why did the industrial revolution start in britain essay

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The First Industrial Revolution: Why it Started in Britain

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.

J. D. Bernal, The Scientific and Industrial Revolutions, volume 2 of Science in History, third edition (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971).

Eric Dorn Brose, Technology and Science in the Industrializing Nations, 1500-1914 (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1998).

William Clark , Jan Golinski, and Simon Schaffer, eds., The Sciences in Enlightened Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).

Charles Coulston Gillispie, Science and Polity in France at the End of the Old Regime (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980).

Ian Inkster, Science and Technology in History: An Approach to Industrial Development ( New Brunswick , N. J.: Rutgers University Press, 1991).

James E. McClellan III and Harold Dorn, Science and Technology in World History: An Introduction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999).

Joel Mokyr, The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress ( New York : Oxford University Press, 1990).

Mary Jo Nye, Before Big Science: The Pursuit of Modern Chemistry and Physics, 1800-1940 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996).

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The Industrial Revolution: Why Britain Got There First

The search for an explanation for why Britain was the first nation to industrialise.

Underpinning my analysis is the recent work of Professor Nicholas Crafts, Professor of Economics and Economic History at the University of Warwick. In November the Legatum Institute welcomed Professor Crafts to explore the question: ‘why Britain got there first?’

What do we understand by ‘Britain was first to industrialise’? Professor Crafts is one of the leading scholars unpacking the Industrial Revolution and his work reveals a number of salient points. First, there was no great ‘take-off’ in industrialisation or productivity: in Britain industrial employment increased by just 12% between 1759 and 1851, similarly total factor productivity increased by just 0.4% a year until the 1830s. By 20th century standards such growth was underwhelming.

Second, the ‘great divergence’ had already occurred by the time Britain was industrialising. Real GDP per person was far higher in Britain, the Netherlands and Italy than in China by 1600: the West was far ahead of the rest by the time of the Industrial Revolution.

Third, Crafts shows that industrialisation was concentrated in a limited number of sectors, such as textiles, and largely bypassed the service industries.

Despite these reservations, something remarkable did occur. By the middle of the 19th century Britain accounted for 23% of global industrial production, British workers were the richest in Europe, and comparatively few of them worked on the land. What is clear is that this unique position was not the result of a century of rapid change; Britain’s was a slower, more incremental revolution than previously thought.

How to explain this revolution? Three different historians offer an economic, a social and a genetic explanation, yet, to differing degrees, all three are found wanting.

Most successful is Robert Allen who puts forth a compelling argument in The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective . Britain’s success was the result of relative prices and market potential. Allen argues that in Britain wages were high, while capital and energy were cheap. Britain also provided a large market for manufactured products. The result was that it made sense to invest in the spinning jenny in England, while it did not in France.

However, this picture is too simplistic. While British workers were paid more than their French counterparts, even at lower French wages, adopting the jenny would still have been profitable (albeit less so). Similarly, American workers were paid more than their British counterparts, but industrialisation did not take off there.

Joel Mokyr in The Enlightened Economy: an Economic History of Britain 1700-1850 posits that the Enlightenment meant that Britain was best positioned to take advantage of the ideas and equipment of the age. While many European states benefited from the Enlightenment, Britain was alone in possessing an adequate supply of skilled craftsmen who were afforded the freedom to be entrepreneurial. Mokyr’s theory incorporates many of the elements that economists have identified as important for economic growth such as human and physical capital, research and development and effective institutions.

Nevertheless his work is somewhat light on evidence. For every piece of effective government legislation of the period, such as the repealing of the Corn Laws, there is a counterpoint of deleterious action, such as the failure to effectively regulate the railways. Similarly, for every Baconian experimenter such as Josiah Wedgwood who would have encountered Enlightenment ideas, there many, such as Richard Arkwright, who were less likely to have been raised on Enlightenment teaching.

Least successful is Gregory Clark who moves further from the realm of inductive reasoning than Mokyr. Clark in A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World argues that Britain’s Industrial Revolution was a rapid transformation bought about by demographic and genetic changes. The salient point in Clark’s account is that the higher birth rates of the upper classes meant that their offspring formed an increasingly large part of the British population. As they did so they spread their genes and work ethic through a larger swathe of the populace, powering the Industrial Revolution.

Clark’s claim is controversial but thankfully statistics can be used to evaluate it. Clark is correct that some of the upper classes had higher birth rates than other segments of the population; however, this was also the case in many other European countries and in China. So why was Britain’s experience unique? Unfortunately Clark fails to give an answer to this question and his overall thesis, that Britain experienced particularly rapid change around 1800, fails to account for the data assembled by Crafts and outlined above. In this case statistics are clearly the antidote to an unsubstantiated theory.

In all disciplines there is a struggle between facts and theories. For years this was the state of affairs in economics, as mathematical models replaced engagement with facts and data. Historians would be wise to not to repeat this mistake. Crafts and others like him are doing the discipline a great service by providing the evidence with which to examine competing claims. Doing so may result in the dismissal of more theories than in their generation but as Thomas Edison said:

Negative results are just what I want. They’re just as valuable to me as positive results. I can never find the thing that does the job best until I find the ones that don't.

Stephen Clarke is a Research Analyst at the Legatum Institute, London.

The Legatum Institute is currently running the History of Capitalism Programme , a series of lectures which explores the origins and development of a movement of thought and endeavour which has transformed the human condition.

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Industrial Revolution

By: History.com Editors

Updated: March 27, 2023 | Original: October 29, 2009

The Industrial Revolution was a period of scientific and technological development in the 18th century that transformed largely rural, agrarian societies—especially in Europe and North America—into industrialized, urban ones. Goods that had once been painstakingly crafted by hand started to be produced in mass quantities by machines in factories, thanks to the introduction of new machines and techniques in textiles, iron making and other industries.

When Was the Industrial Revolution?

Though a few innovations were developed as early as the 1700s, the Industrial Revolution began in earnest by the 1830s and 1840s in Britain, and soon spread to the rest of the world, including the United States.

Modern historians often refer to this period as the First Industrial Revolution, to set it apart from a second period of industrialization that took place from the late 19th to early 20th centuries and saw rapid advances in the steel, electric and automobile industries. 

Spinning Jenny

Thanks in part to its damp climate, ideal for raising sheep, Britain had a long history of producing textiles like wool, linen and cotton. But prior to the Industrial Revolution, the British textile business was a true “cottage industry,” with the work performed in small workshops or even homes by individual spinners, weavers and dyers.

Starting in the mid-18th century, innovations like the spinning jenny (a wooden frame with multiple spindles), the flying shuttle, the water frame and the power loom made weaving cloth and spinning yarn and thread much easier. Producing cloth became faster and required less time and far less human labor.

More efficient, mechanized production meant Britain’s new textile factories could meet the growing demand for cloth both at home and abroad, where the British Empire’s many overseas colonies provided a captive market for its goods. In addition to textiles, the British iron industry also adopted new innovations.

Chief among the new techniques was the smelting of iron ore with coke (a material made by heating coal) instead of the traditional charcoal. This method was both cheaper and produced higher-quality material, enabling Britain’s iron and steel production to expand in response to demand created by the Napoleonic Wars (1803-15) and the later growth of the railroad industry. 

Impact of Steam Power 

An icon of the Industrial Revolution broke onto the scene in the early 1700s, when Thomas Newcomen designed the prototype for the first modern steam engine . Called the “atmospheric steam engine,” Newcomen’s invention was originally applied to power the machines used to pump water out of mine shafts.

In the 1760s, Scottish engineer James Watt began tinkering with one of Newcomen’s models, adding a separate water condenser that made it far more efficient. Watt later collaborated with Matthew Boulton to invent a steam engine with a rotary motion, a key innovation that would allow steam power to spread across British industries, including flour, paper, and cotton mills, iron works, distilleries, waterworks and canals.

Just as steam engines needed coal, steam power allowed miners to go deeper and extract more of this relatively cheap energy source. The demand for coal skyrocketed throughout the Industrial Revolution and beyond, as it would be needed to run not only the factories used to produce manufactured goods, but also the railroads and steamships used for transporting them.

Transportation During the Industrial Revolution

Britain’s road network, which had been relatively primitive prior to industrialization, soon saw substantial improvements, and more than 2,000 miles of canals were in use across Britain by 1815.

