Unit 3: The Industrial Revolution (1780-1870)
1) The roots of Industrial Revolution in England
The Industrial Revolution began in Great Britain in the late 18th century and spread throughout Europe. It was a change that affected all areas of society. It was such a transformation that it has been compared to the Neolithic Revolution.
It seems like everything started with a revolution in the fields...
1.1) Agricultural revolution.
We have already studied something on this point in previous unit: England was a trading and naval power (remember the War of Spanish Succession, the Treaty of Utrecht, the trading routes it controlled all around the world...) and invested a good part of its profits from colonial trade in the internal development of the country. This caused a modernization of the countryside that brought a chain reaction: increased food production, decreased hunger, increased population, increased labor and the number of consumers. This process, as is logical, fed back.
There were three fundamental innovations:
1) Reduction in the number of fallow lands: there are crops that deplete the nutrients of the land, such as cereals, so that, after the harvest, the land must be left to rest for a year to recover those nutrients. However, there are other crops that help the soil fix these nutrients, such as forage plants. By alternating the planting of these two types of crops on the same land (cereals one year and fodder the next) there was no need to leave the land fallow, so its use was much greater. This method is called the Norfolk System, after the place in England where it began to be practiced.
2) Mechanization: new machines appear that maximize production, such as Jehtro Tull's seeder, which we saw in previous units. Crops that come from America (potato, corn, tomato...) and the use of fertilizers become widespread.
3) Enclosures: Until the eighteenth century there was a large amount of communal land in England. It was land that belonged to an entire town and that was exploited by all of them, but this changes radically with the Enclosure Acts of 1845. The rural bourgeoisie bought these lands and fenced them. Private property is established in the countryside and the new owners think of producing a lot of food to sell it for profit, and not to survive.
1.2) Demographics
From all of the above it follows that there is a population growth. It occurs throughout Europe and especially in England, as we will see.
The mortality rate is reduced, as a consequence of greater access to food, better hygiene and medicine. It is necessary to highlight the widespread use of soap and the invention of the smallpox vaccine by Edward Jenner in 1796.
The birth rate increased at the beginning of the century due to the improvement in the economic situation, although it decreased again in the second half, since as many children did not die, families had fewer. In the cities, people begin to think that it is not necessary to have large families.
1.3) New energy sources
The first industrial machines were powered by hydraulic power, but in 1769 James Watt and his friend Mathew Boulton patented the steam engine, which produced energy from the combustion of coal. It was a revolutionary invention, since it could be applied to very different machines, printing much more energy than the old sources. The locomotive or steamboat are perhaps the best known examples.
1.4) Transportation
The increase in both agricultural and industrial production caused England to seek ways to supply the cities faster and better. Roads were improved and canals were built to transport goods by sea.
On the other hand, the great revolution in transport was brought by the railway, which could transport a lot of cargo over long distances and at a speed never seen before. In addition, it was also used to transport people and, therefore, ideas. The locomotive, patented by Stephenson in 1829, was powered by a steam engine. England and then all of Europe were filled with railway tracks.
The new ships, faster than the sailing ones, worked with the same mechanism.
1.5) The capitalist economy
These advances and innovations led to the beginning of producing any type of good in large quantities. Capitalism (an entrepreneur owns his own means of production and tries to produce as much of a product as possible at the minimum cost, in order to obtain the maximum profit) became widespread.
