 The
Industrial Revolution coincided
with – and mutually affected – the
fall of mercantilism and the rise of
capitalism
 It is important to remember that the
central feature of mercantilism was
strict governmental control over the
economy
 By the end of the 1700s, a number of
economic thinkers began to argue
that economies were more likely to
flourish when they were left alone to
function freely
 These
classical, or laissez-faire,
economists theorized that competition,
free trade, and the laws of supply and
demand, operating by themselves,
created greater wealth for all nations
and all people
 These became the key principles of
capitalism
 The first major capitalist thinker was the
Scottish philosopher Adam Smith
 Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776)
used the elegant metaphor of the
“invisible hand” to describe how the
laws of supply and demand naturally
increased prosperity
 Other
classical economists accepted
Smith’s principles and approved of
capitalism, but were not so optimistic
that the new economic approach would
benefit all people, especially the working
masses
 One of these was England’s Thomas
Malthus, whose Essay on Population
(1799) argued that population growth
caused poverty
 His reasoning was that, while population
growth grew at a geometric rate, food
supply grew at an arithmetic rate
 Malthus saw war, disease, and starvation
as natural mechanisms by which
population growth was regulated
 David
Ricardo created the theory known as
the “iron law of wages”
 Ricardo stated that an employer will
naturally pay his workers no more than
whatever it takes to keep them at a
subsistence level
 If population growth expands more quickly
than the economy, too many workers will
compete for too few jobs
 Wages will decline and those without jobs
will starve
 However, according to Ricardo, to interfere
with this “iron law” will only lead to
economic ruin
 The
pessimism of thinkers like Malthus and
Ricardo caused classical economics to be
nicknamed the “dismal science”
 Nonetheless, classical capitalist thought
became the dominant economic approach of
the nineteenth and early twentieth century
 Another
economic approach, socialism,
remained in the minority – and, in some
times and places, it became illegal
 Socialism’s basic principle is that
economic competition is inherently
unfair and leads to injustice and
inequality
 There were many different forms of
socialist thought
 The earliest socialists, who appeared
between the 1810s and 1840s, were
known as the utopian socialists
 These
included the Scottish industrialist
Robert Owen, as well as the French thinkers
Charles Fourier and Comte de Saint-Simon
 Rejecting capitalism and Ricardo’s “iron
law,” utopian socialists felt that, by means of
good planning and judicious regulation,
economies could be made to prosper without
exploiting the working class
A
more radical form of socialism appeared later,
during the 1840s
 This was Marxism (also known as communism)
 It was originated by the German philosophers
and radicals Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
 The movement’s fundamental principles came
from The Communist Manifesto (1848) and Das
Kapital (1867-1894)
 Based heavily on the philosophy of G.W.F. Hegel,
Marxism condemned capitalism and economic
competition
 Marx
and Engels argued that, since
ancient times, social and historical
development have always been
driven by the class struggle between
the upper classes (who control
capital, or the means of economic
production) and the lower classes
(who are forced to labor for the
upper classes)
 They felt that their own age – the
capitalist era, during which the class
struggle pitted the bourgeoisie
(capitalists) against the proletariat
(industrial working classes) – was the
final stage of human history before
the achievement of socialism
 From
socialism, human society would pass to
communism: an economic state of perfect
justice, social equality, and plenty
 In order to bring about socialism, however,
revolution was necessary
 Marx and Engels therefore advocated and
fought for, the overthrow of the capitalist
order
 Much more so than utopian socialism,
Marxism captured the imagination of
hundreds of thousands of intellectuals and
workers, and it would go on to become one
of the most influential doctrines of the
modern era
 Yet
the rapid expansion of the middle class
and the birth of the industrial working class
affected politics in many ways
 The gradual widening of political
representation was due largely to agitation
and ambition on the part of both of these
classes
 Early in the 1800s, the middle class, which
favored liberalization, won greater political
rights and economic privileges for itself, both
by means of reform (in countries like Britain)
and more drastic political action like
opposition or revolt (as in France)
 What
options were open for the working
class?