In the early 1800s, Richard Trevithick debuted a steam-powered locomotive, and in 1830 similar locomotives started transporting freight (and passengers) between the industrial hubs of Manchester and Liverpool. By that time, steam-powered boats and ships were already in wide use, carrying goods along Britain’s rivers and canals as well as across the Atlantic.

Banking and Communication in the Industrial Revolution

In 1776, Scottish social philosopher Adam Smith , who is regarded as the founder of modern economics, published The Wealth of Nations . In it, Smith promoted an economic system based on free enterprise, the private ownership of means of production, and lack of government interference.

Banks and industrial financiers soon rose to new prominence during this period, as well as a factory system dependent on owners and managers. A stock exchange was established in London in the 1770s; the New York Stock Exchange was founded in the early 1790s.

The latter part of the Industrial Revolution also saw key advances in communication methods, as people increasingly saw the need to communicate efficiently over long distances. In 1837, British inventors William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone patented the first commercial telegraphy system, even as Samuel Morse and other inventors worked on their own versions in the United States.

Cooke and Wheatstone’s system would be used for railroad signaling, as the speed of the new steam-powered trains created a need for more sophisticated means of communication.

Labor Movement 

Though many people in Britain had begun moving to the cities from rural areas before the Industrial Revolution, this process accelerated dramatically with industrialization, as the rise of large factories turned smaller towns into major cities over the span of decades. This rapid urbanization brought significant challenges, as overcrowded cities suffered from pollution, inadequate sanitation, miserable housing conditions and a lack of safe drinking water.

Meanwhile, even as industrialization increased economic output overall and improved the standard of living for the middle and upper classes, poor and working class people continued to struggle. The mechanization of labor created by technological innovation had made working in factories increasingly tedious (and sometimes dangerous), and many workers—including children—were forced to work long hours for pitifully low wages.

Such dramatic changes and abuses fueled opposition to industrialization worldwide, including the “ Luddites ,” known for their violent resistance to changes in Britain’s textile industry.

Did you know? The word "luddite" refers to a person who is opposed to technological change. The term is derived from a group of early 19th century English workers who attacked factories and destroyed machinery as a means of protest. They were supposedly led by a man named Ned Ludd, though he may have been an apocryphal figure.

In the decades to come, outrage over substandard working and living conditions would fuel the formation of labor unions , as well as the passage of new child labor laws and public health regulations in both Britain and the United States, all aimed at improving life for working class and poor citizens who had been negatively impacted by industrialization.

The Industrial Revolution in the United States

The beginning of industrialization in the United States is usually pegged to the opening of a textile mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, in 1793 by the recent English immigrant Samuel Slater. Slater had worked at one of the mills opened by Richard Arkwright (inventor of the water frame) mills, and despite laws prohibiting the emigration of textile workers, he brought Arkwright’s designs across the Atlantic. He later built several other cotton mills in New England, and became known as the “Father of the American Industrial Revolution.”

The United States followed its own path to industrialization, spurred by innovations “borrowed” from Britain as well as by homegrown inventors like Eli Whitney . Whitney’s 1793 invention of the cotton gin (short for “engine”) revolutionized the nation’s cotton industry (and strengthened the hold of slavery over the cotton-producing South).

By the end of the 19th century, with the so-called Second Industrial Revolution underway, the United States would also transition from a largely agrarian society to an increasingly urbanized one, with all the attendant problems.

By the mid-19th century, industrialization was well-established throughout the western part of Europe and America’s northeastern region. By the early 20th century, the U.S. had become the world’s leading industrial nation.

Effects of the Industrial Revolution

Historians continue to debate many aspects of industrialization, including its exact timeline, why it began in Britain as opposed to other parts of the world and the idea that it was actually more of a gradual evolution than a revolution. The positives and negatives of the Industrial Revolution are complex.

On one hand, unsafe working conditions were rife and environmental pollution from coal and gas are legacies we still struggle with today. On the other, the move to cities and ingenious inventions that made clothing, communication and transportation more affordable and accessible to the masses changed the course of world history.

Regardless of these questions, the Industrial Revolution had a transformative economic, social and cultural impact, and played an integral role in laying the foundations for modern society. 

Photo Galleries

Robert C. Allen, The Industrial Revolution: A Very Short Introduction . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007  Claire Hopley, “A History of the British Cotton Industry.” British Heritage Travel , July 29, 2006 William Rosen, The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention . New York: Random House, 2010 Gavin Weightman, The Industrial Revolutionaries: The Making of the Modern World, 1776-1914 . New York: Grove Press, 2007 Matthew White, “Georgian Britain: The Industrial Revolution.” British Library , October 14, 2009 

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Why Did the Industrial Revolution Start in Britain?

94 Pages Posted: 28 Nov 2015 Last revised: 7 Dec 2015

Leif van Neuss

University of Liège - HEC Management School

Date Written: December 7, 2015

The main goal of this paper is to provide an integrated overview of the literature devoted to identifying the causes of the British industrial revolution. Why did the industrial revolution, a fascinating and multifaceted event which brought about modern economic growth, occur in eighteenth-century Britain? This question has animated a lot of discussions among scholars and is still nowadays heatedly debated in the literature. This debate is reflected in the large spectrum of theories which aim at explaining the true origins of the British industrialization. The paper first sheds light on a rising debate concerning the evolution of British incomes per capita before the British industrial revolution and the “Great Divergence”. The paper then investigates the proposed causes of the British industrialization, aggregating them into seven broad categories, i.e. (1) geography and natural resources, (2) demography, (3) agricultural progress, (4) urbanization and consumer revolution, (5) trade and empire, (6) institutional and political factors, (7) science, technology, and human capital.

Keywords: economic history, industrial revolution

JEL Classification: N, O10, O30

Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation

Leif Van Neuss (Contact Author)

University of liège - hec management school ( email ).

Boulevard du Rectorat 7 (B31) LIEGE, Liege 4000 Belgium

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Why did the Industrial Revolution begin in England and what factors led to the “Great Divergence?

In a little over a century from around 1750 to 1850 Britain went from being a largely pastoral, farming population to a country of industrialized cities and factories. This tremendous transition, usually referred to as the Industrial Revolution, marked a big turning point in history as it was the first time a country was able to escape from the Malthusian constraints and experience large continuous economic growth and massively increase productivity. However, while there is great consensus for when the Industrial Revolution took place and that it first occurred in Britain, there is heavy debate over its origins and why Britain was first. Although, this essay will acknowledge the wide and complex variety of possible explanations, it will focus on institutions as they have played a crucial role as a foundation for the Industrial Revolution to take place in Britain. The British institutions were important in creating a more egalitarian society, supporting economic growth and encouraging technological innovation and the industrialization that eventually occurred around the world significantly explains the great inequality among nations today. This essay will refer to institutions as sets of informal and formal rules and organizations that impact the distribution of power, and by aggregations of ethics, morals, procedures and guidelines stabilize interaction (Hall, 1986, North, 1990; Peters & Pierre, 1998; Wiens, 2012). Firstly, this essay will argue that British institutions played an extensive part in decreasing the powers of the executives as education increased and a growing middle class emerged which resulted in a relatively freer and more equal society than elsewhere in the world. Secondly, institutions were imperative for Britain’s economic growth and for the maintenance of comparatively high wages at the time. Thirdly, high wages, as well as institutions such as the patent system, guilds and commons motivated industries and individuals to innovate. Lastly, the great inequality among nations in the world today can be highly explained by the onset of industrialization around the world. COURSE: 1003GIR Globalization the Asia-Pacific & Australia. 10.09.12

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We survey significant literature on the role of institutions in industrial revolution. Literature shows that institutions played an important role in facilitating technological progress and thus overcoming Malthusian stagnation. The interaction of economic power, economic and political institutions created the circumstances in which industrial revolution could happen. The decrease in transaction costs led to an expansion of markets. It provided further incentives to improve institutions, as well as to increase the exchange of knowledge and innovation, thus leading to the modern economic regime.

