Industrial Revolution’s Impact: Society, Economy, Art

Posted on Dec 15, 2024 in Geography

The 19th Century and Impressionist Painting

1. Economic and Social Change: The Industrial Revolution and Its Consequences

1.1. The Industrial Revolution and Its Consequences

It begins in England in the 18th century and spread throughout Europe during the 19th century, not being a uniform expansion. The elements that identify the Industrial Revolution are:

  • Mechanization: It involves the change in force production. So far the whole process from raw material extraction or processing of manufactured products were made using human power. What defines the new system is the use of machines, artificial force that replaced the human. A very representative example is the loom that goes from being moved with the hands and feet to use the force produced by the steam engine.
  • Rural Exodus: The mechanization of the countryside and the attractiveness of cities, the demand for labor, will produce a transfer of population from rural to urban, known as the rural exodus.
  • Urban Transformation: The mass march of people from rural to city throughout the 19th and 20th centuries in Europe, produces changes in the structure of cities. Particularly the emergence of extensions and class neighborhoods. It is the time to destroy the walls of historic cities to allow for expansion.
  • Proletarianization: The Industrial Revolution changed the production system guild. From the rise of factories, labor will be hired for the time worked. The large number of people moving to cities will lead to being used as cheap labor, and women and children are used for work. The result will be a large number of impoverished people, without any social security cover.
  • The Preponderance of the Bourgeoisie: To give effect to the Industrial Revolution, necessary technical developments and labor, but also capital, accumulation of money, and spirit of investment, risk factors were provided by the bourgeoisie. Almost parallel to the phenomenon of the industrial revolution, political revolution occurs, French Revolution, Revolutions of 1820, 30, and 48 – that will allow this social group, the bourgeoisie, access to political power in order to protect their interests.
  • The Expansion of Capitalism: Capitalism is an economic doctrine, formulated by Adam Smith, among other authors, who spread the idea that a country is enriched by the development of individual initiative and free competition without state intervention in the economy. The market is governed, according to this doctrine, the law of supply and demand, so the price of the products result from the quantity of products that are offered, and the request-offer these products, by consumer-demand.

There are two phases:

  • First Industrial Revolution: 18th-century England and France, Holland or Belgium in the 19th century. It is characterized by coal as fuel and by rail. The First Industrial Revolution originated from a number of reasons:
    • An increase in population.
    • The agricultural changes: Rotation of crops, new farming tools, and enclosure of land.
    • Technical innovations: the steam engine.
    • Railways.
  • The Second Industrial Revolution: In the late 19th century in England, France, Germany, and the USA. The energy source is oil and the automobile is the means of transport. The Second Industrial Revolution has the following features:
    • Technical progress: steel converter, combustion engine, light bulb, telephone, telegraph, or cinema.
    • New energy sources: electricity and oil.
    • New industry sectors: chemical, electrical, and food industries.

The consequences of the Industrial Revolution caused the following changes:

  • It is a phenomenon linked to the rise and rise of the bourgeoisie, which will implement an economic model, capitalism, based on personal enrichment, freedom of action, and free competition, without any state intervention.
  • It brings out a mode of production that gives rise to a risk-based production, enrichment, and investment. This productive way not only applies to factories, the production of articles produced but extends to the extraction of raw materials, notably agriculture, trade, and transport.
  • It makes developing cities develop. This result is a product of the location of plants near urban centers, seeking cheap labor, but also for the mechanization of the field, which makes producing a shift of population from rural to urban, rural exodus. In the populous cities will be distinguished bourgeois neighborhoods, spacious and well communicated, and working-class neighborhoods, little sanitized and poorly communicated.
  • The proletariat arises. The need to work produces a great mass of people willing to work in new factories or mines. These daily paid workers only worked and lack social coverage. Women and children are also employed for less wages. Working hours are up to twelve hours. The proletariat will be organized throughout the 19th century to achieve better working conditions and life, pitting the interests of the owners.
  • Countries will compete to get cheap raw materials and overseas markets to sell their industrial products. This competition will result in the development of transportation, both land and sea and the dominion of other territories, raising colonial imperialism. In the end, countries will face in these domains and armed conflicts will arise, that will trigger World War (1914-1918).
  • The emergence of the Industrial Revolution in the various countries will lead to technological and developmental inequality between countries with industry and those who do not. This inequality will grow over time, as industrialization creates the need for change constantly in production and in the modernization. Western Europe, Japan, and the United States topped the list of industrial countries.

1.2. Economic Liberalism and Capitalism

Economic liberalism is an economic doctrine developed by Adam Smith and David Ricardo that has the following principles:

  • Theory of wages: labor as a commodity.
  • Theory of value: price-related products used in this work.
  • Law of supply and demand, price and wage setting.

1.3. Stratified Society to Class Society

The Industrial Revolution changes develop in the French Revolution to privilege, equality before the law and political participation and involve the social and economic triumph of the bourgeoisie but entail the confrontation between capitalists and proletarians.

