Britain's factories remade population, power, and the working day
The Industrial Revolution, sometimes tagged the First against a later Second, began in Great Britain around 1760 and spread to Europe and the United States, swapping handcraft for machines, steam, water power, chemicals, iron, machine tools, and factories. Output and population rose without precedent.
The phrase is older than many assume. A French envoy, Louis-Guillaume Otto, used it in 1799 to say France had joined the race to industrialise, and Jérôme-Adolphe Blanqui wrote of la révolution industrielle in 1837. Economic historians rank the onset alongside the adoption of farming as the biggest material turning point in human history, though John Clapham and Nicholas Crafts argue that change was gradual enough to make revolution the wrong word, and others trace its roots to proto-industry in Europe, the Islamic world, Mughal India and China.
Britain had several advantages: a farming revolution that freed labour and fed towns, capable entrepreneurs, dense networks of ports, rivers, canals and roads, plentiful coal, iron and water power, stable politics, business-friendly law and ready capital. The numbers for cotton show the acceleration. Britain imported about 2.5 million pounds of raw cotton in 1750, mostly spun by hand in Lancashire cottages; mills consumed 22 million pounds in 1787, 52 million in 1800 and 588 million by 1850.
By the 1830s the productivity gains were enormous. Water- and then steam-driven spinning raised output per worker roughly 500-fold, the power loom about 40-fold and the cotton gin about 50-fold. Steam engines came to burn a fifth to a tenth as much fuel, and high-pressure designs were light enough for transport. Coke replaced charcoal in iron smelting, allowing bigger furnaces, and the rolling mill worked fifteen times faster than hammering. Screw-cutting lathes, boring machines and milling machines made precise metal parts affordable.
The global balance of manufacturing flipped as a result. Before the transformation most goods were made in China and India; afterward the workshops of the world were in Western Europe and North America. Growth faltered in a late-1830s slump, then surged again after 1870 with steel, assembly lines and electrical grids.
Source: Industrial Revolution
