Chapter 17

Explaining the Industrial Revolution

• The global context for this transformation lies in the very substantial increase in human numbers. From 375 million in 1400 to 1 billion in the 19th century.
• Industrial Revolution marks a human response to that dilemma as non-renewable fossil fuels such as coal, oil, and natural gas replaced endlessly renewable energy sources of wind, water, and wood.
• Raw materials to feed to fuel industrial machinery- coal iron, petroleum altered landscape in many places. Some from coal-fired industries and domestic use polluted the air in urban areas, - respiratory illness.
• Industrial Revolution marked a new era in both human history and the history of the planet.
• ecological, atmospheric and geological history.
• Technological innovations:
• The Spinning Jenny
• Power Loom
• Steam Engine
• Cotton Gin = culture of innovation.
• Industrial Revolution spread beyond the textile industry to iron and steel production, railroads, steamships, food processing, and construction.
• Second Industrial Revolution focused on chemicals, electricity, precision machinery, the telegraph, and the telephone.
• New industries emerged in automobiles, airplanes, consumer durable goods, electronics, computers.

The First Industrial Society

• Individual landowning aristocrats, long the dominant class in Britain, suffered little in materials terms from the Industrial Revolution.
• Mid 19th century 1000 families still owned half of the cultivated land in Britain most leased to tenant farmers. Rapidly growing organization demand for food products grown on that land.
• Landowners continued to dominate the British Parliament.
• Aristocracy declined when in the 1840s high tariffs on foreign agricultural imports, designed to protect the interest of British landlords.
• Those who benefited the most from industrialization were members of that amorphous group called the middle class
• The middle class contained wealthy factory and mine owners, bankers, merchants. Buying country houses, affording universities.
• Doctors, lawyers, teachers, journalists, scientists and other professionals required in any industrial society.
• Reform Bill 1832 – broadened the right to vote to many men of the middle class (no women).
• Women in the middle class: wives, homemakers, mothers. Educators of respectability and managers of household consumption “shopping”
• Families aspire to status – middle-class status.
• Women aspire to enter the teaching, clerical, nursing professions, by the second half of 10th century educated middle-class women flooded the labor force.
• The manual workers in the mines, factories, construction sites, workshops, farms
• Laboring classes who suffered most and benefited from epic transformations of the industrial revolution
• Laboring classes were shaped by the new working conditions of the industrial era.
• Cities were overcrowded and smoky, inadequate sanitation, periodic epidemics, few open places, polluted water supplies.
• By 1850 average life expectancy was 39 years.
• Long hours, low wages and child labor were nothing new for the poor.
• The ups and downs of the capitalist economy made industrial work insecure.
• British industrialists favored young, unmarried women in textile mills because they were willing to accept lower wages.
• Domestic servants for upper and middle-class families to supplement meager family incomes.
• When trade unions were legalized in 1824, growing numbers of factory workers joined these associations in their efforts to achieve better wages and working conditions.
• Socialist ideas of various kinds gradually spread within the working-class, challenging the assumptions of a capitalist society.
• Karl Marx (1818-1883) had expected industrial capitalist societies to polarize into the small wealthy class and a huge proletariat.
• Social democracy evolved with Marxism in Germany.
• Wages rose in Britain under pressure from unions and cheap imported food improved working-class diets, infant mortality rates fell.
• The industrial revolution prompted a massive migratory process. They were pulled abroad by the enormous demand for labor overseas, the ready availability of land in some places. It was Latin America that felt the brunt of this huge movement of people.
• Latin America received 20% of European migratory streams, from Italy, Spain, and Portugal. Considered “white” they enhanced the social weight of the European element in those countries enjoyed economic advantages over mixed race
• 30 million newcomers from all Europe to the United States offered affordable land to many industrial jobs.

Variations on a Theme: Industrialization in the United States and Russia

• American industrialization began in the textile factories of New England, 1820s.
• By 1914 the United States was the leading industrial power, used funds to generate an independent industrial revolution of its women.
• U.S Government played an important role. Huge grants of public land to the railroad companies, laws enabling them easy formation of corporations, large business enterprises – a growing number of employees.
• United States pioneered techniques of mass production. Henry Ford democratizes the automobile.
• American Union organizations, focused on skilled workers excluded the more radical unskilled laborers – massive immigration from Europe. – created a diverse industrial labor force
• While the United States was the most exuberant democracy during the 19th centuries Russia remained absolute monarchy. 
• 29th century Russia had no national parliament or legal parties.
• Russia was far more in control of society.
• The early transformations were of Peter the Great(1689- 1725) to modernize Russia, followed by freeing the serfs 1861.
• 1890s Russias Industrial Revolution was launched and growing rapidly and focused on railroads and heavy steel industry.
• Although factory workers constituted 5% of Russias' total population, they quickly developed radical class consciousness.
• By 1897 over 70% of the population in Moscow and S. Petersburg were recent migrants from the rural areas. 13-hour working day was common, and ruthless discipline overt disrespect of supervisors.
• Marxist socialism found a way of understanding the changes.
• In 1898, they created an illegal Russian Socialist Democratic Labor Party.
• Working in unions and revolutionary actions.
• St. Petersburg went on strike and created their own representative councils called Soviets.
• Varoious revolutionary groups, many of them socialist published pamphlets and newspapers.
• World War I provided that moment where the revolution moment arrived.
• The massive upheaval quickly brought to power the most radical socialist groups
• Bolsheviks led by Lenin (Vladimir).

The Industrial Revolution and Latin America in the Nineteenth Century

• Spanish America ultimately dissolved into 18 separate countries.
• Mexico lost huge territories into the United States (1846-1848).
• Political life was turbulent and unstable. Conservatives favored centralized authority and sought to maintain the social status quo of the colonial era in alliance with the Catholic Church.
• Antonio Lopes de Santa Anna, was president of Mexico at least 9 times between 1833 and 1845. Constitutions replaced one another.
• Bolivia at least had 10 constitutions during the 19th century.
• Social life did no change fundamentally in the aftermath of independence.
• The most significant economic outcome of this growing integration was the rapid growth of Latin American exports to the industrializing countries – needed food products, raw materials.
• Latin American landowners were eager to supply those needs. Exports boom after 1850
• Mexico continued to produced vast amounts of silver.
• European capital investment was 10 billion alone between 1870 and 1919 – most of this investment came from Great Britain.
• By 1910 business interests controlled 40% of Mexican property and produced half of its oil.
• To the economic elites of Latin America, intent on making their countries resemble Europe or the United States all of this was progress.
• Urbanization also proceeded rapidly. Latin America became modern metropolises, compared to urban giants anywhere.
• Authoritarian governments interested in stability and progress and acted harshly to crush or repress unions.
• 1906 Mexican dictator Porfirio Diaz invited the Arizona Rangers to suppress a strike at Cananea near U.S Border.
• 1907 in Chile thousands of women and children slaughtered because of protested miner wages.
• Majority of lower classes lived in rural areas, and suffered the most and benefited the least from the export boom.
• Huge peasant armies like Emiliano Zapata helped oust Porfirio Diaz. Mexico settled with a new constitution in 1917 that proclaimed universal male suffrage.