The Industrial Revolution And Nineteenth-Century Society

Chapter Study Outline

1. Introduction
1. An industrial revolution
1. From agriculture and craft to large-scale manufacturing
2. Capital-intensive enterprises
3. Urbanization
2. New forms of energy
1. Led to unprecedented economic growth
2. Altered the balance of humanity
3. Mechanization
1. Gains in productivity
2. Shifted the basis of the economy
3. New livelihoods
4. Did not dispense with human toil—the intensification of human labor
5. New social classes and new social tensions
4. "Industry"—from industriousness to an economic system
5. Partial causes
1. New territories
2. Economic expansion
3. Expanding networks of trade and finance
4. New markets for goods and sources for raw materials
5. Population growth
6. Regional variations
2. The Industrial Revolution in Britain, 1760-1850
1. Why England?
1. Natural, economic, and cultural resources
2. Small and secure island
3. Empire
4. Ample supply of coal, rivers, and a developed canal system
5. The commercialization of agriculture
1. New techniques and crops, changes in property-holding
2. Enclosure
3. Yielded more food for a growing population
4. Concentration of property in fewer hands
6. Growing supply of available capital
1. Well-developed banking and credit institutions
2. London as leading center for international trade
7. Investment and entrepreneurship
1. Pursuit of wealth seen as a worthy goal
2. The British as a commercial people
8. Domestic and foreign markets
1. The British were voracious consumers
2. A well-integrated domestic market
3. No system of internal tolls and tariffs
4. A constantly improving transportation system
9. Favorable political climate
1. Foreign policy responded to commercial needs of the nation
10. Production for export rose 80 percent between 1750 and 1770
11. The British merchant marine and navy
2. Innovation in the textile industries
1. The British prohibited the import of East Indian cottons
2. Textile manufacturers imported raw cotton from India and the American South
3. Revolutionary breakthroughs
1. John Kay—the flying shuttle (1733)
2. John Hargreaves—the spinning jenny (1764)
3. Richard Arkwright—the water frame (1769)
4. Samuel Crompton—the spinning mule (1799)
5. Eli Whitney—the cotton gin (1793)
4. Textile machines
1. First machines inexpensive enough to be used by spinners in their homes
2. As machines grew in size, they were located in mills and factories
3. By 1780, British cotton textiles flooded the world market
5. A revolution in clothing
1. Cotton was light, durable, and washable
2. Large domestic and foreign market for cotton cloth
6. The tyranny of the new industries
7. Factory working conditions and the factory acts
3. Coal and iron
1. Technological changes
1. Coke smelting, rolling, and puddling
2. Substitution of coal for wood
3. Thomas Newcomen—fashioned an engine to pump water from mines in 1711
4. James Watt and Matthew Boulton—the steam engine
1. 289 engines in use by 1800
4. The coming of railways
1. George Stephenson and the Stockton-to- Darlington line (1825)
2. Railway construction as enterprise
1. Risky but profitable
2. Global opportunities—building the infrastructure of nations
3. The "navvies"
4. Toil and technology
5. Steam and speed as a new way of life
3. The Industrial Revolution on the Continent
1. A different model of industrialization
2. Reasons for the delay
1. Lack of raw materials, especially coal
2. Poor national systems of transportation
3. Little readily accessible capital
4. Tenacity of the small peasant leaseholder
5. The French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars
3. Economic climate changes after 1815
1. Population growth (parts of France, Belgium, Rhineland, Saxony, Silesia, and Bohemia)
2. New railway construction
3. Older methods of putting-out persisted alongside factory work
4. Governments played a major role in subsidizing industry
1. Subsidies to private companies (railroads and mining)
2. Incentives for and laws favorable to industrialization
3. Limited liability laws
5. Mobilizing capital
1. Joint-stock investment banks
1. Société Générale (Belgium, 1830s)
