The Industrial Revolution of the 18-th –19-th Centuries and Its Consequences

By the middle of the 18th century England became ripe for a turnover in industry known as the Industrial Revolution. Colonial warfare and expansion meant an accumulation of tremendous wealth in the country. For example, the profits of only the East India Company immediately after the Seven Years War were 21 million pounds. Britain's monopoly position in international trade led to the accumulation of capital in the City of London. The Bank of England had become a banker's bank, providing support for people wanting to lend or borrow money for business purposes. Private banks were started even in small towns. Manufacturers were now in an advantageous position. They had capital or the means to borrow it. Thousands of peasants became landless and ruined and were forced to migrate to the growing towns where they were consumed by the growing industry. The transformation in agriculture also meant an increase of the profits of the landlords A big part of their profits went into industry, either through banks or directly through the; stock market. Thus the agricultural revolution in England contributed to the financing: of the Industrial Revolution.

The expansion of international trade, the growth of the home market made it imperative to revolutionize industry on a new basis. The manufactories of the previous centuries could no longer satisfy the new demands. Large-scale machine production became an urgent necessity and the factory was to become the main new economic unit of production. Everything which the economists say is necessary for “take off” was present: scientific and technical “know-how”, capital, an increasing amount of suitable labour, an expanding home and world market.

In industrial life, the changes first affected textiles, but presently they spread to mining, power development communications, and other fields. Before the Industrial Revolution began, the domestic system prevailed in textile making, with many families securing thread from nearby villages and weaving it into cloth on a piecework basis. At first, cotton cloth was imported from India; then the English mixed cotton and wool threads to produce a new type of cloth. A series of remarkable textile inventions, however, soon caused England to become a world leader in producing cotton goods.

The new machines required power to drive them, and so could not be housed in the homes of the people but only in what contemporaries called “manufactories”. Water provided the motive power, and the early cotton factories or mills of the 1770-s and 1780-s were therefore located in remote areas of the Pennines, in Lancashire and Yorkshire where there was a plentiful supply of swift-flowing water.

However, soon the situation changed. In 1769 James Watt, a laboratory assistant from Scotland, developed a new type of steam engine. At first the steam engine was used only for stationary work, but later on it was modified to drive locomotives. In 1825 the first railway was built, the Stockton – Darlington line.

The steam engine perfected was immediately applied to driving textile machinery. Cotton spinners were thus freed from their dependence on water power, and further development of factories took place in urban areas where labour was more plentiful and coal supplies not far away.

The social consequences of the Industrial Revolution were dramatic and far-reaching. The expanding factories and industrial centres attracted the newly-formed class of industrial workers, or “operatives” as they were called. The owners of the factories, or capitalists were assuming political and economic importance. English-society was breaking up into two basic classes – the proletarians and the capitalists.

The Industrial Revolution brought about the absolute and relative impoverishment of the proletariat. Tremendous profits were gained by the capitalists by ruthless exploitation of the toilers who lived and worked in nightmarish conditions.

The Industrial Revolution was gaining strength all the time. But with it the situation of the workers became worse. For example, the average age of death among operatives at the beginning of the nineteenth century was nineteen! Hand-workers were losing their jobs to the new mechanics and machines. It was quite natural that the operatives at this stage of their development could not realize the nature of their hardships. They attributed them to the machines. Thus a movement emerged in the latter half of the eighteenth century which was associated with the destruction of the hateful machines. The weavers of Manchester, Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire gathered in great numbers and began to destroy the looms. The movement known as Luddism began in 1779 in Nottingham and Sheffield. It spread quickly all throughout the industrial centres of England.

The movement reached its peak in the years between 1811 and 1816. The English government took severe measures against the Luddites: many of the leaders were executed, the others received long prison sentences or were deported for semi-slave labour to the colonies. Eventually the movement was crushed.

The age of the Industrial Revolution saw the origins of working-class organizations when the operatives began to form united groups to defend their economic rights. Such groups and societies emerged initially among operatives involved in wool processing, later they were formed among spinners and workers of other trades. These were the first organizations of the emerging working-class which later in the nineteenth century formed the basis of the trade union movement in the country.

In 1760 George III (1760-1820) became king of England. His reign is associated with serious developments in England which were closely connected with the loss of the American colonies and the impact of the French bourgeois revolution of 1789.

I. Answer the following questions:

1. What were the suppositions for the Industrial Revolution in the middle of the 18th century?

2. What parts of industrial life did the changes first affect?

3. When was a new type of steam engine develop?

4. What were the social consequences of the Industrial Revolution?

5. What is Luddism?

6. What were the first organizations that formed the basis of the trade union movement in the country?

II. Give English equivalents to the following words:

Warfare, turnover, to provide support, inventions, profit, expansion, to prevail, cloth, weaver, contemporaries, to apply, urban areas, social consequences, impoverishment, nightmarish conditions, hardship, to destroy the looms, severe measures, prison sentence, to defend spinner, reign.