Did factories shrink the family, or did small families build the factories?
Sociologist Talcott Parsons argued that industry created the nuclear family. Historians have pushed back hard. Peter Laslett found most households in pre-industrial England were already nuclear, and anthropologist Alan Macfarlane went further, arguing that small, mobile families and the individualism they bred helped cause the Industrial Revolution rather than resulting from it.
Industrialisation is the shift of a society from farming and feudal ties to manufacturing, and it reorganises far more than the economy. The first wave, now called the First Industrial Revolution, ran from the mid-eighteenth to the early nineteenth century. It started in Great Britain, then reached Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, France and eventually wider Europe and North America, drawing rural labourers into industrial work and money into new plants.
A second wave in the mid-nineteenth century rode on a refined steam engine, the internal combustion engine, electricity, canals, railways and power lines, and later the assembly line. Mines, steelworks and textile mills replaced the home as the workplace. Villagers moved to factory towns, cities swelled, and crowded housing with bad sanitation and dirty water let cholera, typhoid and tuberculosis spread. Class came to be defined by economic power, women increasingly became earners, households had fewer children, and child labour rose before school systems followed.
Timing varied widely. In Chile, Charles Saint Lambert had modern reverberatory furnaces smelting copper at La Serena by 1840, importing the latest techniques from Swansea, though historians usually treat him as an outlier and date Chilean industry to the 1870s, when sugar refineries, confectioners, and shoe and textile factories appeared. Economist Ducoing argues Chile modernised without truly industrialising. Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan, the Four Asian Tigers, industrialised rapidly from the early 1960s to the 1990s.
Growth does not guarantee jobs. Higher productivity can leave employment flat or falling, manufacturing absorbs new workers less readily than services, and over 40 percent of the world's employees are working poor, earning below two dollars a day. Former Soviet states experienced deindustrialisation as they moved to market economies. Newer strategies favour technological leapfrogging, investing directly in cleaner technology instead of repeating the fossil-fuel path.
Source: Industrialisation