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During the Industrial Revolution, Britain experienced significant technological change in a shift towards modern economic growth. The institutional environment created by the Enlightenment is often seen as a source of this change with reduced rent-seeking, shifting scientific attitudes and legislative changes. This essay analyses the necessary conditions for technological change, the areas where it was focused and considers international comparisons to illustrate that Britain's unique factor prices were instead the dominant determinant of the technological change, which was complemented by its institutions. Britain's unique combination of factor prices created strong economic incentives to drive technological growth. Britain had significantly high silver wages relative to other

Journal of Institutional Economics

Was technological progress during and after the Industrial Revolution top-down or bottom-up? The technology that created the great inventions was driven by a combination of pathbreaking ideas and the dexterity and skills of trained artisans. While those forms of human capital were quite different, they both came out of small elites of intellectuals and craftsmen, what are rapidly becoming known as “upper-tail human capital.” I analyze the institutions that drove the incentives for both, and show that they came together to produce the Great Enrichment. These incentives were both material and social: between 1500 and 1700, the search for financial security and reputation cooperated in producing a unique institutional environment in which the elites in Western Europe produced the three legged-stool of European modernity: the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, and the Enlightenment. Once these three movements had succeeded, the foundation for modern economic growth had been laid.

orngu Victor Gbashinbo

The industrial revolution, which started in Britain before sweeping through Europe and the USA, is traditionally viewed as the deepest mutation ever known to have affected men since Neolithic times. As Cipolla (1975:7) contended: “Between 1780 and 1850, in less than three generations, a far-reaching revolution, without precedent in the history of Mankind, changed the face of England. From then on, the world was no longer the same. Historians have often used and abused the word revolution to mean a radical change, but no revolution has been as dramatically revolutionary as the Industrial Revolution, except perhaps the Neolithic Revolution” . The industrial revolution shaped the face of new industrial and economically successful societies by modifying their social and economic structures and destabilizing all established hierarchies. It eventually influenced every aspect of people’s daily life. Thanks to the introduction of new high-impact inventions into the world of production, which emerged in a changing intellectual environment, the human power of production was released in a spectacular way. The industrial revolution indeed witnessed an explosion of the production of various manufactured goods such as textile items and metal products. Equipped with new technologies, the industrializing economies were henceforth able to produce an increasingly larger quantity of products to answer the basic needs of a growing population characterized by new consumption habits and aspirations. The industrial growth was accompanied by the large-scale development of the transport infrastructure (roads, canals and railroads) that contributed to expanding the markets and speeding up the commercial flows. The factory system, a new form of labor organization, developed progressively and started to regulate people’s life as never before. Combined with the modernization of agriculture, the industrial revolution moreover accelerated the urbanization process in the industrializing countries. It also witnessed the emergence of a new social structure characterized by the consecration of a more-and-more powerful and influential bourgeoisie, animated by a rising capitalist spirit, and the birth of a new working class sometimes called “the proletariat”. All these changes helped to transform the societies which successfully undertook an industrial revolution and move their economy on a new growth trajectory. The industrial revolution is to some extent the birth certificate of the modern world.

Asmat ullah

Leonard Dudley

What does it take for a society to be able to innovate? According to recent historical studies by Mokyr (2009), Allen (2009) and Acemoglu & Robinson (2012), the society’s institutions must be able to meet its needs, as expressed by factor prices. However, this approach fails to explain why between 1700 and 1850, the well-organized markets of the commercially-oriented Netherlands failed to generate innovation while the lesscompetitive markets of absolutist France yielded numerous key technologies. This paper presents a complementary approach that emphasizes social networks, distinguishing between cooperative and non-cooperative innovations. The empirical results, based on data covering 117 important innovations and 201 regions in ten countries, suggest that ideology and factor prices played a role for the simpler non-cooperative subset. However, for the more complex cooperative innovations, the keys were literacy, language standardization and the openness of the social structure.

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The Impact of the British Industrial Revolution

The consequences of the British Industrial Revolution (1760-1840) were many, varied, and long-lasting. Working life in rural and urban settings was changed forever by the inventions of new machines, the spread of factories, and the decline of traditional occupations. Developments in transportation and communications meant life in the post-industrial world was more exciting and faster, with people more connected than ever before. Consumer goods became more affordable to more people, and there were more jobs for a booming population. The price to pay for progress was often a working life that was noisy, repetitive, and dangerous, while cities grew to become overcrowded, polluted, and crime-ridden.

The impact of the Industrial Revolution included:

• Many new machines were invented that could do things much faster than previously or could perform entirely new tasks.
• Steam power was cheaper, more reliable, and faster than more traditional power sources.
• Large factories were established, creating jobs and a boom in cotton textile production, in particular.
• Large engineering projects became possible like iron bridges and viaducts.
• Traditional industries like hand weaving and businesses connected to stagecoaches went into terminal decline.
• The cost of food and consumer goods was reduced as items were mass-produced and transportation costs decreased.
• Better tools became available for manufacturers and farmers.
• The coal, iron, and steel industries boomed to provide fuel and raw materials for machines to work.
• The canal system was expanded but then declined.
• Urbanisation accelerated as labour became concentrated around factories in towns and cities.
• Cheap train travel became a possibility for all.
• Demand for skilled labour, especially in textiles, decreased.
• Demand for unskilled labour to operate machines and work on the railways increased.
• The use of child and women labour increased.
• Worker safety declined and was not reversed until the 1830s.
• Trade unions were formed to protect workers' rights.
• The success of mechanisation led to other countries experiencing their own industrial revolutions.

Coal Mining

Mining of tin and coal has a long history in Britain , but the arrival of the Industrial Revolution saw unprecedented activity underground to find the fuel to feed the steam-powered machines that came to dominate industry and transport. The steam-powered pump was invented to drain mines in 1712. This allowed deeper mining and so greatly increased coal production. The Watt steam engine , patented in 1769, allowed steam power to be harnessed for almost anything, and as the steam engines ran on coal, so the mining industry boomed as mechanisation swept across industries of all kinds. This phenomenon only increased with the spread of the railways from 1825 and the increase in steam-powered ships from the 1840s. Coal gas, meanwhile, was used for lighting homes and streets from 1812, and as a source of heat for private homes and cookers. Coke, that is burnt coal, was used as a fuel in the iron and steel industries, and so the demand for coal kept on growing as the Industrial Revolution rolled on.

There were four principal coal mining areas: South Wales, southern Scotland , Lancashire, and Northumberland. To get the coal to where it was needed, Britain's canal system was significantly expanded as transportation by canal was 50% cheaper than using roads. By 1830, " England and Wales had 3,876 miles [6,237 km] of inland canals, up from 1,399 [2,251 km] in 1760" (Horn, 17). Britain produced annually just 2.5 to 3 million tons of coal in 1700, but by 1900, this figure had rocketed to 224 million tons.

Manufacturing

The steam engine transformed industry, particularly one of Britain's biggest sectors: textiles. Spinning and weaving had been cottage industries centred around a single or a few households. A series of machines were invented which revolutionised how cotton was cleaned, spun, and woven. These devices were the flying shuttle (John Kay, 1733), spinning jenny (James Hargreaves, 1764), waterframe (Richard Arkwright, 1769), spinning mule ( Samuel Crompton, 1779), power loom (Edmund Cartwright, 1785), cotton gin (Eli Whitney, 1794), and Robert's loom and self-acting mule (Richard Roberts, 1822-5). Mechanisation permitted the establishment of textile mills and factories where first water-powered and then steam-powered machines did work faster and cheaper than was ever possible by hand. By the 1830s, 75% of cotton mills were using steam power and cotton textiles accounted for half of Britain's total exports.

Some protested violently at the advent of mechanisation, particularly skilled textile workers. The period between 1811 and 1816 saw the Luddites, named after their mythical leader Ned Ludd, smash factory machines. These protestors were dealt with harshly, and the crime of damaging machines could lead to the death penalty.

Despite the turbulence in traditional ways, many more jobs were created by mechanisation than were lost in older industries. In 1830, one in 80 Britons worked in the 4,000+ textile mills across the country. The new jobs were quite different from those in the past. Factory workers had to very often perform repetitive tasks, and they were ruled by the clock. Previously, workers had often been paid for a specific project (piecework) and worked at their own rhythm. In the new factory system, a worker performed only one task in a series that involved many other workers. On the other hand, factory jobs ensured regular pay, something that seasonal agricultural workers, especially, appreciated the value of.

Agriculture

Industrialisation in Britain was dramatic, but this did not mean that agriculture declined. On the contrary, innovations and mechanisation helped make agriculture more efficient than ever and so able to feed the ever-growing population. In 1800, agriculture involved 35% of Britain's total workforce, and even by the end of the Industrial Revolution in 1841, 1 in 5 Britons still worked in farming. Machines countered Britain's relatively high labour costs, and they compensated for the trend of people moving away from the country and into the cities.