 The most desperate tended to turn to
radical forms of agitation: socialism,
communism, even anarchism (developed as
a political movement by the Russian
revolutionaries Mikhail Bakunin and Prince
Pyotr Kropotkin)
 Marxism drew most of its strength from
disgruntled workers
 But as a movement, it was often led by
radicalized intellectuals who promoted
communism as the way toward social
equality and economic justice
 Most
workers turned to trade unions rather
than radicalism
 At first, unions were illegal in Europe, as
well as the United States, and joining one
could be very risky: union members were
often in danger of arrest, even injury,
especially if they went on strike
 Over time, however, trade unionism
became a less extreme way of carrying on
the struggle for greater political rights and
fairer treatment in the workplace (higher
wages, shorter workday, shorter work
week, safety regulations, pensions,
employee insurance)
 Workers’
parties also emerged; one of the
most famous was the Labour Party, which
became (and remains) a major force in
British politics
 Unions and workers’ parties tended to be left
leaning, but not as far to the left as socialist
and communist groups
 Europe
was the first major civilization to
develop a modern industrialized, capitalist
economy and the effects of this new economy
spread quickly to the rest of the world
 The United States also industrialized and by the
late 1800s and early 1900s, was doing so more
successfully and more quickly than the nations
of Europe
 Western industrialization and imperialism were
also intimately connected
 First,
industrialization made Western nations,
particularly Britain and France, more able to
conquer and colonize other parts of the world
during the 1800s
 Industrialization made European nations richer,
it made them more technologically adept, and it
boosted the scientific knowledge needed to
explore or know better parts of the world that
were not yet under Western control
 Perhaps most important, industry placed new
weaponry in the hands of Westerners: gunboats,
artillery, quick-firing and accurate rifles, and
machine guns, all of which made Western
armies extremely difficult for poorly armed
native warriors to resist
 Second,
if industrialization gave Europeans a
greater capacity to conquer and colonize, it
also gave them a greater variety of motives
 Industrialization required ever-greater
amounts of raw materials: iron ore, coal,
rubber, metals, timber, and chemicals, all of
which could be stripped from other parts of
the world
 The growing importance of steamships made
it necessary for Western nations to maintain
naval bases and refueling stations around the
globe
 Moreover,
as Europe and America produced
increasingly large amounts of manufactured
goods, they had to have markets overseas to
sell them to
 All of these needs combined to spur the
Western nations’ intense burst of imperial
activity during the 1800s, especially the
second half
 Even
in non-Western parts of the world that
Europe and America did not conquer or
colonize, industrialization’s economic clout
often had a profound effect
 Western businessmen and industrialists struck
deals with aristocrats or the political elite to
exploit local resources
 These bargains typically involved the large-scale
growth or extraction of a small set of crops or
natural resources
 This
practice, known as monoculture,
generally damages the environment and
retards the development of a healthy,
diverse economy (in the tropics, the
derogatory slang term for a country with this
type of economy is “banana republic”)
 It also exploits these countries’ native
workers: Western payments or investments
end up in the pockets of a small number of
local aristocrats or politicians, rather than
adding to the national well-being
 Yet in the long term, most non-Western parts
of the world would come to imitate
industrial methods of economic production
 One
other worldwide effect of early
industrialization concerned the Atlantic slave
trade
 The 1793 invention of the cotton gin by
American engineer Eli Whitney transformed the
international textile trade
 One of the factors that limited the ability of
steam-driven machines such as the spinning
jenny, the flying shuttle, and the power loom to
speed up the textile industry was the fact that
cleaning raw cotton balls by hand took a long
time
 The
cotton gin changed this, enabling enough
clean cotton to be produced to keep pace with
the machines that turned clean cotton into
thread and the thread into whole cloth
 The effect of this change was to give a
phenomenal boost to the English textile trade’s
demand for raw cotton
 Although one major source for cotton was
Egypt, a chief supplier was the American South,
where cotton was grown and harvested
primarily by slaves
 Most economic historians argue that, before the
1790s, slavery was becoming less profitable in
the American South, and might have therefore
have died away relatively quickly and easily
 The
advent of the cotton gin, however, as
well as England’s increased demand for
cotton, made slave-based cotton production
extremely profitable
 Therefore, slavery in America was prolonged
for decades – necessitating civil war to end it
– largely because of the industrialization of
the textile trade
 Before
the Industrial Revolution, European
women of the lower (and sometimes middle)
class worked alongside men on the farm or in
the family business, so motherhood and
homemaking were not full-time pursuits
 The Industrial Revolution altered that reality
 It turned the husband into the wage earner
outside the home and the wife the homemaker
 Thus, the Industrial Revolution, gradually
created a sharply defined domestic sphere for
women, separate from the workplace, which, by
the mid-to-late 1800s, would be dominated by
men
 However,
early in the nineteenth century, for
couples of the lower classes, often both
husband and wife (and increasingly, their
children) were forced to work in factories to
make ends meet
 Before 1870, women made up 50 percent of the
workforce in textile factories
 Ironically, this meant that lower-class women
had more opportunity to work than those of the
middle and upper classes
 In this case, however, “opportunity” was not a
matter of privilege or right, but economic
necessity
 Also, women who did work were paid a good
deal less than men
 Throughout
the nineteenth century, most working
women remained in traditional types of female
labor, that is, as domestic servants or agricultural
workers
 Most working women were single, not married
 Some single women, desperate for jobs, left
Europe for Australia or the United States
 By the end of the nineteenth century, large
numbers of poor women were working outside the
home, in factories, mines, markets, and on farms
 Increasingly, though, as salaries improved in heavy
industry (making these jobs more desirable to
men) and laws restricted the number of hours
women were allowed to work, more women in
working-class families stayed at home
 Fewer
middle-class (and almost no upper
class) women worked
 In such a way, a new social pattern
emerged that separated work from the
home
 Men were the primary breadwinners,
whereas women became the homemakers
who dabbled in low-paying, part-time
work to supplement income
 Families started to have fewer children,
partly as a result of the adoption of childlabor laws and a decline in infant
mortality rates
 Children were beginning to be perceived
more as dependents than family wage
earners
 Around
the turn of the century, a mass
consumer society began to emerge along
with a higher standard of living
 Such consumer products as sewing machines,
clocks, and cast-iron stoves focused families
on obtaining higher levels of consumption
and freed up time for women of all classes to
pursue activities outside the home
 Britain
was the first country to industrialize
 Near the end of the 1800s, Germany and the
United States began to surpass Britain
 In general, northern Europe and the United
States industrialized fairly quickly
 However, southern and eastern Europe tended
to lag behind
 Even more backward was Russia, which
remained overwhelmingly agricultural – and,
until 1861, economically stagnant, thanks to its
reliance on the old-fashioned practice of
serfdom
 Southeastern Europe and the Balkans remained
the most economically outdated region on the
continent