INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

Today cities spread out in huge industrial connurbations. But this is a recent development. At the beginning of the 18th century a city was simply a cultural or political centre twinned with market place or port. Industry, as we know it today, did not exist. Manufacturing DID take place, but on a small scale and close to fast-flowing streams or near forests for wood. Man-made power was still in the future.
Britain led the way, beginning with the textile cottage industry. But the major stumbling block to advancement was the lack of a suitable transport network to get goods to market. So the turn-pike came into being – its income used to pay navvies to improve the roads. But this was inefficient. Hence, Britain – ideally placed, being an island nation with a strong navy and empire, and built upon a treasure trove of coal – looked to her navigable internal waterways, improving them with a network of canals.
Man-made power was advancing in kind. With Darby producing high quality metal by switching to coke, Newcomen had, by 1712, designed the first pumping-engine, enhancing steam, to assist in controlling flooding in ever-deepening coal mines. Industrialisation was beginning to take shape, aided further by the cessation of the Seven Yearns War in 1763, releasing government from a great financial burden and causing them to drop the rate of interest to such a degree that money-lenders proliferated, making London the banking capital of the world by 1770.
By 1775 a canal system connected cornfields to ports, with embryo urban connurbations beginning to form around the expanding iron and textile industries now established in the towns. Availability of cotton from India caused a further explosion in the textile industry, with innovation meeting demand with the loom shuttle, spinning jenny, water-frame and mule. Mass production was born, soon to be followed by the pottery and steel industries of Wedgwood and Wilkinson.
Power was still a problem, but eventually the modern ‘fire-engine’, utilising steam, was devised by Black. In 1765 Watt improved this design with the separate condenser and the first steam engine propelled machinery. The later sun and planets wheel mechanism, and its resulting rotary motion, revolutionised industry.
The result of all this was that soon the canals were swamped so coal, steam and iron came together to build the railways, the principal innovators being Trevithick,
Stephenson and Brunel.
Industrialisation expanded from the shores of Britain, first to the Ruhr in Germany, and transport networks shrunk the world. Electricity brought the night shift, as well as the telegraph and telephone. Then came the radio, internal combustion engine, car and aeroplane. Extraction of oil, as well as aiding transport, brought about man-made dyes and plastics, leading on to the hi-tech, microchip and computerised world of today, with technologies such as the car, television and computer changing the nature of society in a way once only achieved by religions or wars.
A revolution as great as when man first turned to agriculture had taken place, bringing together the financier, entrepreneur and innovator. However, the Industrial Revolution was more than a revolution in terms of society. It also revolutionised society.
At the heart of it was the ideal of linear advancement, so recently re-defined by the new Protestant non-conformist religious sects. Industry was, quite simply, advancement, and correct to the society created by God. Almost to a man, the great innovators of the revolution were themselves Protestant non-conformists, eager to find a place for themselves in a changing world. And this place was to be found in the ascendency and empowerment of a new, educated and strong middleclass.
Involving huge demographic change, this involved re-locating the poor to the cities. Into this chaos, the new industries required a new form of institutionalisation of the poor, redefining the role of serf beholden to the aristocrat, to worker beholden to the capitalist. And at first the result was deplorable.
Boys went down mines. Adults worked until they dropped. Back to back housing appeared with no thought for planning or the people who lived in them. Slums developed with no thought of lighting or sewage. Latrines were open, excrement carried to rivers in open carts. Smog clung to the cities – cities that rose in population eight-fold in two decades.
Cholera swept through Europe, along with typhus, scarlet fever and smallpox. A mass of humanity crowded in dark streets brought crime and prostitution. Damp added pneumonia. Lack of factory filtration brought bronchitis.
Eventually – when the Thames stank so bad that Parliament had to be suspended – things began to change, bringing a revolution of science leading to social benefit. Scientists began to look at sewage, town planning, medical services and industrial legislation. But it was a two-edged development.
The institutionalisation of industry passed into society with the introduction of social institutions such as the hospital prison and workhouse. Funded by charitable giving by non-conformist industrialists, it was just enough to allow the worker to put up with his deplorable lot, thus putting off the worker’s revolutions until the 20th century. The 18th and 19th centuries were to be the revolutionary period of the middleclass.
Principle to this was a redefined social standard which required an empowerment of the family to guarantee inheritance, and a re-emphasis of childhood to allow a long period of education to provide the brainpower for the on-going revolution. For the first time a whole class of people extended family ties and did not allow its children to work from an early age.
Into this system came a new emphasis in government, with the House of Commons in Britain taking precedence over the Lords, and civic centres arising in provincial cities to take hold of local government from the aristocracy. Jury service came to the courts to reduce the power of the aristocratic judge. In the legislation and judiciary the middleclass did what they had already done with the Church through Presbyterianism. And to rejuvenate their social standing, the civic event entered the social calendar, the impressive middleclass terraced houses coming into being, city parks were built for recreation, spa towns for relaxation, and the seaside resort for annual breaks. Throughout Europe the middleclass rose to supremacy.

(c) Anthony North, January 2003

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