The Rotherham swing plough (Joseph Foljambe, 1730), winnowing machine (Andrew Rodgers, 1737), threshing machine (Andrew Meikle, 1787), reaping machine ( Cyrus McCormack, 1834), and steam-powered flour mills all transformed harvesting and food production. Mobile steam engines were used to cut drainage trenches and pump out waterlogged areas to make them useful for agriculture. With the enclosure system, more common land was utilised for farming. Mass-produced agricultural implements were stronger, sharper, and longer-lasting than traditionally-made tools thanks to new metalworking machines. Scientists developed better fertilisers to increase yields. All of these improvements made food cheaper and helped many more people eat healthier diets, and so life expectancy went up, particularly regarding children.

There were negative effects of the Industrial Revolution on the agricultural sector. Jobs were lost, especially seasonal ones as farmers now hired machines at harvest time. Some labourers attacked the new machines that had taken their livelihood, notably during the Swing Riots of 1830-32. Land became more valuable, and so rents were increased, which led to many small farmers having to give up their farms.

There was a great increase in the use of female and child labour, particularly in factories and textile mills. One reason was that both groups were cheaper than male workers, another reason was that women and children had smaller and often more dexterous hands, which were advantages when using some machines. All three groups tended to work 12-hour shifts until this practice was reduced by law to 10 hours (in 1847). Children, on average, began working as young as eight in mines and factories, and so "at least half of nominally school-age children worked full-time during the industrial revolution" (Horn, 57). In the textile industry, women made up half of the workforce.

The health and safety of workers were often a low priority for employers until laws made these an obligatory consideration. Lung diseases caused by coal dust were a common problem for miners. Working in the damp conditions of a textile mill had a similar negative effect on workers there. Factories were very noisy, and many workers suffered hearing loss to various degrees. Repetitive stress injuries were common as workers performed the same tasks all day, six days a week. Dangerous substances were commonly handled, such as lead and mercury. Machines were large, heavy, had fast-moving parts, and were prone to breakages, all of which could lead to accidents like lost fingers, limbs, or worse.

Successive governments were reluctant to restrict business owners in principle since it was considered possibly damaging to the national economy to interfere. Workers attempted to act collectively to protect their interests, but the formation of trade unions was resisted by employers and politicians. Indeed, the government banned trade unions between 1799 and 1824. From the 1830s, though, Acts of Parliament began to ensure workers had improved protection and working conditions. Trade unions like the Amalgamated Society of Engineers (formed in 1851) then grew in stature to ensure these gains in rights were not lost.

Transportation & Communication

For many, the sight and sound of a train tearing through one's local countryside was the most visible and impressive result of the Industrial Revolution. Trains were first used on short lengths of track at mines. In 1825, the first passenger train ran from Stockton to Darlington. The first intercity passenger line was opened in 1830. Running between Liverpool and Manchester and pulled by Stephenson's Rocket locomotive, the line was such a great success it led to the railways spreading everywhere. Trains also revolutionised goods transport since a single train could carry 20 times the cargo of a canal boat and reach its destination eight times faster. This made consumer goods and raw materials transported by train cheaper than previously.

From 1848, passengers could travel from London to Glasgow in 12 hours, a journey that would have taken many days by stagecoach. By 1870, Britain had over 24,000 kilometres (15,000 miles) of rail lines. People were more connected than ever before. Even the less well-off could buy cheap excursion tickets, and so seaside resorts boomed. A trip from London to Brighton by stagecoach took five days and cost £1.20 in 1830; ten years later, the same journey by train took three hours and cost 40 pence.

A Gallery of 30 Industrial Revolution Inventions

Businesses, especially food producers, could now reach new markets which previously had been too expensive or too far away for fresh produce to be sold there. No longer restricted to local markets where they were already well known, businesses invested in countrywide advertising inside the new bustling train stations. The railways created tens of thousands of new jobs. Steam was also used to power metal ships, which were faster and more reliable than vessels that used only sails. Dockyards were another significant employer. The rise of steam-powered transport perpetuated the success of the coal, iron, and steel industries. In 1850, 2.25 million tons of pig iron were produced in Britain, that compares to 70,000 tons in 1786. Sheffield became the world's major steel producer; the city had five steel manufacturers in 1770, but 135 by 1856.

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Communication was greatly sped up by the railways. Trains delivered newspapers from one area of the country to the other on the same day. Trains delivered letters and parcels in 24 hours. The railways inspired the invention of the electrical telegraph , invented in 1837 by William Fothergill Cook (1806-1879) and Charles Wheatstone (1802-1875), so that train drivers could communicate with stations. Soon the public could send private messages, and journalists, too, used the telegraph to contact their offices, and so the delivery of news sped up remarkably. As the Industrial Revolution spread to other European countries and the United States, so more communication and travel opportunities arrived. Ocean-crossing steamships and intercontinental telegraph cables made the world more connected than ever before.

As in other areas of the Industrial Revolution, new modes of transport brought some negative consequences. Canals and stagecoach companies went into decline. Some people were obliged to give up their land to make way for the railway lines. There was more air pollution and noise, and the countryside was spoilt by the tracks, bridges, and tunnels built to allow trains the most direct route between destinations.

Effects on Society

The population of Britain rocketed from 6 million in 1750 to 21 million in 1851. The 1851 census in Britain revealed that, for the first time, more people were living in towns and cities than in the countryside. The populations of cities and towns like Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield, and Halifax increased ten times over in the 19th century. More young people meeting each other meant marriages happened earlier, and the birth rate went up compared to societies in rural areas.

Life became cramped in the cities that had grown up around factories and coalfields. Many families were obliged to share the same home. "In Liverpool in the 1840s, 40,000 people were living in cellars, with an average of six people per cellar" (Armstrong, 188). Pollution became a serious problem in many places. Poor sanitation led to the spread of diseases. In 1837, 1839, and 1847, there were typhus epidemics. In 1831 and 1849, there were cholera epidemics. Another effect of urbanisation was the rise in petty crime. Criminals were now more confident of escaping detection in the ever-increasing anonymity of life in the cities. The education of many children was replaced by a working day, a choice often made by parents to supplement a meagre family income. There were some rudimentary schools, and some employers provided a certain level of education, but compulsory education for 5-to-12-year-olds and the institutions necessary to provide it would not come along until the 1870s. Literacy rates improved in the period, a development helped by the availability of cheap books made possible by economies of scale from papermaking machines and printing presses.

Consumerism developed with workers able to afford mass-produced goods. There were more shops than ever before to meet this demand, and the stock was more interesting, with exotic goods coming from across the British Empire . An urban middle class grew up, but the gulf between those at the bottom and the top, if anything, widened. Factory workers, for example, had few transferable skills, and so they were stuck at their level of work. In the past, a handweaver might have saved, perhaps over many years, to form their own business with their own employees, but that method of climbing the social ladder now became much more difficult to access. Capital might have replaced land as the great wealth indicator, but for most people, the Industrial Revolution brought a different way of living, not necessarily a better one.

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Bibliography

• Allen, Robert C. The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective . Cambridge University Press, 2009.
• Armstrong, Benjamin. Britain 1783-1885. Hodder Education, 2020.
• Dugan, Sally & Dugan, David. The Day the World Took Off. Channel 4 Book, 2023.
• Forty, Simon. 100 Innovations of the Industrial Revolution. Haynes Publishing UK, 2019.
• Hepplewhite, Peter. The Industrial Revolution. Wayland, 2016.
• Horn, Jeff. The Industrial Revolution . Greenwood, 2007.
• Humphries, Jane. Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution . Cambridge University Press, 2011.
• Shelley, C et al. Industrialisation & Social Change in Britain. PEARSON SCHOOLS, 2016.
• Yorke, Stan. The Industrial Revolution Explained. Countryside Books, 2005.

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Big History Project

Course: big history project   >   unit 9.

• ACTIVITY: The Appetite for Energy
• ACTIVITY: Unit 9 Vocab Tracking
• ACTIVITY: DQ Notebook 9.1
• WATCH: Coal, Steam, and the Industrial Revolution

READ: The Industrial Revolution

• WATCH: How Did Change Accelerate?
• READ: Acceleration
• READ: George Washington Carver - Graphic Biography
• ACTIVITY: Threshold Card — Threshold 8: The Modern Revolution
• Quiz: Acceleration

Fossil Fuels, Steam Power, and the Rise of Manufacturing

The transformation of the world, early steam engines, why britain.

