The First Industrial Revolution: Why it Started in Britain

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The First Industrial Revolution: Why it Started in Britain

British Dominance. The creation and spread of the modern factory system that began within the British textile industry and later spread to other English industries was a tangible sign of a future Europe-wide Industrial Revolution. As the factory system spread gradually through England, British manufactured goods tended to be cheaper than those manufactured on the Continent and in many cases better made. During the first half of the nineteenth century the British dominated the market for consumer goods produced in factories. Other countries, notably France, the Netherlands, and what later became Belgium, had many of the same social, economic, and technological preconditions for industrialization; however, Britain had many important advantages. Rapid population growth provided plenty of workers and a growing demand for manufactured goods. In terms of natural resources, Britain had a productive agricultural sector, large deposits of high-quality iron and coal, and readily available running water to power machines and facilitate transportation. (No place in Great Britain is more than seventy miles from the sea or more than thirty miles from a navigable river.) The surrounding seas and a relatively stable government protected the British Isles from the destruction of lives and property associated with events such as the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars that devastated the Continent during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, thereby encouraging investment in British industry. British colonies also furnished raw materials and markets. Britain had been a leading mercantile nation for centuries and had significant capital and institutions—such as the Bank of England, established in 1694—in place to manage a new industrial economy. British workers were educated and well disciplined. British science was no more advanced than that of its Continental rivals, but their technology gave the British an advantage, particularly in their productive use of coal, which benefited metallurgy and machine building. Through decades of trial and error, British artisans had acquired skills in burning coal that could not be passed easily to competitors. The same methodical experimentation carried over into technological advances. British craftsmen excelled at taking other people’s often rudimentary ideas and tinkering with them until they could be applied profitably.

British Labor. Because it was relatively well educated and possessed many craft skills, the British labor force played a key role in industrialization, adopting innovations in technology and in the organization of production far more systematically than factory workers on the other side of the English Channel. Generally more disciplined and better educated than Continental workers, British labor also adapted to the time clock and the demands of the machine better than their counterparts during the era of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic regime (1789-1815). In Britain the willingness of the elite to invest in machines and the presence of a large, skilled labor force desperate for jobs were important reasons for the British lead in productivity during the early industrial era.

Accomplishments. In scientific, technological, and economic terms, Britain dominated the First Industrial Revolution as no other relatively small country ever had dominated an era before. By 1841 nearly 50 percent of the British population worked in industry, and by 1860 these workers produced 20 percent of all industrial goods in the world, up from 2 percent in 1750. Britain furnished half the world’s iron and cotton textiles, and two-thirds of the coal used worldwide came from British mines. Adjusting for inflation, the gross national product (GNP) of Britain increased fourfold between 1780 and 1850. As Great Britain emerged as the “workshop of the world,” its standard of living increased about 75 percent during the same period. Despite heavy emigration and national disasters such as the Irish Potato Famine of the 1840s, the population of the British Isles grew from 9 million in 1780 to 21 million in 1851. Much of this population growth was in the cities; in the 1840s Great Britain became the first country to have more than half of its people living in urban areas.

The Crystal Palace. Britain displayed its dominance in 1851 at an international exhibition in London. It was housed in the Crystal Palace, constructed specifically for the event from glass and iron. More than one-third of a mile in length and towering over the majestic trees in the park, this structure could not have been built twenty years earlier, thus highlighting the rapid progress of British technological capabilities and presaging the emergence of the skyscraper later in the century, after steel became economical enough for widespread use in building construction. Most of the more than 6 million visitors, nearly 30 percent of the British population, to the “Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations” arrived by train, another British technological marvel. After the exhibition, the Crystal Palace was dismantled and re-erected in Sydenham, where it served as an architecture museum until it was destroyed by fire in 1936.

Change. By 1851 the end of British manufacturing dominance was already in sight. Many British visitors at the Crystal Palace were startled by the high quality and reasonable prices of manufactured goods and luxury items from the Continent and the United States. Recognizing the major effect of advanced scientific knowledge and technological ability on economic development, other countries had begun to industrialize, some following the British model. Moreover, the trained scientist was beginning to overshadow the amateur tinkerer. (The first recorded use of the English word scientist occurred in 1840.) After 1850, scientists working for entrepreneurs, universities, or directly for the state, dominated industry by applying the advances of science to the needs of manufacturing.