Paul Christiansen and Bruce A. McMenomy, Ph.D. for Scholars Online
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Chapter 19: The Industrial Revolution
Mon, Feb 3, 2014
40. Tue, Feb 4, 2014
To call this chapter massively over-simplified would in fact be an oversimplification. Moreover it is so riddled with apparent contradictions that I (Mr. C) suggest a possible solution to the problem of this book's mysterious authorship: it was written by a committee of people who didn't talk to each other. Take, for instance, the sections "Working-Class Women" and "Middle-Class Women" on pages 500-501. The former describes how poor women flooded into the factories in this period; the latter states that "a woman's right to work was hotly debated" and "during the late 1800s, more jobs became available and acceptable for women" — never mind the factory workers and serving girls from four paragraphs prior! (As it happened, even middle-class women often brought in some income, from home; they just did not usually admit that they did. Moreover, all women carried on with the usual chores of cooking, cleaning, and raising children, despite the fact that this rather tiring labor has never been considered "work.") The lack of communication within this hypothetical authorial committee becomes more obvious when we consider the next chapter, which has some overlap.
That said, the book makes one assertion which is no doubt correct: the industrial revolution changed everything. With the possible exception of a few jungle-dwelling tribes, every human being on the planet is affected by the fruits of this massive change.
The authorial commitee I've surmised seems to be divided into two camps, the proponents and the skeptics. The paragraphs written by the proponents are almost luminous in their praise of forward thinking, technological advance, and the enormous productivity of the industrial revolution. The paragraphs written by the skeptics raise considerable objections. Thus this passage, "Each invention went on to create a new need, and human ingenuity filled each new gap with a new invention," can be followed shortly by this one: "At the same time, by making cotton production more profitable, the cotton gin helped perpetuate slavery in the United States." The intent was probably to be balanced; instead it often verges on schizophrenic.
For the purposes of this chapter, we'll divide actual events from theories and ideas.
So what actually happened? As the book says, changes in agriculture spurred changes in industry, with the overall tenor of the change being faster and more. More food, more workers, more demand, more products; faster transportation, manufacture, and communication. This is all true, although it's important not to overstate it. Yes, railroads and steamships began knitting countries together, making rapid travel far more possible, and accelerating the one-mile-an-hour world to thirty or forty-five. But horse-drawn transportation continued to matter long after the invention of the railroad; in fact, railroads were initially not standardized or even connected, so goods would arrive by train at one station, then be hauled by horses across town to a different station for another train to take them onward. Horses remained cruicial for transportation, especially armies, until after World War Two. Yes, people began to migrate to the big cities, but most people still lived on the farm; the United States became majority-urban only in the 1920s, with "urban" defined as living in a town of more than 2,000 people. The world as a whole only became majority-urban in the last few years!
Factories did begin to spring up, with the confluence of more demand and stronger, more reliable power sources. The book does mention that capital was required for this, as one has to have money to invest in building a brand-new factory, but overlooks the reasons why that capital was particularly abundant in Britain. Trade is the biggest and most general answer, but getting more specific, Britain had captured most of the extremely lucrative West Indes islands in the wars with France, which produced sugar. Sugar prices were so high in those days that the plantation owners almost printed money, and after the wars were over, most of the plantation owners were British. However another trade connected to the sugar plantations had proved even more profitable still: the trade in slaves. It has been argued that a crucial driver for the industrial revolution was the vast profit that could be obtained by kidnapping people and then selling them into slavery. Certainly cotton became the primary raw material in Britain's textile mills, and the vast majority came from the slaves of the American South.
Regardless, the factories were built by those who had the money to do so, and staffed by those who needed the money to live. This meant that more and more people were no longer self-sufficient, but relied on wages to pay for their survival (as almost all of us now do). This also meant that populations became increasingly mobile. Formerly people worked on the family farm, probably their whole lives. Now workers might slosh between factories. A worker who quit or went on strike could be replaced. Moreover workers only were responsible for a single part of the production cycle. This further divorced the individual from the whole process of production, unlike the farm families who managed the crop from seed to plate.
This overall process of speeding up, standardizing, and increasing began to make some wonder what place people had in the new systems…
Opposition to the new methods of doing business came swiftly. The book overlooks the Luddites, mostly skilled craftsmen and women, who realized that the new factory system would destroy not only their livelihoods, but their skills and individuality. The Luddites took to smashing factory equipment to head off the oncoming change. William Blake, the poet and artist, wrote the hymn "Jerusalem," which laments the "dark Satanic mills." And of course there were the theorists like Marx and Engels. But the ones who suffered the worst were, of course, the workers themselves. Bounced back and forth between too much work and too little, laboring in dangerous environments with no protections or care, and treated as slightly less important and just as interchangeable as the products they worked on, laborers began to fight back almost at once. The classic methods were the strike and the union, but what the book fails to mention is that strikes were almost invariably violent. Workers on strike would attack "scabs," other workers who had been brought in to replace them, and more violently yet, the factory owners would frequently call in hired guns or the local police to break up strikes with violence and shootings. The book mentions that unions were legalized in Britain in the 1870s; but Britain was exceptional. In the United States unions were effectively illegal unil the New Deal, sixty years later, and during those sixty years there were repeated incidents such as the Ludlow Massacre, in which soldiers set fire to an encampment of strikers, killing eighteen people. Unions remained illegal in other parts of the world for even longer.
Under such circumstances, the ideas of the time are not too surprising.
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