6.1/6.2 - The Spread of Industry Throughout Europe

The Industrial Revolution: Origins and Spread

• The Industrial Revolution marks a significant shift in how goods were produced, moving from handmade to machine-made production. This transformation began in Great Britain and had far-reaching effects on social, political, and economic structures globally.

• Industrialization started in Britain in the late 1700s and spread to continental Europe after 1815. In Britain, private businesses drove most of it. On the continent, countries were trying to catch up with Britain, so governments played a bigger role by building railways, setting tariffs, and backing banks.

1. Agricultural Revolution:
• The Agricultural Revolution increased the food supply in Britain, leading to lower food costs and more disposable income for the population. This allowed people to spend more on manufactured goods, fueling demand for industrial production.
• Enclosure (fencing off common land into large private farms) and new farming methods meant fewer workers were needed on the land. Many small farmers and laborers moved to towns, giving factories a large supply of workers.
• Britain's population also grew fast. England and Wales went from about 9 million people in 1801 to about 18 million in 1851, which meant more workers and more customers.

2. Abundant Capital:
• Britain had a wealth of capital accumulated from successful entrepreneurs in the cottage industry. These individuals were able to invest in new manufacturing methods, driving industrial growth.
• Britain also had a strong banking system. The Bank of England (founded in 1694) kept the currency and government borrowing stable, and hundreds of local country banks lent money to merchants and manufacturers. Most early factory owners also raised money from family, partners, and their own profits.

3. Entrepreneurship:
• Britain's rejection of absolutism allowed its Parliament to create a favorable environment for economic innovation. This meant that the Industrial Revolution was primarily driven by private investors rather than government intervention.
• Engineers, inventors, and capitalists worked together. The manufacturer Matthew Boulton went into business with James Watt in 1775 and paid to build and sell Watt's steam engines, and Richard Arkwright built water-powered spinning mills like the one at Cromford (1771), a model copied across northern England.
• British society was also more open than most on the continent. Merchants and manufacturers could gain wealth and status, and Dissenters (Protestants outside the Church of England, like Quakers), who were kept out of public office and the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, often went into business instead.

4. Favorable Government Policies:
• Britain's Parliament was made up of landowners, merchants, and bankers, many of whom invested in trade and industry, so it passed laws that helped business. It approved private companies' plans to build canals and railways and even extended James Watt's steam engine patent to 1800.
• After the Reform Act of 1832 gave seats in Parliament to new industrial cities like Manchester and Birmingham and the vote to more middle-class men, manufacturers had even more influence. In 1846, they won the repeal of the Corn Laws, tariffs on imported grain that had kept bread prices high to protect landowners. Cheaper food helped workers and showed that industrial interests now outweighed the old landed elite. (The Anti-Corn Law League that led this campaign is covered in 6.7.)

5. Rich in Mineral Resources:
• Britain had abundant deposits of coal and iron ore, essential for industrialization. The small size of the island and the development of roads and canals facilitated the quick transportation of these resources across the country.
• Coal fueled steam engines and iron furnaces, and Britain's coal and iron deposits often lay close together and near water, which kept costs low. Other raw materials came through trade, like raw cotton, which by the early 1800s came mostly from the American South, where it was grown by enslaved people.

6. Access to Markets:
• Britain’s vast empire provided ready markets for manufactured goods. The global reach of the British Empire allowed for the export of large quantities of goods, further fueling industrial growth.

7. Incentives for Innovation:
• Institutions like the British Royal Society of the Arts and the government offered prizes for technological innovations, encouraging inventors to develop new technologies that would drive the Industrial Revolution.
• For example, Parliament voted Edmund Cartwright, inventor of the power loom, a reward of £10,000 in 1809.
• Significant inventions included the spinning jenny (about 1764) by James Hargreaves and James Watt's improved steam engine (patented in 1769), whose separate condenser used far less coal than Thomas Newcomen's earlier engine (1712). Both were central to the factory system.

• Textiles: Cotton cloth was the first industry to be mechanized. The spinning jenny, Arkwright's water frame (1769), and Samuel Crompton's spinning mule (1779) made thread much faster, and Edmund Cartwright's power loom (1785) wove it into cloth. These machines were too big and expensive for homes, so production moved from the cottage industry into factories, especially in Lancashire, the county around Manchester.

• Iron and Steel: In 1709, Abraham Darby began smelting iron with coke (baked coal) instead of charcoal from scarce wood, and in 1784 Henry Cort's puddling process made strong wrought iron in large amounts. Cheap iron went into machines, steam engines, rails, ships, and bridges. Later, in 1856, the British inventor Henry Bessemer found a cheap way to make steel (see 6.3).

• Transportation: The Bridgewater Canal (1761) carried coal to Manchester and cut its price there roughly in half, starting a canal-building boom. Railways followed: the Stockton and Darlington Railway (1825), then the Liverpool and Manchester Railway (1830), whose locomotives included George Stephenson's Rocket. By 1850, Britain had more than 6,000 miles of track, so goods, coal, and people moved faster and more cheaply than ever.

