Social and Economic Structure of the Industrial Revolution
Social and Economic Structure of the Industrial Revolution
The Industrial Revolution is a term describing major changes in the economic and social structure of many western countries in the 1700’s and 1800’s. At the beginning of the 1700s most of Europe’s people lived and worked on the land. By the time the 1800s ended, most Europeans were city dwellers, earning a living in factories or offices. As work became unavailable on the land, huge numbers of Europeans migrated overseas, particularly to America. The political map of Europe was also redrawn during this period.
Revolutions convulsed the continent from the 1820s to the 1870s. They swept away states ruled by hereditary families and replaced them with new nations based on shared history, culture, and language. The European powers also strove to win new colonial territories in Africa and to extend their empires in Asia and the Pacific.
The transitions of Britain’s industrial revolution were repeated elsewhere as other western countries became industrialized. Farm workers moved to the towns, seeking work in the new factories. The densely packed, low quality houses built for them soon became unhealthy slums.
Before the new machines led to manufacture in factories, cloth was made in homes. Women and children did the spinning. Weaving was traditionally men’s work. In the early 1800s, children as young as five years old worked underground in the mines. They often had to work shifts of 12 hours and more. Some toiled half-naked, chained to carts laden with coal which they pulled along dark passageways. Factories also used children. The usual shift was 15 hours a day. Many children were orphans; they lived in crowded, dirty hostels where the death rate could reach 60 percent.
Britain’s industrial revolution was the period (1750-1850) when Britain’s dominance of overseas markets through its empire, and the availability at home of coal and iron ore, transformed it from a farming to a manufacturing community. The harnessing of steam power and major new inventions led to cheap mass-manufacture of materials such as cotton. Iron, made by the new processes, was strong enough for building structures like bridges in a different way.
In Britain, a system of canals linking the major rivers was built, providing the cheap transport the new factories needed to deliver...