Any attempt to grasp the meanings of the Industrial Revolution in England is confronted instantly with a paradox: it is not one but two revolutions that are in question, and while they are linked, they are often studied as though one is autonomous of the other. The first, was the economic transformation associated with the application of new technologies, changes in the dominant forms of industrial organization, accelerated urbanization, and massive rates of growth. While on the other hand, the second revolution was broader and at times less tangible, but was equally significant. It involved the human experiences produced by industrialization, the rise of new social relationships, new forms of suffering and ways of fighting this suffering, new possibilities, and new identities and ideologies.
Seen as economic history, the Industrial Revolution has provoked very sharp and animated historiographical debates. The initial British experience of industrialization, which can tentatively be dated between the 1780s and the 1830s or 1840s (though this periodization is not unquestioned), has been conceptualized in a variety of ways.
Phyllis Deane, who was one of the pioneer economic historians of the Industrial Revolution, summarized the significant aspects of economic transformation. She listed a range of characteristics that constituted early industrial England, among these being the application of science and arithmetical knowledge to production for the market, the specialization of production in the context of international trade, the depersonalization and enlargement of the typical unit of production, the substitution of labour by the extensive and intensive application of capital, urbanization, population increase, and the rise of new social classes. These remain important keys to an understanding of the Industrial Revolution, although the element of an economic growth that can sustain and reproduce itself is also important. The overcoming of the Malthusian trap is to be remembered, in average, national terms, for there were people who starved even in periods of plenty, since Britain witnessed a demographic revolution that was simultaneous with, and linked to, the rise of industry.
Certain qualifications need to be made when examining the history of the Industrial Revolution. Recent research has demonstrated that the classic statistics for British economic growth in the Industrial Revolution, those presented by Deane and Cole are exaggerated. Nick Crafts, while not rejecting the concept of an economic revolution, suggests a gentler and more gradual slope upwards. This evidently contrasts with the view put forward by David Landes, which Maxine Berg describes as `apocalyptic’. Crafts locates that ‘the origins of the Industrial Revolution in processes underway in the 18th century – the increasing rate of industrialization of the labour force, a rise in the volume of resources devoted to investment, growing urbanization, the integration of markets, falling transport costs, and greater specialization’ . Many historians however, have pointed out the fairly slow rate of growth of GNP in Britain in the period of industrial revolution.
Eric Hobsbawm, in keeping with what is essentially a Marxist understanding, has repeatedly stressed that the ‘Industrial Revolution cannot be understood by means of a neutral concept of `industrialization’, but in terms of the web of social relations in and through which it developed. The key concept in this understanding, then, is industrial capitalism, the social relations of production, forms of accumulation and exploitation that determined the experience of industrialization’ . Deane suggested that the Industrial Revolution is best understood in the context of four other economic revolutions happening in England at the time, which acted on and were simultaneously spurred on by industrialization. These were the demographic revolution, the transport revolution, the agricultural revolution, and the commercial revolution. While this presentation of complex processes is somewhat schematic, it does supply a useful key to the dominant processes in the age of industry. First, after an extended period of stagnation, ‘British population exploded between 1751 and 1830, rising from 6.5 to 14 million’ . This sharp increase in population meant that there was no shortage of labor. Indeed, one of the features of British industrialization was that it rested on a constant and massive pool of cheap surplus labour. It can also be argued that population increase created a large home market for industrial and agricultural produce. However, as Hobsbawm points out, ‘domestic demand created through demographic rise cannot explain the industrial revolution, since England already possessed a flourishing market economy in the mid-eighteenth century, and there was ample demand for domestic small-scale production’ .
The revolution in transport was based on roads and waterways. Britain, being the pioneer industrial nation, was also the only one to industrialize before the introduction of the railway. By 1751-72, 389 turnpike trusts had been set up, and by 1830 20,000 miles of roads were covered by these trusts. Water transport expanded its cope hugely, as in the last quarter of the 18th century the area of dock land and harbour basins doubled. Between 1760 and 1830, British canal construction, too, witnessed a peak. This immensely reduced the costs of transport of raw materials, and thereby also reduced overall production costs.
The revolution in agriculture had already been underway in the seventeenth century, and the practice of enclosing arable and common lands to carry out capitalist agriculture had been one of the focal points of the English Revolution of the 1640s. Between 1750 and 1800, there were over 2000 Acts and countless unofficial arrangements that intensified this process. As Hobsbawm points out, ‘enclosures were a highly differentiated practice, and frequently involved peasant cooperation as well as coercion’ . There is also, in the eighteenth century, no clear link between enclosure and rural unemployment. However, the practice of encroachment upon commons and wastelands – often autonomous of enclosures, but not always – did involve trampling upon customary common rights that cottagers had enjoyed for generations, in the interests of private property. Other factors favourable to industrialization in Britain have been adduced. One is the role of the State, a unique financial system. The banks provided a large amount of capital for the government whenever necessary. From the standpoint of liberal economics, the `minimalism’ of State intervention provided a basis for the Industrial Revolution, leaving the field open for entrepreneurs.