• Result: Together, these changes made Britain the "workshop of the world." By the mid-1800s, it was the world's leading producer of coal, iron, and cotton cloth and sold its goods around the globe.

• To showcase Britain's industrial dominance, the Great Exhibition was held in London's Hyde Park in 1851, inside a huge iron and glass building designed by Joseph Paxton and nicknamed The Crystal Palace.

• The exhibition displayed Britain’s industrial achievements, including a massive indoor tree symbolizing the country’s mastery over nature through industrialization.

• More than six million visits were made in the five months the exhibition was open. Its profits helped buy land in South Kensington for museums that still exist, like the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Science Museum.

1. France:
• France industrialized later and more gradually than Britain. It had less coal, much of it hard to mine, the Revolution and Napoleonic Wars disrupted its economy, and most French people stayed on small family farms, so fewer workers moved to factory towns. Industry grew slowly after 1815 and sped up in the 1850s and 1860s under Napoleon III.
• Napoleon’s efforts laid some foundations for industrialization, including the construction of the Canal de Saint-Quentin, which connected Paris to northern coal and iron fields.
• Government support: The French state did more than Britain's. Under a railway law of 1842, the government planned a national network centered on Paris and paid for the land and roadbeds, while private companies laid the track and ran the trains. Napoleon III backed new investment banks like the Crédit Mobilier (1852), which funded railways and industry, and signed the Cobden-Chevalier Treaty (1860), a trade agreement with Britain that cut tariffs on both sides.
• Less dislocation: Because industry grew slowly, many French goods were still made in small workshops by skilled artisans, especially luxury goods like silk, furniture, and fashion. French cities grew more slowly than British ones, and traditional methods of production lasted alongside the new factories.

2. Belgium and the German States:
• Belgium was the first country on the continent to industrialize. It had coal and iron near Liège, the British-born industrialist John Cockerill built ironworks and machine shops there, and the government built a state-owned railway network, opening the first steam railway on the continent (Brussels to Mechelen) in 1835.
• Copying Britain: Britain banned skilled workers from emigrating until 1824 and banned the export of most machinery until 1843, but workers, machines, and plans were smuggled to the continent anyway, and continental businessmen visited British factories to learn their methods.
• German states: Industry took off after the Zollverein customs union (1834) and a wave of railway building, with Prussia leading the way (see 6.3).

3. Southern and Eastern Europe:
• Industrialization was slower in these regions due to a lack of mineral resources and the persistence of old economic structures, such as the landed nobility and peasant labor.
• Geography: Long distances, mountains, and few rivers that boats could use made transportation slow and costly. Spain's mountainous interior and Russia's huge size, with rivers frozen for months each year, made moving coal and goods hard before railways.
• Lack of resources: Many of these areas had little coal or iron, or had them far from cities and ports.
• Landed elites and serfdom: In Russia, Hungary, southern Italy, and Spain, nobles who owned most of the land invested in land rather than factories and wanted to keep cheap peasant labor. In Russia, serfdom tied most peasants to the land until 1861, so there were few free workers for factories and few peasants with money to buy manufactured goods.
• Little government sponsorship: Until late in the century, most of these governments did little to promote industry. When Russia finally did, under Finance Minister Sergei Witte in the 1890s, its industry grew quickly (see 6.6).
• Result: These regions stayed mostly agricultural into the 20th century, with only pockets of industry, such as the textile mills around Barcelona, northern Italy's industrial cities, and the factories of St. Petersburg and Moscow.
• The slow pace of industrialization in these areas meant that they continued to rely on primitive agriculture, which left them open to famine, debt, and land shortages (see below).

4. Famine, Debt, and Land Shortages:
• Where farming methods stayed old-fashioned and a few landlords owned most of the land, poor farmers worked tiny plots, owed rent or debts, and had nothing to fall back on when harvests failed. This happened in parts of western Europe too, not just in the east and south.
• Irish Potato Famine (1845-1849): Most Irish farmers were poor tenants who rented small plots from mostly Protestant landlords, many of whom lived away from their estates. They sold their grain and livestock to pay rent and lived almost entirely on potatoes. When a potato blight destroyed the crop several years in a row, about a million people died and over a million more emigrated, mostly to North America. Britain's limited relief, and the fact that food kept being exported from Ireland during the famine, left lasting anger toward British rule.
• The "Hungry '40s": Bad harvests and potato blight hit much of Europe in the mid-1840s. Food prices rose sharply, and an economic slump in 1846 and 1847 put many people out of work. This hardship helped set off the Revolutions of 1848 (see 6.6).
• Russian serfdom: Russian peasants farmed in village communes using old methods. Even after the serfs were freed in 1861, they had to make redemption payments for their land over 49 years, and their plots shrank as the population grew. Debt and land shortages kept most peasants poor, and the famine of 1891-1892 killed hundreds of thousands of people.