The bourgeoisie form two groups:

  • The big bourgeoisie, industrialists, bankers, shippers, etc.
  • The middle class urban areas: trade and workshop owners, officials, professionals-doctors, lawyers, etc.

The proletariat is composed of:

  • The rural peasantry or proletariat.
  • The urban proletariat: workers, employees or servants.

2. Nationalism, Imperialism, The Labor Movement

Arise from the dominance of the bourgeoisie, the search for new markets, the desire for world dominance and the clash of interests between owners and the dispossessed.

  • Nationalism: Sense of belonging to a territory with language, customs, music and common traditions. Will raise two new countries, Germany and Italy:
    • German Unification: This is encouraged by Napoleonic rule and the revolution of 1848. Prussia took the lead and Kaiser Wilhelm I and Chancellor Bismarck created, defeating Austria, the Confederation of German States, which acquired a constitution, a council and a common Parliament.
    • Italian Unification: It occurs between 1850 and 1870, fruit of the Risorgimento, a political and cultural movement. The initiative was taken by King Victor Emmanuel and Cavour politician from the north. The south will be won by the army of Garibaldi and the “redshirts”.
  • Imperialism: The expansion of some European countries to other continents, due to the following causes:
    • Economics: The need for cheap raw materials such as cotton, rubber, cocoa. was used to make processed products, rags, tires, chocolate, etc. At the same time, it was looking to create market for selling industrial production in European countries, so that started the so-called colonial pact, which facilitated settlements cheap raw materials and the metropolis, colonizing country was selling products manufactured, higher price. This system will prevent the emergence of industrialization in the colonies.
    • Policies: Industrialization leads to competition between countries and that competition raises the domain of other territories to ensure maritime commerce. But also nationalism by establishing a self-consciousness which countries want to express its prestige abroad and military and economic power. The colonial empires, mainly from England, France, Holland or Germany, showed its superiority. The rivalry between the countries will frictions for dominance of the colonial territories. These crashes

The colonies, areas dominated by European powers, could be of three types:

  • Colonies of exploitation.
  • Protectorates.
  • Colonies or settlement.

The Empires most important were the English and French.

2.3. The Labor Movement

Surge to improve the precarious conditions of workers and can distinguish the following actions:

  • The employee associations.
  • The Luddite: Ned Ludd.
  • The Chartist.
  • Utopian Socialism: Fourier, Saint-Simon and Robert Owen.
  • Scientific Socialism: Marx and Engels: Principles:
    • Historical materialism.
    • The class struggle.
    • DOP.
    • A classless society.
  • Anarchism: Proudhon and Bakunin.
  • The International.

3. Impressionist Painting

Arises from the political, social, economic and technological developments during the 19th century. It owes its name to the painting “Impression, soleil levant”, the painter Monet. The factors that produce this artistic change are:

  • The artists express their own individuality in the work, their personal sense of art.
  • Industrialization leads to a change in lifestyles. The painters reflected the speed, the rush and the sense of suddenness of the industrial world. Within this context, the painters in his work shed their individuality, their personal sense of art. Also rebel against the homogeneity of the bourgeois life that implants and try to live on the margins of bourgeois norms.
  • The photograph, and later the cinema, they understand the impressionist painters machine reproduces reality more accurately than painting. One discovers that the painting may reflect the reality of a more subjective manner, applying color on a design brief and barely even draw, which will paint a sketchy look, with less clarity than traditional painting, but with greater wealth expressive.
  • They are produced in the late 19th century a series of optical discoveries that can break optical light and set the color

Impressionist Painters

  • Eduard Manet (1832-1883)
    • Precursor of Impressionism.
    • Issues considered scandalous naked.
    • Feeling for sketching the picture.
    • Key works:
      • Olympia
      • Lunch on the Grass
  • Claude Monet (1840-1926)
    • Studies of light on objects and on the water.
    • Painting as research.
    • Paint the same subject several times with different light.
    • Key works:
      • Impression, Sunrise
      • The Rouen Cathedral
      • Water Lilies
  • Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)
    • Study the light on objects, particularly on the human figure.
    • Retrieve the use of drawing.
    • Key works:
      • Le Moulin de la Galette
  • Edgar Degas (1843-1917)
    • Drawing stark.
    • Constant interest in representing the movement.
    • Key issues:
      • Horse Racing.
      • Ballet.
      • Women in privacy.

The Post-Impressionism

It is the evolution of Impressionism and openness to new trends.

  • Paul Cézanne (1839-1906)
    • Intellectualization of reality.
    • A tendency to reduce reality to geometric figures.
    • Pallet loose.
    • Key works:
      • The Card Players
      • La Montagne Sainte-Victoire
      • Large Bathers
      • Still Life
  • Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890)
    • Inner vision of reality and people.
    • Pictures emotion-laden interior.
    • Brush applicator in short strokes and nervous.
    • Key works:
      • The Potato Eaters
      • Sunflowers
      • My Room at Arles
      • Starry Night
      • Self-portraits