• Shortage of wood and the abundance of convenient coal deposits
• Commercial-minded aristocracy; limited monarchy
• System of free enterprise; limited government involvement
• Government support for commercial projects, for a strong navy to protect ships
• Cheap cotton produced by slaves in North America
• High literacy rates
• Rule of law; protection of assets
• Valuable immigrants (Dutch, Jews, Huguenots [French Protestants])
• Location of China’s coal, which was in the north, while economic activity was centered in the south
• Rapid growth of population in China, giving less incentive for machines and more for labor-intensive methods
• Confucian ideals that valued stability and frowned upon experimentation and change
• Lack of Chinese government support for maritime explorations, thinking its empire seemed large enough to provide everything needed
• China’s focus on defending self from nomadic attacks from the north and west
• Britain’s location on the Atlantic Ocean
• British colonies in North America, which provided land, labor, and markets
• Silver from the Americas, used in trade with China
• Social and ideological conditions in Britain, and new thoughts about the economy, that encouraged an entrepreneurial spirit

The Spread of the Industrial Revolution

Consequences of the industrial revolution, for further discussion, want to join the conversation.

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Britain’s Industrial Revolution Essay

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Introduction

Factors that led to britain’s industrialization in the eighteenth century, works cited.

“ Industrial revolution refers to dramatic change in the main sectors of economy such as agriculture, transportation and manufacturing. Industrialization was associated with major benefits such as rise in people’s living standards, increased job opportunities and economic growth, among others.

According to historians, Great Britain was the first nation in the entire globe to industrialize. Industrialization in Britain started in the late eighteenth century. The following essay examines the factors that led to Britain’s industrialization in the late eighteenth century.

By the second part of the eighteenth century, Great Britain was regarded as one of the wealthiest nation across the globe due to industrial revolution. The following factors explain why Industrial revolution occurred in Britain;

Agricultural revolution of the eighteenth century was one of the factors. According to historians, agricultural revolution was characterized by a change in stock breeding and farming methods which in turn enhanced food production in Great Britain. Framers adopted a commercial approach as opposed to the past where they produced food for domestic use.

The large demand of food commodity from London motivated workers to increase their production. Landlordism, which refers to the act of owning large estates, was also a main factor that enhances commercialization of British agriculture. Agricultural revolution helped to lower the food commodity prices in Great Britain.

The cost of labor also lowered as a result of agricultural revolution. British government was therefore in a position to feed its citizens. British families thus, used their disposal incomes to buy manufactured products. Increased food production in Great Britain caused the population to increase. Population growth played a major role in providing the required labor in the new factories.

The other factor which led to Britain’s industrialization in the eighteenth century is the availability of capital for investment. Financial reforms which included introduction of derivatives such as swaps and options also enhanced the industrial revolution in Great Britain. Additionally, the revolution was boosted by the presence of effective central namely Bank of England.

The financial system in the Great Britain was highly effective compared to other European nations like Spain and Italy. The introduction of financial instruments such as bill of exchange made it possible for people to make payments. Political powers in Great Britain were based on economic and technological matters. Thus, the country had a large number of individuals whose main objective was innovation for development (Arnstein 72).

A study which was done by Arnstein (20) suggested that the presence of huge mineral deposits also enhanced industrialization in Great Britain. Britain is a country which is rich in mineral deposits such as iron ore and carbon fuel. Mineral resources played an important role in the manufacturing process. Iron was used in the production of new machineries. The country’s size was relatively smaller and this enhanced transportation of minerals.

The availability of ready market for manufactured goods led to Britain’s industrialization. Availability of ready market ensured that goods from Great Britain were absorbed as fast as they were produced. The country’s exports increased significantly during the late part of the eighteenth century.

During the colonial times, the nation had created an immense colonial empire. The colonial empire made the country to export goods to many parts of the world, compared to its key rivals such as Holland and France. The development of merchant marine made it possible for the country to transport goods throughout the world. Also, Britain’s railroad created a faster and cheaper means of transportation for the manufactured goods.

This had major impacts on the markets as it increased demand for goods and services. Britain’s railroad connected the major towns such as London, Manchester and Liverpool and this helped to spur trade. As a prerequisite to create conducive atmosphere for vibrant economic growth, the British government heavily invested in infrastructural developments.

Among the infrastructural developments that were made include the invention of steam engine. The invention of steam engine also played an important role in enhancing productivity of goods in Great Britain. It facilitated trade in the European region through easier market access by linking Britain with neighboring countries like Spain and Germany. Construction of infrastructural facilities was also enhanced by plenty supply of water from rivers (Arnstein 18).

According to Arnstein (56), Industrialization in Great Britain was also enhanced by the country’s ability to produce goods cheaply. The adoption of machinery in production of goods led to mass production and reduced the cost of production. The invention of flying shuttle led to mass production of yard goods.

In addition, factories were located near rivers and sources of power, which in turn enabled manufacturers to double their output. Great Britain also protected its key industries such as textile by discouraging imports.

The newly created factories provided jobs to thousands of families in Great Britain. In order to ensure that factory machines run at a steady rate, employees were required to work in shifts. Factory managers mainly employed workers from rural areas as they were regarded as hard working. This made people to live near factories and this in turn helped to create new towns.

Arnstein (36) in his study suggested that, the British government made substantial efforts in enhancing industrialization in the late eighteenth century. The government provided investors with a stable business environment. The parliament passed laws which safeguarded private property.

Additionally, Great Britain adopted capitalism form of economy which advocates for private ownership of resources. There were thus, no restrictions on private ownership of resources in England. The government did not intervene with regard to tariffs and taxes. The government also ensured that the credit system was flexible for private investors. The free market economy ensured that individuals’ had rights to own property and dispose off natural resources and man-made resources as they wished.

It also provided the owners of property with the right income, generated from the resources. Workers were also free to enter into any occupation for which they were specialized in. There was the aspect of self interest in pursuit of personal goals. Factories aimed at maximizing production and profits, land owners aimed at achieving maximum rent, workers shifted to occupation which offered the highest rewards and buyers spent their incomes in the way that satisfied the people most.

Industrial revolution in Great Britain in the late part of eighteenth-century was facilitated by factors such as the availability of resources for production, geographical advantages, such as the presence of streams and rivers which provided factories with water, financial reforms which resulted in extra capital for investment, among others. Industrial revolution in Great Britain brought about changes such as technological advancements, mass production, creation of new urban centers and efficient transport systems, among others.

Arnstein, Walter. Britain yesterday and today: 1830 to the present, Edition5 . London: D.C. Health, 1988.

• The Eighteenth Century America
• British Industrial Revolution and Social Changes
• Western Experience to the Eighteenth Century
• Industrial and French Revolutions
• An Analysis of the Impact of British Colonization
• Restoration and Nationalism
• Christopher Hill “The World Turned Upside Down”
• The French Revolution: Romanticism Period
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IvyPanda. (2019, March 27). Britain’s Industrial Revolution. https://ivypanda.com/essays/britains-industrial-revolution/

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Why did the Industrial Revolution start in Britain?

Do you know why the industrial revolution began in britain it turned out that the nation was very fertile ground for it..

Christopher McFadden

National Library of Wales/Wikimedia Commons

• The Industrial Revolution , which began in Britain in the late 18th century, marked a significant turning point in human history.
• It transformed the goods produced, leading to widespread social and economic changes.
• But why did the Industrial Revolution start in Britain and not elsewhere?

Why did the Industrial Revolution begin in Britain? Was it because they were particularly ingenious and industrial people or just luck of history? Various theories have been proposed, but which, if any, hit the nail on the head? Let’s take a look at one particularly interesting one. 

What was the Industrial Revolution?

The Industrial Revolution is widely accepted to have occurred between the 1760s and the First World War. This period was marked by massive worldwide technological, socioeconomic, and geopolitical changes.

Throughout this period, society transitioned from a larger agrarian and handicraft economy to one dominated by industry and machine-based fabrication. Technological innovation throughout the period changed many aspects of life and how we work beyond all recognition. 

Petar Milošević/Wikimedia

The term “ Industrial Revolution ” was first coined by early French writers but would become popularized by the English economic historian Arnold Toynbee in the 19th Century. 

While Toynbee’s definition covered the period between 1760 and 1840, it is more widely applied to the process of economic transformation from an agrarian economy to a manufacturing economy rather than a rigidly defined period. 

This is why some countries today are sometimes described as undergoing their own “ industrial revolutions .” 

Why did Great Britain start the Industrial Revolution?

Historians have postulated various reasons why the Industrial Revolution began in Britain. But perhaps one of the most convincing is the argument put forward by Turkish-American economist Daron Acemoğlu and British political scientist James A. Robinson in their fascinating book “Why Nations Fail” . 

