The Industrial Revolution: A Comprehensive Analysis
The existence of strong border controls prevented the spread of disease and reduced the spread of epidemics, as occurred in earlier times. The British agricultural revolution also made food production more efficient with less labor input, encouraging people unable to find farm work to seek industry-related jobs. This caused a migratory movement from rural areas to cities and a new development in factories. Seventeenth-century colonial expansion, accompanied by the development of international trade, the creation of financial markets, and capital accumulation, are considered influential factors, as was the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. One could say this was produced in England by its economic development.
The presence of a larger domestic market should also be considered a catalyst for the Industrial Revolution, particularly explaining why it happened in the UK.
The invention of the steam engine was one of the most important innovations of the Industrial Revolution. It enabled improvements in metalwork based on the use of coke instead of charcoal. In the eighteenth century, the textile industry leveraged water power to operate certain machines. These industries became the model organization of human labor in factories.
Besides the innovation of machinery, the assembly line significantly improved factory efficiency.
- Agricultural Revolution: Progressive increases in production thanks to investment in new technologies and farming systems, in addition to improvements in fertilizer use.
- Development of Commercial Capital: Machines were used to improve transport and communication, initiating a huge transformation. Employer-employee relations were redefined to obtain mutual benefits.
- Socio-Demographic Changes: Modernization of agriculture allowed population growth due to improved nutrition. Advances in medicine and hygiene also contributed to population growth. There was also migration from the countryside to the city as agricultural jobs declined while labor demand grew in cities.
The first revolution was characterized by a change in artisan-type working tools—the steam engine, powered by coal. The machine required highly skilled individuals, causing a reduction in the number of people employed and shifting workers from one branch of production to another, especially from the countryside to the city.
International Trade
Industrial Economics
However, despite all the above factors, the industrial revolution would not have succeeded without the support and development of transport, which carried goods produced in factories to markets.
This new transport was needed not only in domestic trade but also in international trade, since this period saw the creation of large national and international markets where goods could travel freely throughout the country without paying duties. International trade was liberalized, especially after the Treaty of Utrecht (1713), which liberalized trade relations between England and other European countries with Spanish America. This ended the era of privileged companies and economic protectionism, and advocated a policy of imperialism and the elimination of union privileges. Additionally, church, manorial, and communal lands were secularized to bring new land to market and create a new concept of ownership. The Industrial Revolution also produced an expansion of foreign markets and a new international division of labor (IDL).
New markets were conquered by lowering the cost of machine-made products, new transportation systems, open communication channels, and an expansionist policy.
The United Kingdom first underwent a series of transformations that placed it at the forefront of every country in the world. Changes in agriculture, population, transport, technology, and industries favored industrial development. The cotton textile industry was the leading sector of industrialization and the basis of capital accumulation, which would then move into a second phase focused on steel and railways.
By the mid-eighteenth century, British industry had solid foundations and experienced a double expansion in producer and consumer goods industries. This even stimulated the growth of coal mining and the steel industry with the construction of the railway. Thus, Great Britain fully implemented capitalist industrial development, explaining its industrial supremacy until around 1870, as well as its financial and trade dominance from the mid-eighteenth century until World War I (1914). In the rest of Europe and other regions like North America or Japan, industrialization was much later and followed a different pattern.
Some countries industrialized between 1850 and 1914: France, Germany, and Belgium. In 1850, there were hardly any modern factories in mainland Europe; only Belgium was undergoing a revolution similar to the UK’s. In the second half of the nineteenth century, industrialization strengthened in Thuringia and Saxony in Germany.
Other countries followed a different and much later model of industrialization: Italy, Austria-Hungary, Spain, and Russia. Their industrialization began timidly in the last decades of the nineteenth century, ending long after 1914.
Stages of the Industrial Revolution
The Industrial Revolution is divided into two stages: the first from 1750 to 1840, and the second from 1880 to 1914. These changes brought about consequences such as:
- Demographic: Rural-urban population transfer (rural exodus), international migration, sustained population growth, major differences between populations, economic independence.
- Economic: Mass production, development of capitalism, emergence of large enterprises (manufacturing system), unequal exchanges.
- Social: Rise of the proletariat, birth of the social question.
- Environmental: Environmental deterioration and landscape degradation, irrational exploitation of the earth.
In mid-nineteenth-century England, a series of transformations occurred—what we know today as the Industrial Revolution—in which the most important were:
- The application of science and technology led to the invention of machines to improve production processes.
- The depersonalization of relations: a shift from the family workshop to the factory.
- The use of new energy sources such as coal and steam.
- The revolution in transport: railways and steamships.
- The emergence of the urban proletariat.
The industrialization that originated in England and then spread throughout Europe had not only a major economic impact but also created huge social changes.
Urban Proletariat. As a result of the agricultural and demographic revolution, there was a mass exodus of farmers to cities; the old farmer became an industrial worker. The industrial city increased its population due to natural growth and the arrival of this new human contingent. A shortage of housing was the first problem faced by this socially marginalized population, who lived in cramped spaces without minimal conditions, comfort, or hygiene. They endured long working hours (more than 14 hours a day), involving men, women, and children, for poverty wages and lacking legal protection against arbitrary actions by factory owners. The diseases affecting the urban proletariat were collectively called the social question, referring to the spiritual and material weaknesses that affected them.
Industrial Bourgeoisie. In contrast to the industrial proletariat, the social and economic power of big business strengthened, thus strengthening the capitalist economic system characterized by private ownership of the means of production and market-based price regulation according to supply and demand.
In this scenario, the bourgeoisie surpassed the landed aristocracy, and privileged social status was primarily based on merit rather than birth. Backed by a doctrine that advocated economic freedom, employers amassed great wealth not only through sales and competition but also by paying low wages to workers.
Proposals to Solve the Social Problem. Faced with worker poverty and insecurity, criticisms and solutions emerged. For example, utopian socialists sought to create an ideal, just society free of social problems. Another proposal was Karl Marx’s scientific socialism, which proposed revolution and the abolition of private property (Marxism). The Catholic Church, through Pope Leo XIII, issued the encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891), which condemned abuses and called upon states to protect the weakest. Here is an excerpt from the encyclical: “(…) If the worker provides other forces in his industry, he provides in order to achieve what is necessary to live and sustain himself and his family; with the work of his hands, he acquires a true and perfect right, not only to demand a wage, but to make use of it (…) as he likes.” These elements were crucial to the emergence of worker rights protest movements.