The Industrial Revolution: Machines, Energy and a Global Economy

The biggest change since farming

For most of human history, energy came from muscles (human and animal), wind, water and wood. The Industrial Revolution changed that. Machines powered by coal and steam let a worker produce many times more goods than before. Many historians call it the biggest change in human life since the beginning of farming.

It was not a sudden event. It began slowly in Britain from about the 1760s, sped up after 1800 and spread unevenly around the world over the next century.

Why Britain first?

This is one of the great debates in history. Historians point to several factors:

• Coal and iron were found close together, and coal was cheap. Steam engines needed both.
• Agricultural changes such as enclosure and new crop rotations produced more food with fewer workers, freeing people to work in towns.
• Capital and markets from overseas trade and colonies. In Capitalism and Slavery (1944), the Trinidadian historian (and later prime minister) Eric Williams argued that profits from slavery and the Caribbean sugar trade helped finance industrialization. Others argue those profits were too small to explain it. The debate continues.
• High wages and cheap energy. Historian Robert Allen argues that British wages were high and coal was cheap, so it paid to invent machines that replaced workers with coal power.
• A stable state with a strong navy, patents to protect inventors, and canals for transport.

Comparing regions sharpens the question. In The Great Divergence (2000), Kenneth Pomeranz compared England with China's Yangzi Delta, which was also rich and commercial in 1750. He argued that England pulled ahead mainly because of accessible coal and the land and resources of its colonies in the Americas.

The key technologies

Textiles. Cotton led the way. A series of inventions mechanized spinning (the spinning jenny, about 1764; Richard Arkwright's water frame, 1769; Samuel Crompton's mule, 1779) and weaving (the power loom, 1785). Arkwright's mill at Cromford is often called one of the first modern factories. In the United States, Eli Whitney's cotton gin (1793) made it much faster to clean raw cotton, which made cotton-growing far more profitable and expanded slavery in the US South.

Steam. Steam engines first pumped water out of mines. James Watt patented a separate condenser in 1769 that made engines far more efficient, and his engines were soon driving factory machines. Factories no longer had to be beside rivers.

Iron and transport. Coke-smelted iron became cheaper and stronger. The Liverpool and Manchester Railway (1830) was the first intercity line run entirely by steam locomotives. Steamships cut ocean crossings from weeks to days. The electric telegraph (1840s) let messages travel faster than any person.

The factory system changed work itself: set hours, a clock, a supervisor, and one repeated task. You will look at workers' lives in the next lesson.

Industrialization spreads

• Western Europe: Belgium and northern France followed early. The German states formed a customs union (the Zollverein, 1834) and built railways; after unification in 1871, Germany became an industrial giant.
• North America: New England's textile mills, then railways, steel and oil. In Canada, railways tied the country together; the Canadian Pacific Railway was completed in 1885.
• Russia: industrialized late, with state-funded railways and mines in the 1890s, including the start of the Trans-Siberian Railway (1891).
• Japan: after 1868, the Meiji government built model factories, railways and shipyards (see the lesson on reform from within).

The Second Industrial Revolution (about 1870 onward)

New industries rose: cheap steel (the Bessemer process, 1856), chemicals (dyes, fertilizers), electricity (electric light and motors) and oil with the internal combustion engine. Germany and the United States led many of these industries, and Britain's lead shrank. Big companies, research laboratories and banks became more important.

A global economy: winners and losers

Industrialization made the world more connected, but it also created a sharp divide between industrial economies and economies that supplied raw materials and bought finished goods.

• India had been one of the world's great producers of cotton cloth. In the 1800s, cheap machine-made British cloth, plus colonial trade policies, took over much of the market. Many hand-weavers lost their work, and India exported more raw cotton instead. Historians debate how deep this "deindustrialization" went, but the shift is clear.
• Egypt under Muhammad Ali tried to build its own textile factories; later in the century it became a major exporter of raw cotton, especially during the US Civil War, which left it dependent on one crop and on European lenders.
• The US South grew most of the raw cotton for British mills by the mid-1800s, using enslaved labour. The world's most modern industry depended on one of its oldest forms of exploitation.

By 1900, industrial power had become the basis of military power, which helps explain the empire-building you will study in later lessons.