Tama66/Pixabay

By their estimation , it is no accident that the Industrial Revolution began in Britain. However, the very fact Britain had reached a point where it was fertile ground for the Revolution is part chance and part cultural development. In short, they argue that meaningful  changes in history , like the Fall of Rome, the Black Plague , the signing of the Magna Carta , the break with Rome that occurred during  the Reformation , and the Glorious Revolution , had initially small but cumulatively profound effects over time. In a sense, it can be likened to Chaos Theory , where small changes in initial conditions can result in a very different result when all else is equal.

Of course, the path of history is not always linear, if ever. There had been various regressive events in British history before the Industrial Revolution. The English Civil War and the following Puritanical tyrannical rule of Oliver Cromwell  are notable examples. However, some have argued that this eventually led to a cementing of Protestant ethics in British culture and a transfer of power from the monarch to the British Government in its aftermath.

According to Acemoğlu and Robinson, once the path had been set for a more significant rule of law, development of inclusive institutions in society, greater property rights, and an openness to creative destruction in social and economic institutions, the Industrial Revolution was all but guaranteed in the United Kingdom. In case you are not aware, creative destruction is the economic term that describes how capitalism leads to a constantly changing economic structure, including the dismantling of long-standing practices to make way for new production methods. 

Old industries and firms, which are no longer profitable, close down, enabling the resources (capital and labor) to move into more productive processes and areas. The so-called disruptive technologies like railroads, the internet, etc., are prime examples of creative destruction. 

Aloahwild/Wikimedia Commons

As the authors put it, “inclusive economic institutions… are those that allow and encourage participation by the great mass of people in economic activities that make the best use of their talents and skills.” But this had been bought and paid for in much blood and political struggle beforehand — like many monumental historical events. 

Why did the Industrial Revolution start in Great Britain in the 1750s?

While developing inclusive institutions was vitally important in allowing the Industrial Revolution to happen, they were not the whole story. Inclusive institutions “bestow equal rights and entitlements and enable equal opportunities, voice, and access to resources and services. They are typically based on principles of universality, non-discrimination, or targeted action.”

Other factors played their part too. The seeds were sown, quite literally, thanks to the English  agricultural revolution , which included a move to high-yield crops, crop rotation, the clearing of woodland, and other new methods in agriculture, which enabled the production of food surplus and excess population growth.

Population growth led to an excess of labor, which was attracted to larger population centers in search of work and fortune. As a result of earlier changes, banks had become more inclusive institutions in that they lent money to those other than the aristocracy. They could provide capital to merchants and entrepreneurs to build new technologies and companies that they might previously have been able to afford to do.

myshkovsky/iStock

Importantly, the rule of law and greater property rights, stemming partly from a power transfer away from the monarch and toward the Parliament, also promoted investment and risk-taking. Large, capital-hungry structures like factories could now be built on credit. 

The granting of patents was also formalized around this time into a legally binding system. This further created confidence for investors and inventors to take a gamble.

Britain also had a wealth of coal , iron, and other resources in a relatively small area, which would help kick-start the Industrial Revolution . Its growing Colonial Empire also provided a ready-made (and captive) market for surplus goods, providing further impetus for entrepreneurs and new industrialists.

Initial developments occurred in the cotton industry with the development of the spinning jenny, flying shuttle, power loom, and the application of the steam engine to drive machinery, which sped up cloth production tremendously. Very soon, other industries would benefit from industrialization. 

Clem Rutter/Wikimedia Commons

The Industrial Revolution was one of human history’s most essential and transformational periods. For good or bad, the modern world would not exist without the events that laid the foundations for it and its aftermath. 

Perhaps, if Britain’s history had run more parallel with that of mainland Europe , where monarchies held more power for longer, it would have happened much later, begun in a different place, or even not occurred at all. But, of course, like any discussions on alternative histories, we will never know for sure. 

And that is your lot for today.

The Industrial Revolution in Britain was a complex phenomenon shaped by various factors, ranging from the availability of natural resources to the cultural and institutional landscape of the country. The interplay of these factors created a unique set of conditions that allowed for rapid technological and economic progress.

While the Industrial Revolution brought many benefits, such as increased productivity and living standards, it faced challenges and negative consequences. Understanding the lessons of the past can help us navigate the complex challenges facing our world today and build a better future for all.

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Christopher McFadden Christopher graduated from Cardiff University in 2004 with a Masters Degree in Geology. Since then, he has worked exclusively within the Built Environment, Occupational Health and Safety and Environmental Consultancy industries. He is a qualified and accredited Energy Consultant, Green Deal Assessor and Practitioner member of IEMA. Chris&rsquo;s main interests range from Science and Engineering, Military and Ancient History to Politics and Philosophy.

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Why was the Industrial Revolution British?

• Robert Allen

It is still not clear among economic historians why the Industrial Revolution actually took place in 18th century Britain. This column explains that it is the British Empire’s success in international trade that created Britain’s high wage, cheap energy economy, and it was the spring board for the Industrial Revolution.

Why did the Industrial Revolution take place in eighteenth century Britain and not elsewhere in Europe or Asia? Answers to this question have ranged from religion and culture to politics and constitutions. In a just published book, The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective , I argue that the explanation of the Industrial Revolution was fundamentally economic. The Industrial Revolution was Britain’s creative response to the challenges and opportunities created by the global economy that emerged after 1500. This was a two step process. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries a European-wide market emerged. England took a commanding position in this new order as her wool textile industry out competed the established producers in Italy and the Low Countries. England extended her lead in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by creating an intercontinental trading network including the Americas and India. Intercontinental trade expansion depended on the acquisition of colonies, mercantilist trade promotion, and naval power.

The upshot of Britain’s success in the global economy was the expansion of rural manufacturing industries and rapid urbanisation. East Anglia was the centre of the woollen cloth industry, and its products were exported through London where a quarter of the jobs depended on the port. As a result, the population of London exploded from 50,000 in 1500 to 200,000 in 1600 and half a million in 1700. In the eighteenth century, the expansion of trade with the American colonies and India doubled London’s population again and led to even more rapid growth in provincial and Scottish cities. This expansion depended on vigorous imperialism, which expanded British possessions abroad, the Royal Navy, which defeated competing naval and mercantile powers, and the Navigation Acts, which excluded foreigners from the colonial trades. The British Empire was designed to stimulate the British economy–and it did.

The growth of British commerce had three important consequences. First, the growth of London created a shortage of wood fuel that was only relieved by the exploitation of coal. Figure 1 shows the real price per million BTUs of energy in London from wood and coal in this period. In the fifteenth century, the two fuels sold at the same price per million BTU’s which meant that the market for coal was limited given its polluting character. As London grew after 1500, the price of wood fuels rose and by the end of the sixteenth century, charcoal and firewood were twice the price of coal per unit of energy. With that premium, consumers began to substitute coal for wood. Instead of a wood burning hearth in the middle of a large central room, houses were built with narrow fireplaces and chimneys to burn coal. The coal burning house was invented. It then paid to mine coal in Northumberland and ship it down the coast to London. The coal trade began. On the coal fields (in Newcastle, for instance), Britain had the cheapest energy in the world. Energy was more expensive on the European continent and particularly expensive in China (Figure 2).

Second, the growth of cities and manufacturing increased the demand for labour with the result that British wages and living standards were the highest in the world. Figure 3 shows the wages of labours in leading cities in Europe and Asia from 1375 to 1875. The wages have been deflated by a consumer price index so that they show the purchasing power across space as well as over time. A value of one means that a labourer employed full time, full year could earn just enough to keep his family at a subsistence standard of living of 1940 calories per adult male equivalent per day. The budget used to define the consumer price index is set so that most of the spending is on food and most of that is on the cheapest carbohydrate available (oatmeal in northwestern Europe, polenta in Florence, sorghum in Beijing, millet chapatis in Delhi). Only tiny quantities of meat, oil, cloth, fuel, and housing are included in the budget. After the Black Death in the mid-fourteenth century, the standard of living of workers everywhere was high; they typically earned three or four times subsistence. In the ensuing centuries, population growth in Europe and Asia led to falling real wages, so that most workers ended up in the eighteenth century earning just enough to purchase the subsistence standard of living. The only countries to avoid that fate were Britain and the Low Countries. Their populations, in fact, grew more rapidly than those elsewhere, but this effect was offset by the booms in their economies due to international trade. Workers in London and Amsterdam did not, however, buy four times as much oatmeal as they needed for subsistence. Instead they upgraded their diets to beef, beer, and bread, while their counterparts in much of Europe and Asia subsisted on quasi-vegetarian diets of boiled grains with a few peas or lentils. Workers in northwestern Europe also had surplus income to buy exotic imports like tea and sugar as well as domestic manufactures like books, pictures, watches, and better clothes.

