What is this about?
Factors that contributed to industrialization
- Industrial Revolution marks transition from making stuff with our hands to machines
- Greatly changed the social and economic structures of the world
- Started in England and is between 1760 to ~1840
- After 1840 we see the Second Industrial Revolution
- Stuff like the spinning jenny and the water frame reduced the time needed to spin yarn and weave cloth
Factors that Led to the Start of the Industrial Revolution in England
Proximity to Water
- England has a lot of rivers and canals
- These allowed for easy and inexpensive trade
Raw Materials
- England has a LOT of:
- coal (main source of power for the Industrial Revolution)
- iron (used to create infrastructure of the Industrial Revolution)
⬆️ Agricultural Productivity
- Just before the Industrial Revolution, in the early 1700s, an agricultural revolution took place
- New advances in agriculture led to increased productivity
- Examples of such advances:
- Crop rotation: rotating different crops in and out of a field each year; increased soil productivity
- Seed drill: New tool that allowed farmers to put seeds in the right spot
Urbanization
- Increase in food thanks to agricultural revolution
- More food → more people!
- Not all of these people needed to work on farms anymore, so there was a rise in the migration from rural to urban
Protection of Property
- Enabled entrepreneurs to take risks and build businesses without the fear that the government was going to take away their hard work
Access to Foreign Resources
- In the last period, Britain had been building a global empire
- One benefit of this was that they had access to all the raw materials in their colonies
- Allowed them to get resources not necessarily available in Britain
Accumulation of Capital
- British capitalists had accumulated a lot of wealth thanks to stuff like the slave trade
- This means that they can invest this wealth in new entrepreneurial opportunities if they arose
- And they did!
The Rise of the Factory System
- Factory = place where goods for sale are manufactured
- “But people have always made goods for sale, what makes the factory different?”
- Factory can produce these goods in mass
Eli Whitney and Interchangeable Parts
- Before, if someone wanted to make, say a chair, that would have to be made by an artisan or skilled labor from beginning to end
- Made production of goods slow
- Eli Whitney invented concept of interchangeable parts, in which manufacturing no longer focuses on building while products but rather on the individual parts
- Meant that producers no longer had to rely on skilled labors to produce a product from beginning to end
- Instead you can hire unskilled workers to create each part, then join them all together at the end
Note about First and Second Industrial Revolution
- First Industrial Revolution lasts from 1760 to ~1840
- First Industrial Revolution focuses on:
- the replacement of manual labor with machinery
- use of steam power
- innovations in textile manufacturing
- iron production
- Second Industrial Revolution lasts from ~1840s to 1910s
- Second Industrial Revolution focuses on advancements in technology:
- invention of the telephone
- expansion of railroads
- use of electric power
- steel production (instead of iron)