2. Creditanstalt (Austria,1850s)
3. Crédit Mobilier (1850s)
6. Promoting invention and technological development
1. State-established educational systems
4. Industrialization after 1850
1. Individual British factories remained Small, but output was tremendous
1. Iron industry the largest in the world
2. Continental changes
1. Mostly in transport, commerce, and government policy
2. Free trade and the removal of trade barriers
3. Guild controls relaxed or abolished
4. Communications
1. Transatlantic cable (1865)
2. Telephone (1876)
5. New chemical processes, dyestuffs, and pharmaceuticals
6. New sources of energy—electricity and oil
7. Internal combustion engine (Carl Benz and Gottlieb Daimler, 1880s)
8. Eastern Europe
1. Developed into concentrated, commercialized agriculture
2. The persistence of serfdom
3. The industrial core
1. Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, and Switzerland
2. The industrial periphery
1. Russia, Spain, Bulgaria, Greece, Hungary, Romania, and Serbia
5. Industry and empire
1. European nations begin to control the national debts of other countries
2. Where trade agreements could not be made, force prevailed
3. New networks of trade and interdependence
4. The world economy divided
1. Producers of manufactured goods (Europe)
2. Suppliers of raw materials and buyers of finished goods (everyone else)
5. Toward a global economy
4. The Social Consequences of Industrialization
1. Population
1. Europe: 205 million (1800), 274 million (1850), 414 million (1900), 480 million (1914)
2. Explanations
1. Fatal diseases became less virulent
2. Edward Jenner and smallpox vaccination (1796)
3. Improved sanitation
4. Governments became more concerned with improving the lives of their people
5. Less expensive foods of high nutritional value
6. Rising fertility
1. Men and women married earlier
2. Rural manufacture allowed couples to marry and set up households
3. More people married
2. Life on the land: the peasantry
1. Rural poverty
1. Harsh conditions of the countryside
2. Millions of tiny farms produced a bare subsistence
3. Rising population put pressure on the land
4. Unpredictability of weather and the harvest
2. Great Famine of 1845-1849
1. Potato blight
1. No alternative food source
2. At least one million Irish died of starvation
3. Forced 1.5 million people to leave Ireland for good
3. The role of the state
1. Became more sympathetic to commercialized agriculture
2. Encouraged the elimination of small farms and the creation of larger farms
4. Serfdom
1. Landowners and serfs had little incentive to improve farming or land management
2. Serfdom made it difficult to buy and sell land freely
3. An obstacle to the commercialization and consolidation of agriculture
5. Industrialization in the countryside
1. Improved communication networks
2. Government intervention in the countryside
3. Centralized bureaucracies
1. Made it easier to collect taxes and conscript soldiers from peasant families
6. Rural violence
1. Captain Swing, southern England (1820s)
2. Insurrections against landlords, taxes, and laws curtailing customary rights
3. Russian serf uprisings as a result of bad harvests and exploitation
4. Governments seemed incapable of dealing with rural discontent
3. The urban landscape
1. Growth of cities
2. Urbanization moved from northwest Europe to the southeast
3. London's population grew from 676,000 (1750) to 2.3 million (1850), that of Paris from 560,000 to 1.3 million
4. Overcrowding and poor sanitation
5. Construction of housing lagged well behind population growth
6. Governments passed some legislation to rid cities of slums
4. Industry and environment in the nineteenth century
1. Air pollution
2. Water pollution
3. Fertile breeding grounds for cholera, typhus, and tuberculosis
5. Sex in the city
1. Prostitution
1. Seen as one of the dangers and corruptions of urban life
2. The problems of the cities posed dangers that were not just social but political
3. Social surveys and studies
4. Critics of the urban scene
1. Victor Hugo (1802-1885)
2. Charles Dickens (1812-1870)
3. Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850)
