Industrial Revolution .xyz

The Maturity of the Industrial Revolution, 1780-1840

The six decades from 1780 to 1840 were the period in which the Industrial Revolution came of age. During this time, the slow changes of the late eighteenth century accelerated into a wholesale transformation of the British economy, and the country moved from being a largely agricultural and rural society to being the world’s first industrial and urban society. The maturity of the Industrial Revolution is the period in which the new machines, factories, and railroads became the defining features of British life.

The Spread of the Factory System

The single most important change in this period was the spread of the factory system. By 1780, the new spinning machines had largely been adopted, but most of them were still operated by hand in small workshops. By 1840, a substantial proportion of British textile production was concentrated in large factories powered by steam, and the same pattern was beginning to appear in other industries.

The driving force behind this change was the steam engine, which had become reliable and efficient enough by the 1790s to replace water power in many applications. Steam engines were first used to drive spinning machinery in cotton mills, especially in Lancashire, and the new steam-powered mills were much larger and more productive than the older water-powered ones. The first steam-powered cotton mill, built in Nottingham in 1790, was followed by many others, and by 1830 steam had become the dominant source of power in British industry.

The factory system transformed the organization of work. Workers, who had previously been scattered in homes and small workshops, were brought together in large buildings, where they were required to work long hours at a pace set by the machines. The discipline of the factory was strict, with fines for lateness, talking, and other infractions, and the working day was often twelve hours or more. The article on factory conditions describes the often brutal conditions in the early mills.

The Textile Industry Comes of Age

The industry that changed most dramatically in this period was the textile industry, especially the cotton industry. The invention of the power loom by Edmund Cartwright in 1785, and its gradual improvement over the following decades, completed the mechanization of cloth production. By the 1830s, the cotton industry was the largest single industry in Britain, employing perhaps a million people directly and many more in supporting industries.

The raw material for the industry came increasingly from the American South, where the cotton gin invented by Eli Whitney in 1793 had made short-staple cotton enormously profitable. By 1840, the United States was supplying the majority of the raw cotton used in British mills, and the British cotton industry was the largest single consumer of American exports. The dependence of the British industry on American cotton was a constant source of anxiety, and it tied the economies of the two countries together in ways that would have profound political consequences.

The Coming of the Railway

The most visible symbol of the new industrial age was the railway. The first public railways, the Stockton and Darlington of 1825 and especially the Liverpool and Manchester of 1830, transformed overland transport and opened an age of rapid movement of goods and people. The development of the steam locomotive, particularly the Rocket designed by Robert Stephenson for the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, established the basic form of the steam locomotive for the next century.

The railway boom that followed the success of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway transformed the British landscape. By 1840, several thousand miles of railway had been built, and the network was expanding rapidly. The railways reduced the cost of transport, opened up new markets for goods, and accelerated the pace of urban growth. The construction of the railways also created a large demand for iron, coal, and engineering products, providing a powerful stimulus to other industrial sectors.

The Growth of Industrial Cities

The period from 1780 to 1840 saw the most rapid urbanization in British history. The population of Manchester, for example, grew from about 25,000 in 1772 to about 142,000 in 1831, and similar growth occurred in Leeds, Birmingham, Sheffield, and other industrial towns. The growth of these cities was driven by the demand for industrial labor, and it was accompanied by serious problems of overcrowding, poor sanitation, and disease. The article on urbanization and the growth of cities describes the often grim conditions in the new industrial cities.

The new industrial cities were also centers of political and cultural ferment. The concentration of large numbers of workers in relatively confined spaces made it easier to organize trade unions, political movements, and reform campaigns. The Chartist movement of the late 1830s and 1840s, which sought political reform for working-class men, was centered in the industrial cities, and so were the early socialist and cooperative movements of figures like Robert Owen.

Iron, Coal, and the New Industrial Geography

The growth of industry required ever-increasing quantities of iron and coal, and the period from 1780 to 1840 saw a major expansion of the British iron and coal industries. The use of coke for smelting iron spread widely in the late eighteenth century, and the puddling process developed by Henry Cort in the 1780s made possible the production of wrought iron in much larger quantities than before. The British iron industry, centered on the coalfields of South Wales, the West Midlands, and the Scottish Lowlands, became the largest in the world.

The demand for iron and coal also shaped the geography of transportation. The first canals, built in the late eighteenth century, were designed primarily to carry coal and iron. The first railways were similarly tied to the coal trade, and the railway boom of the 1830s and 1840s was driven in part by the demand for coal transport. The article on coal and iron ore describes the central role of these resources in the Industrial Revolution.

The Social and Political Consequences

The maturity of the Industrial Revolution was also the period in which the social and political consequences of industrialization became impossible to ignore. Working conditions in the new factories were often brutal, and the use of child labor was widespread. The article on working conditions in British factories describes the long campaign for factory reform that culminated in the Factory Acts of the 1830s and 1840s.

The 1830s and 1840s also saw the rise of new political movements. The Reform Act of 1832, which extended the franchise to the new middle class, was in part a response to the political pressure created by the industrial changes. The New Poor Law of 1834 reorganized the system of poor relief. The Chartist movement, which sought universal male suffrage, was the first mass working-class political movement in British history. The Anti-Corn Law League, which campaigned for the repeal of the protective duties on imported grain, brought together industrialists, workers, and radicals in a powerful coalition that succeeded in 1846.

A World Economy

By 1840, the Industrial Revolution had made Britain the most powerful economic and political force in the world. British manufactured goods, especially cotton textiles, were exported across the globe. British capital was invested in railways, mines, and plantations in every continent. The British navy, the most powerful in the world, protected the trade routes that carried British goods to every market.

The maturity of the Industrial Revolution was therefore the start of a global transformation. The technologies, the economic systems, and the social problems of the new industrial age would soon spread from Britain to the rest of Europe, the United States, and beyond. The history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is in large part the history of the spread of industrialization from the British Isles to the rest of the world.

What It Teaches Us

The interesting current question about the 1780-1840 “maturity” phase is whether it deserves the word. The traditional periodization, going back to W. W. Rostow’s The Stages of Economic Growth (1960) and to T. S. Ashton’s The Industrial Revolution, 1760-1830 (1948), treats 1780-1840 as the take-off phase, with the railway boom of the 1830s as the moment of “maturity” — the point at which the new industrial economy was self-sustaining. The revisionist answer, developed in a generation of cliometric work since 1980, is more cautious: the British growth rate in 1780-1840 averaged perhaps 1.5-2.0 percent per year, and per-capita growth was below 1 percent; the rate at which the British economy was growing before 1830 was substantially slower than the growth rates of the United States or Germany in the late 19th century. The interesting current question, raised in the comparative economic-history literature, is whether the “maturity” of 1840 was a real watershed or whether the British economy simply continued its slow, sustained growth into the second half of the 19th century and was overtaken by faster-growing industrializers around 1870. The honest answer, given the data, is probably: a little of both. The 1830s and 1840s did see a real acceleration (the railway boom, the post-1815 fall in grain prices, the post-1830 fall in textile prices), but the British growth rate remained modest by the standards of 20th-century industrializing countries, and the “maturity” framing reflects more about the aspirations of mid-Victorian commentators than about the actual pace of change.

See also

See also

Selected Sources

  • T.S. Ashton, The Industrial Revolution (1760–1830) (1948).
  • Paul Mantoux, The Industrial Revolution in the Eighteenth Century (1928).
  • Peter Mathias and John A. Davis (eds.), The First Industrial Revolutions (1989).
  • R.M. Hartwell, The Industrial Revolution and Economic Growth (1971).