Without steam power the Industrial Revolution wouldn’t have been the Industrial Revolution, it would have been the Minor Water Mill Change In Textile Manufacture.
Despite the name, the IR didn’t happen all at once or even within a generation, and the introduction of steam power is what turned it from a limited change into all-out industrialization. The IR would have never been 5% of what it was without steam power.
:dubious: The shift from cottage industry to full-on mechanised cotton manufacture was a pretty fundamental shift, not least because it saw the first series of population movements, as cotton manufacture was no longer an industry that could be profitably situated anywhere throughout the UK, but became concentrated in the great cotton mill towns in the North and Scotland. It also saw the rise of the first “factory towns” like Styal in Cheshire (incidentally, the cotton mill there was never steam powered, always powered by the river flowing through the village).
Actually, scratch that last parenthetical remark. From reading the National Trust website on Quarry Bank Mill it appears steam power was eventually used as an additional power source (I was in Primary School when we last went there!).
I still maintain that the shift from an industry that people used to do in their own homes to the industry being situated in gigantic water powered mills would still be seen as revolutionary today, even if the steam engine had never been perfected.
Most definitely. But it wouldn’t have been The Industrial Revolution, the truly globe-changing, total everyone’s-life shift that it was. Without steam power (and subsequently combustion, though it’s hard to see how you get that without figuring out steam power along the way) it simply wouldn’t have been what it was. The ability to harness mechanical power from fossil fuels is an absolutely fundamental part of industrialization. Heck, maybe THE fundamental part. All this work requires huge, huge amounts of energy, and better yet relatively portable energy.
The liberalisation of production probably came about due to changes in the feudal system.
Land holdings, kept on being chopped into smaller pieces, despite the rules of primagenacy, so that income in the land owning classes was static or even declining.
Many manorial holdings were based upon serfdom, but to encourage a differant form of economy, incentives were provided in the form of freeholdings, which of course meant an increase in freedmen whose livelihoods were not tied directly to land.
It became quite the fashion to create ‘new townships’ within the old manorial holdings, these would allot a strip of land - a burgage plot, for rent with perhaps a smallholding for a vegatable allotment, sometimes attached to the burgage, and sometimes a short distance away. These burgage holders were not subject to the same obligations that were a feature of feudalism, they were exempted the various duties, instead they paid a rent.
These ‘burghers’ were also not subjected to the same administration system, including the manorial courts.
Various towns in England have their main roots in these changes, some burgages were far more liberal than others, but it must have been inspired by the increasing granting of market charter status to many small settlements which drew in greater populations and hence more demend and thus more money.
This really is how merchant trading spread throughout the shires, rather than a few cities, and this created the markets which drove demand.
Quite how manufacturing took off is the point to debate, certainly huge a improvement in investment and shipping must have been important, the London coffee houses are testament to all that.
Cloth manufacture which could compete with the products from other countries would not have happened had it not been for the importation (one way or another) of the Merino sheep, this was done under very spurious circumstances as Spain protected this breed of sheep very jealously.
Once the English had their sheep, why did cloth manufacture take off so much better than in Spain ?- after all, Spain had had the cloth trade to itself for quite some time and had a head start.
The manufacture of textiles was probably the main turning point toward the industrial revolution, it was based first on hand looms, then on water power before moving on to steam.
Perhaps Spain did not have the combination of entrepreneurial spirit, the expansion fo the British empire would have provided a ready market, just as Spains empire was declining, ironicaly, one of the more significant markets was the Americas, before during and after the war of independance.
The industrial revolution predated the use of steam, but once it was available, the presence of cheap coal would have been a critical factor, land wars in Europe would have been detrimental to industrial growth, and Britain for much of the 17thC-18thC was pretty much unmolested and would have been a far more stable place for investor confidence.
I don’t think one can say that technology or science led to industry so much as it became integral, as soon as you start industrial production methods, you are presented with problems that need to be overcome using novel solutions, once you find a method of resolving technical issues, than you begin to ask more and more questions - perhaps a more liberal religious dogma also helped.
Mass publication , not available prior to Gutenburg is the key to the scientific and enginnering progress that allowed for the sudden onslought of the industrial revolution.
Steam power, use of fossil fuels, ie coal have both been around for thousands of years .
