Revolution

Revolution THE transformation of industry and the economy in Britain between the 1780s and the 1850s is called the ‘first industrial revolution’*. This had far-reaching effects in Britain. Later, similar changes occurred in European countries and in the USA. These were to have a major impact on the society and economy of those countries and also on the rest of the world. This phase of industrial development in Britain is strongly associated with new machinery and technologies. These made it possible to produce goods on a massive scale compared to handicraft and handloom industries. The chapter outlines the changes in the cotton and iron industries. Steam, a new source of power, began to be used on a wide scale in British industries. Its use led to faster forms of transportation, by ships and railways. Many of the inventors and businessmen who brought about these changes were often neither personally wealthy nor educated in basic sciences like physics or chemistry, as will be seen from glances into the backgrounds of some of them. Industrialisation led to greater prosperity for some, but in the initial stages it was linked with poor living and working conditions of millions of people, including women and children. This sparked off protests, which forced the government to enact laws for regulating conditions of work. The term ‘Industrial Revolution’ was used by European scholars – Georges Michelet in France and Friedrich Engels in Germany. It was used for the first time in English by the philosopher and economist Arnold Toynbee ( - ), to describe the changes that occurred in British industrial development between and . These dates coincided with those of the reign of George III, on which Toynbee was giving a series of lectures at Oxford University. His lectures were published in , after his untimely death, as a book called Lectures on the Industrial Revolution in England: Popular Addresses, Notes and Other Fragments . Later historians, T.S. Ashton, Paul Mantoux and Eric Hobsbawm, broadly agreed with Toynbee. There was remarkable economic growth from the 1780s to in the cotton and iron industries, in coal mining, in the building of roads and canals and in foreign trade. Ashton ( - ) celebrated the Industrial Revolution, when England was ‘swept by a wave of gadgets’. *In the second one, after about , new areas like the chemical and electrical industries expanded. In that period, Britain fell behind, and lost its position as the world’s leading industrial power, as it was overtaken by Germany and the USA.