14.2: Geography of the Industrial Revolution

Britain was well positioned to serve as the cradle of industrialism. As a result of the Industrial Revolution, Britain became the single most powerful European country of the 19th Century. What caused the Industrial Revolution?

Source: amessocialstudies

Population and Agriculture

• Rapidly increasing populations
• More efficient agriculture, which provided more calories to feed the population
• Fairly rudimentary improvements in sanitation in the first half of the eighteenth century resulted in lower infant mortality rates and lower disease rates in general

The Little Ice Age (1303 – 1850) ended, increasing crop yields. Despite the fact that more commercially-oriented agriculture was often experienced as a disaster by peasants and farmers, it did increase the total caloric output of crops at the same time. In short, agriculture definitively left the subsistence model behind and became a commercial enterprise in Britain by 1800. Thus, there was a “surplus population” (to quote Ebenezer Scrooge of A Christmas Carol, speaking of the urban poor) of peasants who were available to work in the first generations of factories.

Natural Resources

Britain has abundant coal deposits concentrated in northern England. In a very lucky coincidence, the same region was the heart of the existing British textile industry, which became the key commercial force in the early period of industrialization. The northern English underground coal deposits reach across to Beligium, eastern France, and western Germany. This stretch of land would become the industrial heartland of Europe. (One can draw a line from England stretching across the English Channel toward the Alps and trace most of the industrial centers of Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century.)

The English and Scottish had long known you could burn it and produce heat. However, for centuries, it was an unpopular fuel source. Coal produces a noxious, toxic smoke, along with heaps of black ash. It has to be mined, and coal mines in northwestern Europe tended to rapidly fill with water as they dipped below the water table, requiring cumbersome pumping systems. In turn, conditions in those mines were extremely dangerous and difficult. Thus, coal was only used in small amounts in England until well into the Renaissance period.

What changed was, simply, Britain ran out of forests. Thanks to the need for firewood and charcoal for heat, as well as timber for building (especially shipbuilding; Britain's navy consumed a vast quantity of wood in construction and repairs), Britain was forced to import huge quantities of wood from abroad by the end of the 17th Century. As firewood became prohibitively expensive, British people increasingly turned to coal. Already by the 17th Century, former prejudices against coal as dirty and distasteful had given way to the necessity of its use as a fuel source for heat. As the Industrial Revolution began and a series of key inventions evolved, the vast energy capacity of coal was unleashed for the first time. By 1815, annual British coal production yielded energy equivalent to what could be garnered from burning a hypothetical forest equal in area to all of England, Scotland, and Wales.

Technology

Technological breakthroughs powered the expansion of the Industrial Revolution, all of which originated in Britain. In 1763, an engineer named James Watt developed an efficient steam engine. Steam engines were originally used to pump water out of mines. Soon it was discovered that they could be used to substitute for water power at mills. Thermal energy unleashed by burning a fossil fuel like coal could be transformed into other forms of energy - such as kinetic energy (the energy of movement) - through steam power. With a steam engine, coal did not just provide heat, it provided power. Watt personally invented the term “horsepower” to explain to potential customers what his machine could do. Almost anything that moved could now be tied to coal power instead of muscle power. Thus began the vast and dramatic shift toward the modern world’s dependence on fossil fuels.

The first industry to benefit from coal power was the northern English textile industry, which harnessed steam power to drive new machines that processed and transferred cotton into finished cloth. Building on various other machine breakthroughs, Edmund Cartwright developed the power loom in 1787, the first large-scale textile machine that could process an enormous amount of cotton fiber. By the end of the 1800s, a single “mule” (a spinning invention linked to steam power) could produce thread 200 to 300 times as fast as could be done by hand. By 1850, Britain was producing 200 times as much cotton cloth than it had in 1780.

Figure 14.2.2: Power looms in 1835. Factory owners preferred female labors who could be paid less than men for doing the same work.

Textiles were the basis of the Industrial Revolution for two reasons:

• raw material was available from the southern United States and its slave labor
• an endless market for textiles existed all across Europe

British cloth processed by the new machines was of very high quality. Due to the vast quantity that British mills could produce, machines manufactured textiles were cheaper than being produced by hand. Thus, British cloth rapidly cornered the market everywhere in Europe, generating tremendous profits for British industrialists. The impact on Britain’s economy was enormous, and its textile industry dominated European rivals. Initially, France tried to keep British fabric out of its own markets. But in 1786, the two kingdoms negotiated the Eden Treaty, which allowed the importation of British manufactured goods. The result was a tidal wave of British cloth in French markets, which forced French manufacturers to implement industrial technology in their own workshops.

Britain

Other major factors driving industrial expansion in Britain were political and cultural. Britain became the leading industrial power because its parliament was full of believers in the principles of free trade, which meant that archaic restrictions or cultural prejudices did not hamper commercial enterprises. The country was also the richest society in Europe in terms of available capital: money was available through reliable, trustworthy banking institutions. Thus, investors could build up a factory after securing loans with fair interest rates under a legal system that favored enterprise. Finally, taxes were not arbitrary or extremely high (as they were in most parts of Spain and Italy, for example).

The other major reason for the early and long-lasting lead in industrialization is that British elites, especially the powerful gentry class of landowners, were not hostile to commercial enterprise. In many kingdoms on the continent, members of the nobility were banned from actively practicing commerce until the period of the French Revolution. Even after the Napoleonic wars, when noble titles could no longer be lost by engaging in commerce, banking, or factory ownership, there remained deep skepticism and arrogance among continental nobles about the new industries. In short, nobles often looked down on those who made their wealth not from land, but from factories. This attitude helped to slow the advent of industrialism for decades.

Other Parts of Europe

Before the 1840s, the southern swath of the Netherlands was the only continental region to industrialize in earnest. After 1830, this region became the newly-created nation of Belgium. In addition to being a close ally of Great Britain, the area had usable waterways, coal deposits, and a skilled artisanal workforce. By the 1830s, the newly-minted country was rapidly industrializing.

Despite its large population and considerable overall wealth, Belgium’s neighbor to the southwest, France, was comparatively slow to follow. The traditional elites who dominated the restored monarchy were deeply skeptical of British-style commercial and industrial innovations. Despite Napoleon’s having established the first national bank in 1800, the banking system as a whole was rudimentary, and capital was restricted. The transportation of goods was prohibitively expensive due to the lack of navigable waterways and the existence of numerous tolls.

In addition, important cultural factors impeded industrial expansion in France. Whereas Britain’s large population of landless rural laborers and poor peasants had little option but to seek factory work, most French peasants were independent farmers who had no interest in going to cities to work in miserable conditions. Second, French industry had always concentrated on high-quality luxury goods, and French artisans fiercely resisted the spread of lower-quality and lower-skilled work and goods. Industrialization was thus limited to the northeastern part of the country, which had coal deposits, until the second half of the century.

In the German lands, it was not until the establishment of the Zollverein, a customs union, in 1834, that trade could flow freely enough to encourage industrial growth. Following its creation, railroads spread across the various kingdoms of northern Germany. Western Germany had extensive coal deposits. By 1850, German industry was growing rapidly, especially in the Ruhr valley near the border with France.

Meanwhile, outside of Western Europe, there was practically no large-scale industry. In the late 19th Century, the Industrial Revolution "arrived" in places like northern Italy and the cities of western Russia, with some countries like Spain missing out entirely until the twentieth century.

Figure 14.2.3: While the UK enjoyed the early lead in industrial manufacturing, its share of global output had dropped by 1900. From 1900-1920, the United States became the major industrial power of the world.