Industrial Revolution: What Changed and Why

Not one invention, but a different way of producing

Anyone looking for the start date of the Industrial Revolution will not find one, because there isn’t one. The term describes a transformation of productive and social structures brought about by new technologies: a long process that begins in Britain in the last decades of the eighteenth century and plays out over the first thirty years of the nineteenth. Some accounts stretch the first phase across the whole first half of the century, which gives you a sense of how blurred the boundary is.

Before, wealth was made mainly in fields and workshops, using the strength of arms, animals, water and wind. After, it is made in factories, by machines fed on coal, in quantities no workshop could have approached. In between there is no sudden discovery, but a chain of technical innovations and a setting able to take them up.

Why Britain

Every textbook asks this question, and the answer is not a single cause but a set of conditions that in the eighteenth century coincided only there.

There was a large unified national market, meaning broad demand with no internal customs barriers. There was capital to invest, built up through agriculture organised along capitalist lines and through colonial trade. Over the course of the eighteenth century British imports and exports increased fivefold, and re-exports rose ninefold. There were cheap raw materials, a transport network that was excellent for the time, a level of urbanisation that was already high. And there were institutions that left room for private enterprise, alongside advanced scientific research and a new entrepreneurial outlook.

Remove any one of these and the chain does not start: that is why Belgium, France and Germany followed at a distance, and the rest of Europe much later.

The dates line up in a way that helps place everything. While spinning mills and machines were multiplying in Britain, France was going through the French Revolution: two different revolutions, one economic and one political, dismantling the Europe of the old regime from opposite sides within the same thirty years.

Spinning: the bottleneck gives way

The first machines of the Industrial Revolution were not locomotives. They were machines for spinning thread, and there is a reason for that: spinning on its own took up around half of the working time needed to make a piece of cloth. That was where the gain in productivity could be largest.

In 1764 James Hargreaves built a spinning jenny that worked eight spindles at once. In 1768 Richard Arkwright built a frame driven by water power rather than by arms. In 1778 Samuel Crompton combined the two ideas in the spinning mule. All of these arrive before or around Watt’s decisive patent: a detail to keep in mind whenever steam is treated as the starting point.

The leap in productivity can be measured. Spinning roughly 50 kilograms of cotton by hand took 50,000 hours of work; on the mule it took around three hundred.

Weaving, by contrast, held out much longer. Edmund Cartwright mechanised it in 1785, but the power loom only really took hold around the middle of the nineteenth century, and in Britain mechanical cotton weaving won out over handloom weaving only after 1830. Manchester, which would become the capital of the cotton industry, grew alongside these machines.

The engine that stopped wasting heat

The problem with the steam engines then in use is one you can grasp without knowing any thermodynamics. Steam was condensed inside the very cylinder in which it had just done its work: to do that you had to cool the cylinder, and for the next stroke you had to heat it up again. Rather like keeping a room warm with the window open, and feeding the fire to compensate.

While repairing a model of a Newcomen engine, James Watt saw how much steam was being lost that way. His answer was to add a separate chamber, kept permanently cool, in which the steam could condense without cooling the rest of the engine. The patent, dated 5 January 1769, was titled “a new method of lessening the consumption of steam and fuel in fire-engines”: a title that says precisely what was at stake.

The effect was that engines with the separate condenser burned two thirds less coal. That is not a marginal gain: it is the difference between a machine that only makes sense where coal is right at hand, which meant at the pithead, and a machine you could install anywhere power was needed. In 1774 Watt moved to Birmingham and went into partnership with the investor Matthew Boulton to build them on an industrial scale, and he went on refining them until 1781.

Practical example: a mill driven by a water wheel has to sit on a watercourse with the right flow, and it stops when the river runs dry or freezes. A mill driven by steam can be built next to the coal mine, the port or the market, and it works all year. That, more than raw power, is what redrew the industrial map.

Coal, iron, rails

Around the textile machines grew the other half of the system, the half that supplied energy and materials.

The figures give the order of magnitude. Between 1700 and 1800 coal extraction in Britain went from three to fifteen million tonnes, while metal production rose from 20,000 to a million tonnes a year. Energy and metal pulled each other along: more machines needed more iron, more iron needed more coal, and every improvement in one sector made the next one in the other worth making.

Then came transport. In 1807 Robert Fulton ran his steamboat; in 1819 came the first Atlantic crossing under steam. On land, George Stephenson built his locomotive in 1814 and in 1825 the first British railway line opened. The telegraph appears in the same phase.

The economic result shows up in the national accounts: gross domestic product, the value of everything produced in a year (what we now call GDP), tripled between 1810 and 1850.

Cities grow at rates never seen before

The most visible consequence is there in the census returns.

City	1801	1851
Manchester	35,000	353,000
Birmingham	46,000	111,000

London, with half a million inhabitants in 1700 and almost a million by 1800, was already the largest city in Europe. What was new was the speed: in the first half of the nineteenth century it was not at all unusual for an urban centre to expand by 30% in ten years, and in certain decades a few towns exceeded 60%.

By 1845 the population living in towns in England and Wales was already the majority. Across the century, between 1801 and 1911 the urban share rose from a third to four fifths of the total: in absolute terms, from 3.5 to 32 million people.

Inside the factories

The factory system organises production on a large scale by gathering workers in a single place, with a sharp division between those who own the machinery and those who sell their labour for a wage.

Conditions were harsh in ways that are hard to picture now: days of 13 to 15 hours, low wages, still lower pay for women and children, children put to work at four or five, no safety net in case of unemployment.

The response came from below and at first took the most direct route, Luddism, the destruction of the machines. Then it organised itself better, into strikes, friendly societies, trade unions and eventually socialist parties.

The first laws followed decades later. The British Factory Act of 1833 banned work below the age of nine, limited children aged 9 to 13 to nine hours a day and those aged 13 to 18 to twelve, prohibited night work for children, required two hours of daily schooling and age certificates, and appointed four factory inspectors. By 1836 their reports were already recording breaches, and further acts were needed in 1844, 1847, 1867 and 1901. In 1847 the working day for women was brought down to ten hours.

The second wave

Between the 1860s-1870s and the first decade of the twentieth century a second phase arrives, resting on different technical foundations: electrical machinery in the 1880s, the internal combustion engine in the 1890s.

The scale of firms changes too. Companies become enormous, trusts and cartels form (agreements between large firms to carve up markets and prices) and banks grow in weight, to the point where people speak of finance capitalism: this is the phase in which capital raised through stocks and the stock market becomes an ordinary tool for building firms on a continental scale. Protective tariffs come back.

And the geography changes. Industrialisation reaches Germany, northern Italy, Austria-Hungary, Russia, Japan and the United States; Germany and the United States end up overtaking Britain, which had started first.

What it left behind

In material terms, an unprecedented rise in wealth, distributed very unevenly: the upper classes and the capitalist middle class were the main beneficiaries.

In political terms, the consequence shows up later. Industrial countries competing with one another needed raw materials and markets to sell into, and they went looking for both through colonial expansion: this is the age of imperialism, which runs on into the First World War.

The way we live now, with big cities, wage labour, working hours, unions and goods made far from where they are used, is largely what those decades left us. It did not end in the nineteenth century: it just moved to other sectors.