation not based on agricultural but rather on the industrial production, exchange, and consumption of a seemingly endless variety of consumer goods. It opened a passage to an era of previously untapped energy. Furthermore, the Industrial Revolution resulted in a phenomenal growth of national and personal wealth and, like the Neolithic Revolution, stimulated responses that fundamentally changed existing political, economic, and social institutions. However, the scope, scale, and impact of the Industrial Revolution far surpassed in its breadth, depth, and speed of change the more gradual diffusion of the Neolithic era.
Although the Industrial Revolution had no definitive start date like its French Revolutionary counterpart, it is apparent that beginning in the early 18th century, economic and technological developments supported by political establishments coalesced to alter fundamentally the landscape of Western civilization, and then by a process of diffusion spread to other societies across the globe. These factors included the ability of agriculture to support a rapidly growing population and mobile society, specialization of economic pursuits and class distinctions, the mutual support of scientific inquiry and technical innovation and their application to commercial applications. There is no dispute that this phenomenon occurred first in Great Britain. Perhaps no single image embodies the spirit of the first century of this new age better than the International Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, opened formally by Queen Victoria at Kensington in London on May 1, 1851. This six-month-long exhibition housed in an impressive glass and iron structure dubbed the ‘‘Crystal Palace’’ was a soaring monument to the power and vision of the Industrial Revolution and Great Britain’s dominant role in the era. It demonstrated the paramount industrial and engineering milestone that Great Britain had achieved in the first century of the Industrial Revolution, a position that surpassed that of its neighbors and brought the nation extraordinary wealth and material success. On the eve of the Great Exhibition, Queen Victoria penned a diary entry that summed up the bursting confidence and optimism of the country with the simple notation, ‘‘We are capable of doing anything.’’2
After 1815 the Industrial Revolution spread methodically but unevenly from the British Isles to northwestern Europe, northern Italy, the United States, central Europe, Russia, Japan, and ultimately portions of the wider world such as India, the Middle East, and Latin America. It had a dramatic impact on the political, economic, and social life of Western civilization and a lesser one on the peripheral areas. The Industrial Revolution stimulated a major increase in production and mass consumption. The ancient sources of power— human, draught animal, wind, and water—were replaced by coal and steam and eventually gas and electricity to construct and operate more sophisticated machinery and stimulate new inventions and increasingly higher levels of productivity. These changes required modified forms of labor organizations to ensure sustained profits and resulted in the growth of factory enterprises and new business arrangements to replace the former widely dispersed domestic workshops and cottage industries.
As the impact of the Industrial Revolution deepened, Europe, the Western world, and then selected portions of the globe underwent a distinct transition from an agrarian and handicraft society to one fueled by factories, machines, and more specialized labor. Factory owners and industrial financiers at first resorted to any means available to stoke the industrial engine with little regard for human or environmental consequences. As a result, conditions for the workers took an initial step backwards as the factories were dirty, monotonous, unsafe, and difficult places in which to toil. As people moved from the farm areas to the growing industrial cities, bulging populations erased large portions of the rural landscape and the more simple, traditional, and personal characteristics of agrarian life. This rapid and uncharted growth of the urban areas placed new challenges on political authorities who attempted to cope with housing shortages and overcrowding, poor sanitation and recurrent epidemic disease, and nagging social issues such as abandonment of children, crime, alcohol abuse, and prostitution. Relief for these disturbing social ills and blemishes of industrialization did not appear until courageous and dedicated reformers spurred governments to legislate improvements in the later 19th century. Other changes were the rise of a wealthy and politically influential middle class and the massive growth of an urban proletariat whose initially faint voice slowly became loud as the 19th century progressed, a clamor that eventually transformed the nature of Western politics. Finally, this new environment stimulated in Western nations a fresh and insatiable appetite for raw materials and new resources to pursue ever-increasing levels of economic growth. As a result, fundamental changes occurred regarding the relationship of Western states with each other and the rest of the world as industrial power became the major vehicle by which nations attempted to subdue wide portions of the globe and compete for economic, territorial, and strategic advantage. In summary, the Industrial Revolution was the culmination of complex changes churning in Europe beginning in the 18th century. The marriage of invention and entrepreneurship, a shifting labor supply, the growth of international trade, new and enterprising business ventures, and eventual government involvement and direction contributed to the explosion of economic growth known as the Industrial Revolution and, despite fits and starts, a heretofore unknown level of progress and prosperity.
World History