I inferred from the OP that, since humans had been around 200,000 years ago, he thought they should have performed the Industrial Revolution a long time ago. My point was, I think, similar to yours–we got smarter much more recently, and so that’s a main reason it did not happen (that) much earlier…
A WAG but I’d speculate that prior to the industrial revolution, most technological advances were seen as a one-off event. Sure it was great that somebody invented a new process or machine that did something easier than traditional methods had, but it wasn’t seen as part of a larger pattern. What happened in the industrial revolution was that there was a cluster of problems that were solved by technological means in close proximity and this sparked a new idea: What if technology was applied as a general solution? What if we started looking for problems that could be solved by new technology? What if instead of people in existing businesses occasionally applying a little technology to their own business, there was an ongoing business of inventing and selling technology itself to other businesses?
The real reason that so many different elements came together to create the industrial revolution was the introduction of uniform-rate, pre-paid postage.
I’m saying this mostly tongue-in-cheek, but I think you could make a decent argument here. Before cheap, speedy and reliable prepaid postage, it was much more difficult to exchange ideas and data. Once that became possible, inventing was no longer the province of the lone tinkerer. It could become a collaborative and perhaps even social pursuit.
Even in places where there had previously been no real impediments to communication, it still could have made a difference. According to the Wiki entry, in London in the 19th century, there were between 6 and 12 mail deliveries per day. It was almost like virtual email. You could correspond back and forth several times in the space of a single day.
I am partial to the argument that colonialism was the key factor in Britain’s industrial revolution.
The industrial revolution was largely fueled by extremely cheap raw materials coming out of the colonies, and the expanded markets and demand for goods coming out of those same colonies. When Britain colonized India, India was not (comparatively) actually that poor of a place. It had quite a bit of wealth that Britain was able to tax heavily. This provided a lot of the money that was behind the industrial revolution.
The cotton industry, for example, would have never evolved the way it did without colonization. England was able to create such a huge cotton industry precisely because they had access to inexpensive Indian cotton and were able to force India to buy British cotton. Without these huge, basically free, supplies and inflated demands (caused by Britain’s dismantling of India’s local cotton industry) there would have never been a reason to produce such massive amounts of cotton cloth, and people wouldn’t have bothered to create the machines that do it. I think the connection is pretty clear, and of course it was the textile industry that paved the way for the rest of the industrial revolution.
Creating technology is easy, and happens pretty naturally when there is a demand. The real trick to innovation is seeing how to apply existing technology and the creation of needs that current technology doesn’t fulfill.
The correlation between industrialization and imperialism seems suspect to me. Britain obviously was a leader in both. But Spain and Portugal were major imperial powers that lagged in industrialization. And Germany and the United States were major industrial powers that lagged in imperialism.
Spain and Portugal got the “extract goods” part right, but not the “build markets.” The genius of Britain is that they took India’s cotton, processed it in British mills (providing British jobs) and then sold it right back to India for higher prices. This is a part of why former British colonies, on the whole, do better than other country’s former colonies. The British actually tried to get a local middle-class together so that they could sell stuff to them. Spain and Portugal were too stuck on “plunder” to do that. Britain created a global capital system. Spain and Portugal were still just adding to the king’s coffers.
In Germany, the industrial revolution came MUCH later than in Britain, and is related to banking systems that developed that worked well with the emerging global capitalism.
America, of course, did have imperialism. What do you think manifest destiny was? Anyway, America’s cotton industry fueled a lot of it’s early growth and was America’s first experience with industrialization, and that could have never happened without slavery. And having nearly unfettered ever-expanding access to fresh lands and the wood they contain no doubt played an instrumental role in America’s development.
For further exploration, lets look at China and Japan. China historically had quite advanced technology, but did not become industrialized until very recently. Japan, on the other hand, embraced industrialization quite early. Why? China has geographically limited room for expansion, and has been so involved in dealing with it’s own borders that it didn’t have a lot of energy for colonialism. Japan, on the other hand, had no choice but to look outside for raw materials and markets.
The problem with this is that it’s a just-so story. It explains events after they have occurred on an ad hoc basis. Rather than looking for examples where your theory is right, could you perhaps tell us how we would know that it’s wrong? What evidence would convince you that it is false?