Third, the growth of cities and the high wage economy stimulated agriculture. The strong demand for food and particularly meat, butter, and cheese led to the conversion of arable to pasture, convertible husbandry, and the production of fodder crops (beans, clover, turnips), most of which raised soil nitrogen levels and pushed up the yields of wheat and barley. The urban demand for labour led to the amalgamation of small holdings into large farms, which employed fewer people per acre, a development also entailed by the conversion of ploughed land to grass. Agriculture was revolutionised because cities expanded, rather than the reverse as historians have often maintained.

Success in international trade created Britain’s high wage, cheap energy economy, and it was the spring board for the Industrial Revolution. High wages and cheap energy created a demand for technology that substituted capital and energy for labour. These incentives operated in many industries. Pottery, for instance, was manufactured in both England and China. The design of the kilns differed greatly, however. English kilns were cheap to build but very fuel inefficient; much of the energy from the burning fuel was lost through the vent hole on the top (Figure 4). The typical Chinese kiln, on the other hand, was more expensive to construct and, indeed, required more labour to operate. Figure 5 shows how heat was drawn into the chamber on the left and then forced out a hole at floor level into a second chamber. The process continued through many chambers until the air, by then denuded of most of its heat, finally exited up a chimney. In England, it was not worth spending a lot of money to build a thermally efficient kiln since energy was so cheap. In China, however, where energy was expensive, it was cost effective to build thermally efficient kilns. The technologies that were used reflected the relative prices of capital, labour, and energy. Since it was costly to invent technology, invention also responded to the same incentives.

Figure 5. Chinese kiln

The famous inventions of the Industrial Revolution were responses to the high wages and cheap energy of the British economy. These inventions also substituted capital and energy for labour. The steam engine increased the use of capital and coal to raise output per worker. The cotton mill used machines to raise labour productivity in spinning and weaving. New technologies of iron making substituted cheap coal for expensive charcoal and mechanised production to increase output per worker.

These technologies eventually revolutionised the world, but at the outset they were barely profitable in Britain, and their commercial success depended on increasing the use of inputs that were relatively cheap in Britain. In other countries, where wages were lower and energy more expensive, it did not pay to use technology that reduced employment and increased the consumption of fuel.

The French government was very active in trying to promote advanced British technology in the eighteenth century, but its efforts failed since the British techniques were not cost effective at French prices. James Hargreaves perfected the spinning jenny, the first machine that successfully spun cotton, in the late 1760s. In 1771, John Holker, an English Jacobite who held the post of Inspector General of Foreign Manufactures, spirited a jenny into France. Demonstration models were made, but the jenny was only installed in large, state supported workshops. By the late 1780s, over 20,000 jennies were used in England and only 900 in France. Likewise, the French government sponsored the construction of an English style iron works (including four coke blast furnaces) in Burgundy in the 1780s. The raw materials were adequate, the enterprise was well capitalised, and they hired outstanding and experienced English engineers to oversee the project. Yet it was a commercial flop because coal was too expensive in France.

Since the technologies of the Industrial Revolution were only profitable to adopt in Britain, that was also the only country where it paid to invent them. The ideas embodied in the breakthrough technologies were simple; the difficult problem was the engineering challenge of making them work. Responding to that challenged required research and development, which emerged as an important business practice in the eighteenth century. It was accompanied by the appearance of venture capitalists to finance the R&D and a reliance on patents to recoup the benefits of successful development. The Industrial Revolution was invented in Britain in the eighteenth century because that was where it paid to invent it.

The success of R&D programs in eighteenth century Britain depended on another characteristic of the high wage economy. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the growth of a manufacturing, commercial economy increased the demand for literacy, numeracy and trade skills. These were acquired through privately purchased education and apprenticeships. The high wage economy not only created a demand for these skills, but also gave parents the income to purchase them. As a result, the British population was highly skilled (by international standards), and those skills were necessary for the high tech revolution to unfold.

The Industrial Revolution was confined to Britain for many years, because the technological breakthroughs were tailored to British conditions and could not be profitably deployed elsewhere. However, British engineers strove to improve efficiency and reduced the use of inputs that were cheap in Britain as well as those that were expensive. The consumption of coal in steam engines, for instance, was cut from 45 pounds per horse power-hour in the early eighteenth to only 2 pounds in the mid-nineteenth. The genius of British engineering undermined the country’s technological lead by creating ‘appropriate technology’ for the world at large. By the middle of the nineteenth century, advanced technology could be profitably used in countries like France with expensive energy and India with cheap labour. Once that happened, the Industrial Revolution went world wide.

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The Industrial Revolution in Britain: an Epoch of Innovation and Change

• Categories: British Industrial Revolution Great Britain

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Published: Dec 12, 2018

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Table of contents

The catalysts of change, technological advancements and innovations, social transformations and challenges, hook examples for industrial revolution essay.

• A Time Machine: Imagine stepping into a time machine and journeying back to the heart of the 18th century. Join me as we explore the revolutionary transformation that swept through Britain during the Industrial Revolution.
• An Intriguing Quote: Charles Dickens once wrote, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” These words encapsulate the paradox of the Industrial Revolution. Let’s delve into the profound changes and challenges it brought to British society.
• A Tale of Innovation: From steam engines to cotton mills, the Industrial Revolution was a hotbed of innovation. Explore with me how these technological advancements reshaped the British landscape and economy.
• A Social Revolution: Beyond machinery, the Industrial Revolution unleashed a social upheaval. Join me in unraveling the impact on workers, families, and the dynamics of class during this transformative period.
• A Global Perspective: The Industrial Revolution not only altered Britain but also had ripple effects around the world. Discover how this pivotal moment in history shaped global trade, imperialism, and the course of human progress.

Works Cited

• Investopedia. (2021). American Dream.
• Locke, J. (1690). Two Treatises of Government.
• Rousseau, J. J. (1762). The Social Contract.
• The Constitution of the United States. (n.d.).
• The Declaration of Independence. (1776).
• Pew Research Center. (2021). Global views on morality. Retrieved from https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2021/06/24/global-views-on-morality/
• Smith, B. (2003). The First Amendment Center.
• Tocqueville, A. D. (1835). Democracy in America. Retrieved from https://www.gutenberg.org/files/815/815-h/815-h.htm
• United Nations. (n.d.). Human Rights.
• United States Census Bureau. (2021). Educational Attainment in the United States: 2020. Retrieved from https://www.census.gov/data/tables/2021/demo/education-2021.html

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S1 - Matu 4 - The Industrial Revolution - Lesson 1

Essay about Great Britain and the Industrial Revolution

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Great Britain and the Industrial Revolution Why did Great Britain lead the Industrial Revolution? The Industrial Revolution of the 18th century changed Europe forever. At the front of this change was Great Britain, which used some natural advantages and tremendous thinking and innovation to become the leader of the Industrial Revolution . First, Britain had some tremendous natural attributes. It was naturally endowed with many deposits of coal and iron ore, which were used heavily in the early stages of factory production. In addition, Britain was situated at a critical point for international trade. Its position between the United States and the rest of Europe allowed them to have a serious impact in all matters of trade. …show more content…

Once the factory became common, technological advances were soon made to improve them, the most important of which was the division of labor. This use of factories increased economic growth two-fold and “facilitated economies of scales in mass-produced goods and the introduction of new technology for accelerating production” (Evans 110). Mass production made usually expensive items, such as shoes, less expensive and easily affordable by lower class and less wealthy people, which improved the quality of life and spurred on more advancement. One such advancement was James Watt's improvement of the steam engine, which shifted factory power from water to steam, making possible steam driven machinery. This also led to an increased demand for iron and coal, which in turn led to an increase in the mining industries. Some of the most important advancements came in the production of cotton, where several inventions stood out: John Kay's flying shuttle of 1733, which greatly increased weaving speed; James Hargreaves spinning jenny, which made possible the automatic production of thread; Richard Arkwright’s water frame; and Edmund Cartwright’s machine loom. It was the textile industry that pioneered the Industrial Revolution and its innovators encouraged others to continue the technological advancements that made Britain's economy flourish. All of this innovation needed entrepreneurs to use capital to put the inventions to work, and

The Impact Of Great Britain On The Industrial Revolution

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The Rise of the Machines: Pros and Cons of the Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution , the period in which agrarian and handicraft economies shifted rapidly to industrial and machine-manufacturing-dominated ones, began in the United Kingdom in the 18th century and later spread throughout many other parts of the world. This economic transformation changed not only how work was done and goods were produced, but it also altered how people related both to one another and to the planet at large. This wholesale change in societal organization continues today, and it has produced several effects that have rippled throughout Earth ’s political, ecological, and cultural spheres. The following list describes some of the great benefits as well as some of the significant shortcomings associated with the Industrial Revolution.

