Professor Brophy
History 102


The Industrial Revolution
I. Definitions
-technology and inanimate energy: substituting machines for human labor
-new organization of labor: the factory
-legal and cultural innovations: private property, credit, joint-stock principle, mobile labor
-sustained growth, change, new markets
-mechanization and consumption
-industrial society and modernity

II. The First Industrial Revolution: England
-factors for early industry
-textiles as pacemaker
-flying shuttle (1733); spinning jenny (1778); water frame (1770); power loom (1784); steam engine (1780-1830s)
-steam power: the demise of decentralized work
-the nexus of coal, iron, and railroads
-the multiplying effect of better infrastructure for markets and mail

Factory Work
-the division of labor
-the necessity of profits
-David Ricardo’s ‘Iron Law of Wages’
-new tyranny of the clock
-tyranny of ‘cash nexus’: no social obligations beyond wage; lack of social security for laborers
-industrial discipline
-deskilling of labor: from artisan to factory hand
-children’s labor: 29 percent of Brit. workforce in 1838 are children; seven-year olds work 15 hr. days in cotton mills
-Factory and Labor Acts, 1833-40s

Industrial Urban Life
-1800: London, 1million; 6 cities b/w 50,000-100,000
-1850: London, 2.4 million; 9 cities over 100,000; 18 b/w 50,000-100,000
-inadequate housing: modern slums and shanty towns
-urban problems: sanitation, clean water, sewage
-diseases: cholera, tuberculosis, typhus, smallpox, dysentary
-physical deprivation of urban workers
-alcohol, crime, prostitution
-religion’s urban missions

England in 1840: Workshop of the World
-rapid mechanization after 1830: 17 m. mec. spindles
-50 million tons coal mined (1/2 of  world production)
-advanced urbanization: roughly half of populations in cities
-trade volume twice that of next competitor (France)
-world leader in exports; advocacy of free trade
-continental emulation: expanded industrialization in France, Belgium, Germany, Austria after 1840

Conclusions
-assessing the costs and damages; the paradox of ‘progress’ and civilization
-the new haves and have-nots of industrial class society
-social and psychological trauma of early factory life
-differences between first and second half of nineteenth century for working classes
-the formation of a politically conscious class: radicals and socialists