14.5: Cultural Effects

The Industrial Revolution was responsible for enormous changes in people's everyday lives. Two specific areas are noteworthy: transportation and communication.

In transportation, the speed of railway travel made everything "closer" together, and started tying together distant regions. People could travel to the capital cities of their kingdom or, later, their "nations". As a result, the intense localism of the past started to fade. For the first time, members of the middle classes could travel just for fun. In other words, middle-class vacations were an innovation made possible by the railroad. The first beneficiaries were the English middle class, who "went on holiday" to the seashore whenever they could.

Simultaneously, new, more advanced printing presses and cheaper paper made newspapers and magazines available to a mass reading public. This event encouraged the spread of information and news, as well as the promotion of shared written languages. People had to be able to read the "default" language of their nation, which encouraged the rise of certain specific vernaculars at the expense of the numerous dialects of the past. For example, "French" was originally the language spoken in the area around the city of Paris, just as "Spanish" was just the dialect spoken around Madrid. Rulers had unsuccessfully fought to impose their language as the daily vernacular in the regions over which they ruled. However, most people continued to speak regional dialects that often had little in common with the language of their monarch. With the centers of newspaper production often being in or near capital cities, and written in the official language of state, more people acquired a decent working knowledge of those languages over time.

Those capital cities grew enormously, especially in the second half of the nineteenth century. Industry, finance, government, and railroads all converged on capitals. Former suburbs were simply swallowed up as the cities grew. Further, cultural elites thought the only places that mattered were the capitals: London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, St. Petersburg, etc. As a result, political revolutions often began as revolutions of a single city. For example, if a crowd could take over the streets of Paris, they might well send the king running for the proverbial hills and declare themselves to be a new government (which happened in 1830 and 1848). In some cases, the rest of the nation would read about the revolution in their newspapers or via telegraph after the revolution had already succeeded.

The cultural effects of the Industrial Revolution are too numerous to detail here. Yet, one other effect should be noted: the availability of food. With cheap and fast railway and steamship transport, food could travel hundreds or even thousands of miles from where it was grown or farmed or caught to where it was consumed. In addition, the daily diet underwent profound changes. Tea grown in India became cheap enough for even working people to drink it daily. The same was true of South American coffee on the continent. Fruit appeared in markets half a world from where it was grown, and the long term effect was a more varied (although not always more nutritious) diet. Whole countries sometimes became economic appendages of a European empire, producing a single product. For a time, New Zealand (which became a British colony in 1840) was essentially the British Empire’s sheep ranch.

The great symbol of changes in the history of food brought on by the Industrial Revolution is that quintessential English invention: fish and chips. Caught in the Atlantic or Pacific, packed on steamships, and transported to Britain, the more desirable fish parts were sold at prices the upper and middle classes could afford. The other bits - tails, fins, etc.- were fried up with chunks of potato, heavily salted, and wrapped in the now-cheap newspaper. The result was the world's first greasy, cheap, and wildly popular fast food.