payment page
The British Industrial Revolution
Although Western Europe had long had the basic trappings of capitalism (private property, wealth accumulation, and contracts), the Industrial Revolution fueled the creation of a truly modern capitalist system. Widespread credit, business corporations, investments and large-scale stock markets all become common, with Britain leading the way in this transformation. By the 1780s, the British Industrial Revolution, which had been developing for several decades, began to further accelerate. Manufacturing, business, and the number of wage laborers skyrocketed, starting a trend that would continue into the first half of the 19th century. This was further driven by a change in technology as hand tools were replaced by steam- or electricity-driven machines.
The economic transformation brought about the British Industrial Revolution was accompanied by a social transformation as well. Because industrial resources like coal and iron were in Central and Northern England, the booming population began to shift northward, allowing Northern cities like Manchester to grow tremendously. These changes in social and demographic realities created vast pressure for political change as well, with the first act to protect workers going into effect in 1802. Pressure to redress the lack of representation for the new industrial cities and the newly wealthy industrial manufacturers also began to build.
Free-Market Capitalism
Meanwhile, industrialists developed an ideology called laissez-faire based on Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776). Based on this, the discipline known as “economics” developed, largely to give the manufacturers a basis for arguing for little or no regulation of industry. Instead of government interference, these economists argued that a free market, in which everyone followed their own self-interest, would maximize the nation’s utility.
It would be some time before workers developed a counter-ideology of their own. Yet as manufacturing brought hundreds of thousands of workers into the cities, they started thinking about organizing to protect their own political interests. By 1825, the workers in the industrializing nations would become a social and political force of their own.
Impacts of Industrialization
The Industrial Revolution represented a shift in influence away from the traditional power-holders in England. Aristocratic rule was no longer supreme, for manufacturers were now often more wealthy and more important to the nation's overall wellbeing than the landed gentry. They also employed a far greater percentage of the national economy. As a result, the aristocracy, trying to take some power back from the manufacturers, would ally with the working class. As both sides, aristocrats and manufacturers, competed for the support of the workers, reforms in Britain gradually happened through Parliamentary deal-making without the need for a bloody revolution.
Industrialization was a transformative power across Europe from 1815 to1848. It gave rise to urbanization and greatly increased the overall wealth and production power of humanity, although not everyone would share in the benefits of industrialization equally. Those who did receive benefits, such as the developing middle classes, began to wield political clout. Further, the Industrial Revolution would give Western Europe the economic system and technology to dominate much of the world in the colonial period towards the end of the 19th century. The countries that did not transition to industrial systems were quickly left behind, and often ended up as satellites to the major industrial powers.