Pro: Goods Became More Affordable and More Accessible

Factories and the machines that they housed began to produce items faster and cheaper than could be made by hand. As the supply of various items rose, their cost to the consumer declined ( see supply and demand ). Shoes , clothing , household goods, tools , and other items that enhance people’s quality of life became more common and less expensive. Foreign markets also were created for these goods, and the balance of trade shifted in favor of the producer—which brought increased wealth to the companies that produced these goods and added tax revenue to government coffers. However, it also contributed to the wealth inequality between goods-producing and goods-consuming countries.

Pro: The Rapid Evolution of Labor-Saving Inventions

The rapid production of hand tools and other useful items led to the development of new types of tools and vehicles to carry goods and people from one place to another. The growth of road and rail transportation and the invention of the telegraph (and its associated infrastructure of telegraph—and later telephone and fiber optic —lines) meant that word of advances in manufacturing, agricultural harvesting, energy production, and medical techniques could be communicated between interested parties quickly. Labor-saving machines such as the spinning jenny (a multiple-spindle machine for spinning wool or cotton) and other inventions, especially those driven by electricity (such as home appliances and refrigeration) and fossil fuels (such as automobiles and other fuel-powered vehicles), are also well-known products of the Industrial Revolution.

Pro: The Rapid Evolution of Medicine

The Industrial Revolution was the engine behind various advances in medicine . Industrialization allowed medical instruments (such as scalpels, microscope lenses, test tubes, and other equipment) to be produced more quickly. Using machine manufacturing, refinements to these instruments could more efficiently roll out to the physicians that needed them. As communication between physicians in different areas improved, the details behind new cures and treatments for disease could be dispersed quickly, resulting in better care.

Pro: Enhanced Wealth and Quality of Life of the Average Person

Mass production lowered the costs of much-needed tools, clothes, and other household items for the common (that is, nonaristocratic) people, which allowed them to save money for other things and build personal wealth. In addition, as new manufacturing machines were invented and new factories were built, new employment opportunities arose. No longer was the average person so closely tied to land -related concerns (such as being dependent upon the wages farm labor could provide or the plant and animal products farms could produce). Industrialization reduced the emphasis on landownership as the chief source of personal wealth. The rising demand for manufactured goods meant that average people could make their fortunes in cities as factory employees and as employees of businesses that supported the factories, which paid better wages than farm-related positions. Generally speaking, people could save some portion of their wages, and many had the opportunity to invest in profitable businesses, thereby growing their family “nest eggs.” The subsequent growth of the middle class in the United Kingdom and other industrializing societies meant that it was making inroads into the pool of economic power held by the aristocracy . Their greater buying power and importance in society led to changes in laws that were updated to better handle the demands of an industrialized society.

Pro: The Rise of Specialist Professions

As industrialization progressed, more and more rural folk flocked to the cities in search of better pay in the factories. To increase the factories’ overall efficiency and to take advantage of new opportunities in the market, factory workers were trained to perform specialized tasks. Factory owners divided their workers into different groups, each group focusing on a specific task. Some groups secured and transported to the factories raw materials (namely iron , coal , and steel ) used in mass production of goods, while other groups operated different machines. Some groups of workers fixed machines when they broke down, while others were charged with making improvements to them and overall factory operation.

As the factories grew and workers became more specialized, additional teachers and trainers were needed to pass on specialized skills. In addition, the housing, transportation, and recreational needs of factory workers resulted in the rapid expansion of cities and towns. Governmental bureaucracies grew to support these, and new specialized departments were created to handle traffic, sanitation, taxation, and other services. Other businesses within the towns also became more specialized as more builders, physicians, lawyers, and other workers were added to handle the various needs of the new residents.

Con: Overcrowding of Cities and Industrial Towns

The promise of better wages attracted migrants to cities and industrial towns that were ill-prepared to handle them. Although initial housing shortages in many areas eventually gave way to construction booms and the development of modern buildings, cramped shantytowns made up of shacks and other forms of poor-quality housing appeared first. Local sewerage and sanitation systems were overwhelmed by the sudden influx of people, and drinking water was often contaminated. People living in such close proximity, fatigued by poor working conditions, and drinking unsafe water presented ideal conditions for outbreaks of typhus , cholera , smallpox , tuberculosis , and other infectious diseases. The need to treat these and other diseases in urban areas spurred medical advances and the development of modern building codes, health laws, and urban planning in many industrialized cities.

Con: Pollution and Other Environmental Ills

With relatively few exceptions, the world’s modern environmental problems began or were greatly exacerbated by the Industrial Revolution. To fuel the factories and to sustain the output of each and every type of manufactured good, natural resources (water, trees, soil, rocks and minerals, wild and domesticated animals, etc.) were transformed, which reduced the planet’s stock of valuable natural capital. The global challenges of widespread water and air pollution , reductions in biodiversity , destruction of wildlife habitat, and even global warming can be traced back to this moment in human history. The more countries industrialize in pursuit of their own wealth, the greater this ecological transformation becomes. For example, atmospheric carbon dioxide , a primary driver of global warming, existed in concentrations of 275 to 290 parts per million by volume (ppmv) before 1750 and increased to more than 400 ppmv by 2017. In addition, human beings use more than 40% of Earth’s land-based net primary production, a measure of the rate at which plants convert solar energy into food and growth. As the world’s human population continues to grow and more and more people strive for the material benefits promised by the Industrial Revolution, more and more of Earth’s resources are appropriated for human use, leaving a dwindling stock for the plants and animals upon whose ecosystem services (clean air, clean water, etc.) the biosphere depends.

Con: Poor Working Conditions

When factories sprung up in the cities and industrial towns, their owners prized production and profit over all else. Worker safety and wages were less important. Factory workers earned greater wages compared with agricultural workers, but this often came at the expense of time and less than ideal working conditions. Factory workers often labored 14–16 hours per day six days per week. Men’s meager wages were often more than twice those of women. The wages earned by children who worked to supplement family income were even lower. The various machines in the factory were often dirty, expelling smoke and soot, and unsafe, both of which contributed to accidents that resulted in worker injuries and deaths. The rise of labor unions, however, which began as a reaction to child labor, made factory work less grueling and less dangerous. During the first half of the 20th century, child labor was sharply curtailed, the workday was reduced substantially, and government safety standards were rolled out to protect the workers’ health and well-being.

Con: The Rise in Unhealthy Habits

As more cheap labor-saving devices become available, people performed less strenuous physical activity. While grueling farm-related labor was made far easier, and in many cases far safer, by replacing animal power and human power with tractors and other specialized vehicles to till the soil and plant and harvest crops, other vehicles, such as trains and automobiles , effectively reduced the amount of healthy exercise people partook in each day. Also, many professions that required large amounts of physical exertion outdoors were replaced by indoor office work, which is often sedentary. Such sedentary behaviors also occur away from work, as television programs and other forms of passive entertainment came to dominate leisure time. Added to this is the fact that many people eat food that has been processed with salt and sugar to help with its preservation, lower its cooking time, and increase its sweetness. Together, these lifestyle trends have led to increases in lifestyle-related diseases associated with obesity , such as heart disease , diabetes , and certain forms of cancer .

Why Did Britain Start The Industrial Revolution?

Show More As technology and the industrial age began to evolve, Britain became a powerful leader to start the Industrial Revolution for several reasons. As Britain, at the time, was a small nation, it had large supplements of coal in which they powered steam engines with, along with other ample amounts of natural resources. Along with this, Britain also “had plenty of skilled mechanics who were eager to meet the growing demand for new, practical inventions” (199), in which they advanced their technology further than the rest of the world. Within the mid-1600’s to the 1700’s, “trade from a growing overseas empire helped the British economy prosper” (199), which also allowed all goods affordable to all, especially because the population explosion. To help

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• Industrial Revolution
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