The Industrial Revolution ― The Workshop of the World

In the previous episode we saw the outline of an empire that spread across the world through its navy, its trade, and its colonies. Behind that wealth lay the shadow of the slave trade, and light and shadow existed as the front and back of the same history.

But what truly turned the empire into something colossal was neither war nor trade. It was another revolution that arose within the island ― the Industrial Revolution, in which coal and iron and steam remade the world. For thousands of years humankind had relied on muscle, beasts, and water; here, for the first time, that framework was broken.

Why Britain?

Why did the Industrial Revolution arise first in Britain? The reason was not a single one, it is said.

Abundant coal and iron ore lay buried in the ground. There was capital brought by colonies and trade, and a supply of raw cotton. The empire’s trade network, which we saw in the previous episode, had prepared both markets and materials. People driven off the land by enclosure became the labor force of the cities. Stable politics since the Glorious Revolution, the protection of property rights, and the patent system encouraged the will to invent. Where these conditions overlapped upon a single island, the fire of revolution caught. To the question of why it was Britain, there is no single answer.

What first fanned that fire was cotton cloth. Hand-spinning could not keep pace with demand. To break through this barrier of supply, in the latter half of the eighteenth century, inventions of spinning machinery came one after another. Hargreaves’s spinning jenny allowed one person to spin many threads at once. Arkwright’s water frame drove machinery with the power of the waterwheel and created a new place of work ― the factory, where people were gathered. Domestic handwork was replaced by factory machinery.

Steam Sets the World in Motion

What first turned the spinning machines was water power. But waterwheels could only be set beside rivers, and were at the mercy of the water’s flow. What removed this constraint was the steam engine.

The steam engine itself had earlier been used by Newcomen and others to drain water from mines. The man who dramatically improved it was James Watt. In 1769 Watt obtained a patent for a mechanism that separated the condenser. By this device, which kept the cylinder hot, the engine came to require far less fuel than its predecessors, it is said. Further, in the 1780s, he put into practical use a mechanism that converted the up-and-down motion of the piston into rotary motion.

The meaning this brought was great. A rotating force could be transmitted to spinning machines, to the blast of ironworks, to every kind of machine. And the steam engine need not be beside a river. With coal alone, a factory could be built anywhere. Power had been released from place.

The Iron Road Shrinks Distance

To carry what the factories produced, to carry raw materials, and in time to carry people ― that role fell to the railway.

In 1825 the Stockton and Darlington Railway opened. As a public railway using a steam locomotive, it is often counted among the first in the world. Its original main purpose was carrying coal from the mines. Then in 1830 the railway linking Liverpool and Manchester opened. This was a full-fledged passenger railway, designed from the outset to carry both people and freight in great quantity. The work of the railway engineer George Stephenson and others is said to have opened up this age.

As the iron road extended, the meaning of distance changed. Journeys that had once taken many days shrank to a few hours, and distant markets were joined into one. Coal, iron, and textiles flowed faster and more cheaply. The smoke of the steam locomotive appeared to people as the very symbol of progress. Britain laid down a railway network ahead of the world and secured its position as the workshop of the world.

The railway was the artery of the economy, and at the same time it changed the very fabric of people’s lives and their sense of time. Local times, which had differed from place to place, were unified to match the running of the trains. The provinces were joined to the cities, and newspapers, letters, and goods came to pass back and forth day by day. Steam did not only carry things; it reassembled the way society was bound together. In time this technology of the railway, born in Britain, spread across the sea to Europe and North America, and then to every corner of the world.

The Soot-Choked City, and the Hands of Children

But we cannot tell of this prosperity and leave it there. At the foot of those rows of factory chimneys lay another reality.

People poured into the cities in search of work. Industrial cities like Manchester swelled rapidly, and with water and sewage unable to keep pace, overcrowded and unsanitary slums spread. Soot clouded the sky, and epidemics struck the people again and again. Factory labor was long, discipline harsh, and wages low.

Above all, what we must not turn our eyes from is child labor. As cheap labor, young children were made to work long hours in factories and coal mines. The sight of children crawling between narrow machines and working in dark mine shafts would be handed down in later ages as the shadow of prosperity. Criticism of this reality accumulated among reformers and within Parliament, and society slowly began to move. The Factory Act of 1833 prohibited the employment of children under nine, limited the working hours of the young, banned night work, and established a system of factory inspectors. Whereas earlier laws had entrusted oversight to justices of the peace and lacked effect, this law, which placed inspectors with the right of entry, is said to have been the first to possess real force ― the starting point of regulation that protected workers.

The Island That Changed the World

This island, which burned coal, turned steam, and laid the iron road, became the world’s first industrial nation. Its technology and its systems would in time spread to continental Europe, to America, and then to the world. We may say that the skeleton of the modern age in which we live was given its form, at this time, in Britain.

Having become the workshop of the world, Britain, with its overwhelming industrial might behind it, would head toward the summit of prosperity. An age called by the name of a single queen ― the age when the empire seemed at its largest and its most radiant ― was close at hand.

With its industrial might behind it, the empire would climb to its very summit.