The pacemaker of early industrial change, as most historians agree, was cotton. Cotton provides a striking illustration of Hobsbawm’s assertion that the Industrial Revolution was substantially based on colonial commerce. The slave plantations of the West Indies largely provided the raw material for cotton manufacture. Local manufacturers emerged around Bristol, Glasgow, and Liverpool – major loci of slave and colonial trade – and eventually, with the tenfold expansion of cotton exports between 1750 and 1770, in Lancashire. Women and children carried out the bulk of labor in the spinning sector, and this continued into the period of industrialization, a point stressed by Maxine Berg. The major problem faced by the cotton industry, as Hobsbawm points out, that ‘the imbalance between the efficiency of spinning and weaving, which were effectively separate industries, with separate production processes. The spinning wheel could not supply weavers fast enough. This was transformed utterly by three major inventions: Hargreaves’ spinning jenny in 1764, Arkwright’s water-frame in 1768, and Crompton’s mule in 1779. These inventions made it possible to spin finer yarns than the Indian hand-spinner at much lower cost’ . The problem of the generation of power was solved by the application of the steam engine, applied to both textiles and mining. Other textile industries also underwent mechanization, though at slower paces or with less of an overall impact. Silk, for instance, was the first industry to experience wholesale mechanization.
Besides cotton, in relative terms the only other industry to be revolutionized in this phase was iron. Unlike cotton, iron production had been organized on a capitalist basis since the 16th century. What was new was the revolution in technology. The bottlenecks faced by the iron industry in the late 18th century were twofold: the source of fuel and the source of power. Charcoal had provided the major source of fuel for centuries, but this created two problems. First, forest reserves were not inexhaustible. Second, the iron furnace and forge, dependent on forest reserves, would have to migrate to new regions as these depleted. Power, the other major bottleneck, was substantially based on water: hence, the iron industry had to be located near both forest and water resources. Mokyr points to certain other areas of industrial development: among these being gas-lighting, pottary, and machine tools. The machine-tool industry has been the focus of much recent attention, as has small-scale industry in general, notably in the pioneering work of Maxine Berg. This was one area where Britain enjoyed a great advantage, given the profusion and unusual sophistication of mechanical skills, especially in areas like London.
Technology, then, provides one of the major strands in the narrative of the Industrial Revolution. The other strand that is weighted with equal importance is the organization of industrial production. Images of the blast-furnace, the spinning-jenny and the power-loom are conjured up by the mention of the Industrial Revolution, but not with the same power and clarity as the image of the modern factory, compressing human labour and experience under a single roof, and regulating time with almost inhuman precision.
This has been, among other things, central to the Marxist conceptualization of the Industrial Revolution. It encompasses much that was significant in Marx’s own philosophy: his critique of alienation, his positing of the simplification and polarization of class conflict between industrial bourgeoisie and factory proletariat, based on the `double freedom’ of the industrial wage-laborer from both extra-economic ties and the means of production, and the radical hopes he invested in the progressive socialization of human labour under capitalism, a dialectical process that he hoped would lead to the overthrow of the system.
This consensus is fairly obviously borne out by later development of after the 1820s and 1830s the factory system did come to dominate the landscape – both physical and mental of industrial England, and there were reasons why this happened. David Landes points to the insufficiencies of artisanal production when it came to handling demand from expanding overseas markets, the insufficiency of putting-out systems for the needs of mass production. What we see as problematic is the notion that the factory constituted a historical given in the context of the Industrial Revolution right from the beginning, a notion that has led to the marginalization of other experiences of organization and labour. Landes, Hobsbawm and other important historians do accept that in the early stages of the Industrial Revolution factories were not the dominant organizing space. However, since factories contained the `seeds’ of later industrial development, they provide the underlying assumptions behind these historians’ conceptualization of structural change.
The historian who has done most to problematize this understanding of the Industrial Revolution is Maxine Berg. She points out that ‘the preoccupation with large-scale production has led to a marginalization, in historiographical discourse, of forms of `proto -industrial’ management and organization that held sway for much of the early Industrial Revolution’ . Berg argues that ‘industrial organization in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth century was actually highly differentiated, and it was only much later that the classic polarization between concentrated factory production and made into casual forms of sweating, outworking and sub-contracting on the margins of the economy developed’ . She points out that ‘there is no consensus about the definition of a factory in early industrial England, and contemporary accounts make a distinction between `mills’ and `manufactories’ . A striking feature of early industrial organization, according to Berg, was that concentrated factory production – for instance in the major factory industry, cotton – was not large-scale at all, but dominated by small firms and small thresholds.