5. The Middle Classes
1. Balzac as observer
1. The French and Industrial Revolutions had replaced one aristocracy with another
1. From rank, status, and privilege to wealth and social class
2. Who were the middle classes?
1. Not a homogeneous group in terms of income or occupation
2. Upward mobility impossible without education
1. Easier in Britain than on the Continent
3. The examination system
4. "Getting ahead"
1. Intelligence, pluck (luck), and hard work
2. Samuel Smiles, Self-Help (1859)
5. Respectability
1. A code of behavior
2. Financial independence
3. Providing for family
4. Avoiding gambling and debt
5. Merit and character
6. Hard work
7. Live modestly and soberly
6. Aspirations and codes not social realities
3. Private life and middle-class identity
1. The family
2. A well-governed household served as an antidote to the confusion of the business world
4. Gender and the cult of domesticity
1. The respectable home
1. Rituals, hierarchies, and distinctions
2. The "separate sphere"
1. Women were supposed to live in subordination to men
2. Boys educated in secondary schools, girls educated at home
3. The idea of legal inequality between men and women
3. Middle-class identity—neither aristocratic nor working-class values
4. The "angel in the house"
1. Middle-class women to be free from unrelenting toil
2. The moral education of children
5. The "cult of domesticity"
1. Central to middle-class Victorian thinking about women
2. The reassessment of femininity
3. Keeping the household functioning smoothly and harmoniously
4. The servant as the mark of middle-class status
6. Outside the home
1. Few options to earn a living
2. Voluntary societies and campaigns for social reform
3. Protestantism and charity
4. Florence Nightingale (1820-1910)
7. Queen Victoria (r. 1837-1901)
1. Reflected contemporary feminine virtues of moral probity and dutiful domesticity
2. Successful queen because she embodied middle-class virtues
5. "Passionlessness": gender and sexuality
1. Victorian sexuality usually seen as synonymous with anxiety, prudishness, and ignorance
2. Beliefs about sexuality came from convictions about separate spheres
3. Scientists taught that specific characteristics were inherent to each sex
1. Men and woman had different roles
2. Auguste Comte and "biological philosophy"
4. Women's moral superiority embodied in their "passionlessness"
5. Absence of reliable contraceptives
6. Middle-class life in public
1. Houses and furnishings as symbols of material prosperity
1. Solidly built and heavily decorated
2. Homes were built to last
3. Rooms crowded with furniture, art, carpets, and wall hangings
2. Suburban life
1. Moved to the west side of cities
2. Lived away from the city but managed the affairs of their city
3. Leisure
6. Working-Class Life
1. General observations
1. Working classes divided into several subgroups
1. Based on skill, wages, gender, and workplace
2. Some movement from unskilled to skilled (required children with education)
3. Movement from skilled to unskilled due to technological change
4. Housing was unhealthy and unregulated
5. The daily round of life for the working-class wife
2. Working-class women in the industrial landscape
1. Problems observed
1. Promiscuous mixing in workshops
2. Children left unattended
3. Industrial accidents
4. Women laboring alongside men
2. Women's work not new— industrialization made it more visible
3. Women workers were paid less and were less troublesome
1. Most began to work at age ten or eleven
2. They put their children out to wet nurses or brought them to the mills
4. Gender division of labor
1. Most women labored at home or in small workshops ("sweatshops")
2. Domestic service
1. Less visible
2. Low wages
3. Coercive sexual relationships
5. Working-class sexuality
1. Different from middle-class counterpart
2. Increase in illegitimate births
3. Weaker family ties
4. The collapse of the family?
3. A life apart: class consciousness
1. The factory created common experiences and difficulties
1. Denied skilled laborers pride in their crafts
2. Guild protections abolished
3. Decline of apprenticeship
2. The factory
1. Long hours under dirty and dangerous conditions
2. The imposition of new routines and discipline
1. The factory whistle
2. The pace of the machine
3. The division of labor into specialized steps
4. Machinery as the new tyrant
3. Working-class vulnerability
1. Unemployment, sickness, accidents, and family problems
2. The varying price of food
3. Seasonal unemployment
4. Markets for manufactured goods were small and unstable
5. Cyclical economic depressions
6. Severe agricultural depressions
4. Working-class survival
1. Families worked several small jobs
2. Pawned possessions
3. Joined self-help societies and fraternal associations
4. Early socialist movement
5. Social segregation of the city
1. Implied that working people lived a life apart from others
2. Class differences embedded in experience and beliefs
7. Conclusion
1. The Industrial Revolution as major turning point in the history of the world
2. The global balance of power
3. Technology as progress
4. The new wealth and the new poverty
5. Social identities and class consciousnes