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While it's hard to pinpoint a beginning to the Industrial Revolution, historians
generally agree that it basically originated in England, both in a series of technological and social innovations. Historians
propose a number of reasons. Among the most compelling is the exponential increase in food production following the enclosure
laws of the eighteenth century; Parliament passed a series of laws that permitted lands that had been held in common by tenant
farmers to be enclosed into large, private farms worked by a much smaller labor force. While this drove peasants off the land,
it also increased agricultural production and increased the urban population of England, since the only place displaced
peasants had to go were the cities. The English Parliament, unlike the monarchies of Europe, was firmly under the control
of the merchant and capitalist classes, so the eighteenth century saw a veritable army of legislation that favored mercantile
and capitalist interests.
Because of the strong role of Parliament in English government and the
incredible influence of capitalists and mercantilists, social values had also been steadily shifting in England. In continental
Europe, the aristocracy represented the fullest embodiment of social values. They believed that they were born with higher
virtues than the common people, who, because of their birth would never attain these virtues to the same level. They also
believed that the pursuit of money was a characteristic of common people; the mercantile and capitalist revolutions throughout
Europe, in England, was achieved by the non-aristocratic classes—it was a middle-class or bourgeois revolution.
The diminished role of the aristocracy in English government and society, however, allowed for a
steady shift in values; the values of the mercantile and capitalist classes slowly became the norm—the most important
of these values was the pursuit of wealth. Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations proposed that the only legitimate goal
of national government and human activity is the steady increase in the overall wealth of the nation. This is not an idea
that would have flown two hundred years earlier.
Mercantilism had thrived in England in ways that
it hadn't on the continent. In particular, the English had no internal tariffs or duties on commerce, which wasn't true of
any of the continental European states. Moving goods around in continental Europe was an expensive affair as you had to pay
taxes and duties every hundred miles or so; moving goods around in England was cheap, and profits soared. In addition, England
had come to monopolize overseas trade. Every time England fought a war in the eighteenth century it always acquired new overseas
territory. It completely monopolized trade with the North American colonies—in fact, one-half of all British exports
went to America in the 1780's—but it also began to control the South American and, most importantly, the Indian trade.
All this trade produced the largest merchant marine in the world as well as a navy to protect this merchant marine fleet.
Like Periclean Athens, England shot to the forefront of the new capitalist economy primarily through its navy.
The
technological innovations followed these social and economic changes. The first major technological innovation was the cotton
gin. Cotton is a plant grown in America and India; it was a small industry through much of the seventeenth century but exploded
in the middle of the eighteenth. Most cotton was produced in British colonies; because it was a labor-intensive agriculture,
it fueled the traffic in African slaves to the colonies—the cotton shroud that fell over the history of Africa. The
first innovation in cotton manufacture was the fly-shuttle, which greatly speeded up the process of weaving cotton threads
into cloth. That wasn't enough, though, for cotton had to be stretched out or spun into threads to begin with; this process
was done slowly, one thread at a time, by a machine called a spinning wheel. This slow process was mechanized by James Hargreaves,
a carpenter, in what is usually pointed to as one of the typological major technological innovations of the Industrial Age:
the "spinning jenny." Patented in 1767, the spinning jenny was a series of simple machines rather than a single machine, and
it spun sixteen threads of cotton simultaneously. These two qualities: multiple machines in a single machine as well as a
machine that was designed not just to speed up work, but to do the work of several laborers simultaneously, was the hallmark
of all subsequent technological innovations. In 1793, the American, Eli Whitney, invented the cotton gin which mechanized
the separating of seeds from cotton fibers. These innovations made cotton incredibly cheap and infinitely expandable; since
cotton clothing was tougher than wool, the manufacture of cotton clothing shot through the roof. By the end of the eighteenth
century, the manufacture of thread and cloth was slowly moving out of the family economy and into large factory mills, though
this transition would not be fully realized until the middle of the nineteenth century.
While the
spinning jenny is frequently pointed to as the first, major technological innovation of the industrial revolution, the invention
that really drove the revolution in the eighteenth century was invented several decades earlier: the steam engine. Along with
the growth in the cotton industry, the steel industry began to grow by leaps and bounds. This was largely due to a quirk in
English geography: England sits on vast quantities of coal, a carbon based mineral derived from ancient life forms. Coal burns
better and more efficiently than wood and, if you have lots of coal, is infinitely cheaper. The English figured out that they
could substitute coal for wood in the melting of metals, including iron, and blissfully went about tearing coal from the ground
while manufacturers in Europe looked on jealously.
Mining coal, however, was not an easy task. As
you drew more and more coal out of the ground, you had to mine deeper and deeper. The deeper the mine, the more it fills with
water. In 1712, Thomas Newcomen built a simple steam engine that pumped water from the mines. It was a single piston engine,
and so it used vast amounts of energy. Because of its inefficiency, nobody could think of any use for it besides pumping water.
Until a Scotsman named James Watt added a separate cooling chamber to the machine in 1763; this
cooling chamber condensed the steam so the cylinder itself didn't have to be cooled. Patented in 1769, Watt's steam engine
had the efficiency to be applied to all kinds of industries. He was not, however, good at doing busines and it was only when
he had teamed up with the businessman, Matthew Boulton, that the steam engine began to change the face of English manufacture.
By 1800, Watt and Boulton sold 289 of these new engines; by the middle of the next century, the steam engine replaced water
as the major source of motive power in England and Europe. The changes that the steam engine wrought, however, is a story
for another day.
And it is here, with 289 steam engines pumping and steaming around England that
we'll leave the story of the Industrial Revolution—half-completed, you might say. The nineteenth century saw the exporting
of the Industrial Revolution to Europe in the decades after 1830, and the explosion of factory-based, technology driven manufacture.
The Age of Absolutism and the waning years of the Enlightenment saw Europe just beginning a new phase in its history, one
that would irreperably severe it from the traditions and certainties of the past.
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