Finally, Berg makes the extremely important point that the ‘choice of large-scale factory production often had very little to do with the question of the `efficiency’ of organization. Managerial control, the intensity of labour, maximized capitalist control of the production process, and the concentration of knowledge with proprietors and managers because of the divison of labour, frequently were more important in dictating organizational choices. State law also backed employers. Till 1867, labourers faced imprisonment for breach of contract of service. This enabled intense managerial control in the form of long contracts and bonded service’ .
Thus, Berg’s studies importantly qualify many assumptions about the nature of industrial processes and organization. They do not negate the importance of large-scale factory organization, but they demonstrate that there was no one predetermined path to this end, and that the experience of industrialization was differentiated, and offered a range of choices. Such a qualification has important consequences for the study of both economic and social history. Berg has laid stress on the importance of a correspondence between the two disciplines, and thus presents an unusual contrast to most of the major contemporary economic historians of the Industrial Revolution.
When examining what had, apart from technologies and industries to play an important role in the Industrial Revolution, it is possible to make a couple of general observations. Firstly, we observe that the experience of industrialization led to an unprecedented ruralization of the village, and a huge decline in autonomous village manufactures. The textile industry, and other part-time industrial activities were migration of people from villages to cities, a process that thoroughly urbanized, and the relative self-sufficiency of the village was destroyed. This corresponded to a steady in the terminology of economics is called the `release of labour’, but which actually represented a much more complex and differentiated migration of human experiences and skills. The village was now more thoroughly integrated with wider markets than it had ever been, even as it underwent the experience of ruralization. John Merrington has pointed out that industrial capitalism is the first economic system to achieve a genuinely thoroughgoing subordination of country to town, and this insight holds in the case of nineteenth-century Britain.
The obverse of this there was the growth of urbanism. In 1750, only Edinburgh and London had populations over 50,000. By 1850, there were 29 such towns, many of them located in the North and the Midlands. Besides towns like Liverpool and Bristol, which had been significant ports connected with slave and colonial trade for a long time, specifically industrial towns like Manchester, Leeds and Birmingham sprang up. Manchester witnessed the most spectacular urban growth of this period. The specific form of urban life associated with early industrialism evoked complex responses among contemporary observers. The Romantics could denounce city life and celebrate direct experience of nature, but they could also celebrate the city. Socialists often reacted in a more complex manner.
But these were all hopes and visions projected upon the experiences of industrial urban life, the construction of divergent imaginaries. Within the actual historical record of the changes produced in British society by the Industrial Revolution certain threads can be teased out, others remain tangled. Firstly, as Asa Briggs has argued, the nineteenth century saw the emergence of a language – and an identity – of class, emerging against and to a large degree burying older social categories of rank and order. Industrial society, as Marx had said, had led to a `generalization’ of the working class, and the growth of a relationship between employer and wage earner founded on the ties of a strictly economic exploitation. What this indicated was a polarization of social identity, tearing down earlier `connections’ of deference, duty, and paternalism between the rich and the poor. This should not be seen to imply an overnight transformation, neither were older ties of `connection’ and `attachment’ as hegemonic as they might appear, nor were the new antagonisms always immediately comprehended and translated into actual conflict. Yet a new self-picturing of sorts had begun to emerge, both among the middle and the working classes. Manufacturers, merchants and professionals assumed the label `middle-class’. Some early socialists – like Saint-Simon and Owen – posited a new identity, founded on harmony between the middle and the working classes – the `productive’ classes – against the `parasitic’ rich and aristocratic landed elites. However, this commonality was increasingly belied by the antagonisms between the two classes, and a sense that their interests were mutually opposed. The working class, as we shall see, constructed its own identity, and fashioned a radicalism that was – despite its lack of success – a major force in British society. The identity that was fashioned was not, of course, homogeneous, and the Industrial Revolution produced new kinds of divisions within the working population. The experiences and self-perceptions of the `labour aristocracy’ differed greatly from those of seasonally employed construction workers. However, the divisions and tensions within the working class did not cancel out a widely held notion of a common identity – with, of course, leaders and followers within it.
The study of the working class thus problematizes now commonsense notions of the Industrial Revolution as a purely economic phenomenon, one that can be explained satisfactorily by tracing the shifts in consumption patterns, mapping the changes in technological equipment, and computing the rate of growth of national income. These are, without doubt, important indices of `objective’ socio-economic change. However, it is impossible to understand the Industrial Revolution entirely through the prism of `pure’ economic history, because it also involved multiple transformations of human experience. These transformations can sometimes complicate notions of `positive’ and `negative’ social change, and bring into sharper focus the lived costs of one of the most tumultuous and radical processes the world has seen. The Industrial revolution in England, we see, was a phase of long growing innovations not only in the fields of technology but socially as well. While technology played a magnificent role in the development of English Industrial revolution. The emergence of various new urban areas brought about changes in the rural - urban relations and the relations with and within the social order. Demographic changes played an important role in it altogether, which lead to the changes in the demand and supply. There were a level of other changes that led to the result, the influx of cheaper labor from Africa, cheaper materials from the colonial countries etc. All these contributed immensely to the outcome as the revolution.