For example, you tell us that Japan, and island state, had more room for expansion. Yet Japan didn’t have any obvious colonial holdings until the late 19th century at the very earliest, and realistically well into the mid 20th century. Meanwhile other Asian islands such as Borneo or Java never industrialised despite being highly colonialist and isolated with even less room to expand than Japan. Meanwhile Russia and the Ottoman Empire and both had serious colonial possessions and yet neither industrialized.
So doesn’t that prove that colonialism has no bearing on industrialisation?
It really does seem that your theory doesn’t in fact predict the degree, rate or starting point of industrialisation at all. You need to keep adding in fudge factors to explain away every exception on a case by case basis.
Everything here is a just-so story. Surely you don’t find the “everyone suddenly got smarter” explanation more convincing!
Anyway, what would the cotton industry in Britain have looked like without colonialism? Why don’t you contemplate, for a moment, the alternate history where India’s budding cotton industry was not essentially dismantled and sent to Britain. What does it look like? I find it absolutely impossible to deny that colonialism and cotton were extremely interlinked. And since cotton was the first industry to truly become industrialized, I think it does say quite a bit about industrialization as a whole.
While Japan did not colonize until much later, the point is they were forced to participate in the world economic system. The need to buy things from abroad meant that they had to sell things to abroad, leading to motivation for industrialization.
Obviously colonialism is not the only factor, but I find it pretty convincing that it provided enough money and enough opportunity for markets to provide the “push” that made industrializing so attractive.
Except that colonialism, even if it’s an explanation, doesn’t happen by chance, as if the British chanced upon it growing by the side of the road.
The more intelligent and more capable have always been able to take advantage of the less intelligent and less capable. They learn better from all sources–even their opponents; apply the learning better; deal with their environment better; make better weapons; figure out diseases…on and on.
All of history is a combination of luck and brains, to be sure. But not every success story is pure luck, and colonialism is a great example of the more able controlling the world of the less able. Some former colonies–I can think of India–have done quite well and are loaded with their own rapidly developing success stories. Others–many sub-saharan countries, for example–are trivially, if any, better off post-colonially, with their infrastructure that was developed while they were colonies barely hanging on, or even crumbling away. Unless you are a Creationist, the idea that all populations are equal is kind of silly.
There’s all sorts of evidence that some populations got smarter. It’s not some sort of accomplishment; it’s just the luck of the draw from mother nature’s unegalitarian evolutionary hand. I’ afraid it’s simply our egalitarian nature that wants us to be able to feel good and pretend we are all identically enabled.
So you contend then that the British just suddenly became ‘more intelligent’ and that accounted for the Industrial Revolution?
The confluence of certain factors, along with advantageous circumstances meant the Britain had the march on industrialisation, but it must have been only a matter of time before it took place somewhere.
The huge expansion of the Royal Navy required huge amounts of money to fund it, which in turn meant fiance had to be raised, and this is where the Bank of England came in, as it was the creation of this that made the invention of government bonds possible.
The process of creating a navy on the scale not seen before meant that some industrialisation had to take place to enable it to happen, one Samual Pepys was instrumental in this.
The Royal Navy was in turn intended to protect trade through force, and protect its colonies, and this too gave rise to investor confidence.
Many industrial processes had their true origins well before steam was widespread, from textiles, to brewing, to shipbuilding - all these required a competant workforce and thus began a growth in skilled labour, they also had to be effectively managed. The roots of the industrial revolution can be found in late 17th Century England.
The wars in Europe, culminating in the Napoleonic conflicts delayed things.
The requirements for production meant that machinery had to be used to produce all the goods required, this in turn required innovation.
Before the industrial revolution there simply was not the demand, and what labour was needed could be cheaply provided through enforcement.
The agrarian revolution happened throughout the medieval period, knowledge being spread often through religious insitutions such as monastries, and since there were some small scale industrial processes, its logical that the industrial revolution was dependant upon it.
Not just Britain- white people in general.
And your evidence is…? If you are using the industrial revolution as evidence, that’s a little circular.
I don’t think anyone or any group or any country got smarter, if you mean an increase in raw intelligence.[sup]*[/sup] I think it was more due to accumulated knowledge and faster trade of that knowledge with goods and books. In other words, more nurture than nature.