Introduction to Industrialization
Throughout most of world history, nearly everyone has been poor, life expectancy has been short, and famine has been a
frequent visitor. Today, many parts of the world are so wealthy that they regard poverty not as normal but as a special
problem that ought to be eliminated. The single great cause of this increase in wealth has been industrialization. We know
now beyond question that industrial societies generate wealth, which eventually spreads widely to benefit all their people,
even though inequalities increase and even though the early stages of industrialization are often dirty, exploitative, and
painful. No other way out of collective poverty has yet been discovered.
The Industrial Revolution, which transformed the world over the past two and a half centuries, was the most profound and
beneficial event in human history since the Neolithic Revolution—the discovery some 12,000 years ago that plants and
animals could be domesticated. Industrialization has created, on balance, a much safer world and one that supports larger
populations with greater life expectancy than ever before. In our classroom, we’ll explore how humanity has learned to
make and distribute devices of increasing complexity, whose collective effect has been to make life longer, richer, safer,
and more varied for us than for nearly all our predecessors on the planet.
An Anti-Traditional Phenomenon
1. Beginning in the 1700s, in central England, an ingenious group of men began experimenting with the business of
making things and discovered that traditional methods could be improved, accelerated, and made more efficient.
Their advances began in woolen and cotton textiles but soon spread to pottery, coal mining, iron making, and
transport.
2. The basic insight that it was possible to make things more quickly and efficiently led to new methods of
transportation and new ways those items might be sold and traded. Those insights, in turn, led to new ideas about
how a society involved in such manufacturing and trading should be reorganized. The result was a new
distribution of status and wealth.
3. A new era of critical thinking began. Industrialization depends on the idea that tradition should not always
constrain us and that careful thought can enable us to do what our ancestors never even attempted. In this sense,
industrialization has immense anti-traditional implications.
4. By now, industrialization has been institutionalized to such a degree that we expect to see new inventions and
methods introduced every year and to watch old ones fall into obsolescence. Although the process is benign
overall, that doesn’t mean that everyone profits from it. The nature of social change is that it produces winners
and losers. Each time a technology is made obsolete, some people may lose their livelihoods or drop out of the
workforce altogether.
5. Still, although industrialization has caused constant upheavals and dislocations, in the long run, it has created a
higher standard of living for more people than ever before, greater longevity, and greater opportunities.
6. The overall effect of industrialization has been liberating; in fact, democracy correlates closely with
industrialization, as does the presence of mass literacy, widespread higher education, and respect for human
rights.
Connotations of Industry
1. The word industry tends to conjure negative associations, perhaps in part because of certain odd characteristics
that we nearly all share. First, humans are capable of an incredible depth of ingratitude. Most of us never think
about the debt we owe to our industrial predecessors—except when the things they gave us are suddenly taken
away.
• Think about electrical power. We’re so familiar with electricity that we never think about it when it’s
working; we think about it only when it suddenly stops working. Of course, most people in world history
have had to manage without electricity. We have it as part of the legacy of the Industrial Revolution.
• The great iron and steel manufacturer Andrew Carnegie once said that capitalism was all about turning
luxuries into necessities. In other words, new inventions that once caused a sensation gradually become
familiar and feel normal, until we reach the point of wondering how we ever got along without them.
Then, we forget how useful they are until we’re forced to do without them again.
2. In addition, most of us think more about the future than the past. We take what the world gives us as our starting
point.
• The gifts of the past are present all around us and are too familiar to induce a sense of awe and wonder.
The future, by contrast, is a zone of speculation where we can imagine marvelous improvements over our
current condition.
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If we do think about the past, it’s often nostalgically; we’re likely to daydream about either the simple
contentment of the “good old days” or the pageantry of aristocratic life we see in costume dramas.
Factories and commerce seem like intruders into that world, rather than sources of improvement.
3. The third reason the Industrial Revolution has negative associations is that there is much to dislike about it. The
people who brought it about were trying to make themselves rich and were rarely motivated by a sense of
benevolence toward others. Many of them were ruthless employers; the successful ones made themselves rich
while leaving their employees poor.
• A long moral and literary tradition has condemned rather than celebrated the industrialist. The great
novelist Charles Dickens lived in the midst of the Industrial Revolution and was unsparing in describing
its ugliness, squalor, and human cost.
• In real life, John D. Rockefeller, the pioneer of the modern American oil industry, who made himself one
of the richest men in the world, was widely hated as a grasping, unscrupulous monopolist who destroyed
other people’s livelihoods and drove his workers hard and mercilessly.
4. Industry has also caused many of the environmental problems we face today. The Industrial Revolution began by
burning coal in massive quantities, then went on to burn oil in even greater amounts. As we know, extracting
fossil fuels from the earth is dangerous and dirty, and burning them causes pollution.
5. Finally, the Industrial Revolution made warfare much more horrific, with mass killing by means of machine guns,
high- explosive bombs, and industrial gas. Worse still, it brought us nuclear weapons, the ultimate indiscriminate
killing machine, capable of destroying everything.
Embracing the Paradox
• It might seem paradoxical to celebrate a process that shattered traditional ways of life, increased economic
inequality, exploited workers, fouled the atmosphere, and exponentially increased the horrors of war.
Nevertheless, the basic principle of this unit is that we should embrace the paradox and be grateful for the
Industrial Revolution.
• Most people in traditional societies are powerless, and the accident of birth decides irrevocably what they will do
in life. These are ways of life that tend to be short, oppressive, and exhausting. To be a hunter-gatherer or a
peasant—the fate of tens of millions throughout world history—is to live a life of constant drudgery, completely
devoid of choice.
• Although the inequality of industrial societies is real, it’s an inequality where the poorest are far less poor than
their ancestors. It’s true that the gap between the richest and the poorest often increases with industrialization, but
it’s also true that the poorest people in advanced industrial societies are in many ways richer than the richest
people in a traditional society.
• It would be pointless to deny that the exploitation of industrial workers has been severe at many times and places
throughout the Industrial Revolution.
• The Marxists, who presented the most powerful challenge to industrial capitalism from the mid-1800s to
the late 1900s, regarded exploitation as inseparable from capitalism and aimed to destroy it.
• Karl Marx himself believed that as the rich got richer, the poor would get poorer until, finally, they would
rise up in rebellion against the wealthy minority. What Marx was seeking was industrialization without
exploitation—that is, industrialization without capitalism.
• But what actually happened in the early 20th century is that the rich realized they could continue getting
richer only by making the poor richer. They recognized that their capacity to make things had outstripped
their pool of consumers; thus, it was necessary to turn the makers into consumers, too.
• The first employer to apply this principle in a significant way was Henry Ford, who overnight raised the
average worker’s pay at his auto assembly line factories from about $1.50 per day to $5. The raise kept
the workers on the job and had the effect of turning them into buyers and drivers of Ford cars.
• Some economic historians believe that one of the reasons for the severity of the Great Depression was
that wages, although they had been rising rapidly in the last 20 to 30 years, had not risen fast enough to
keep up with increases in output during the 1920s. In other words, wages needed to be higher still.
• There were also widespread fears during World War II that as soon as the demand created by the war
ended, depression conditions would return. With the scarcity of labor during the war, however, wages
rose sharply, creating the enlarged buying power that could sustain the economy when the fighting ended.
• Environmentally, the early stages of the Industrial Revolution were filthy, with appalling levels of smog and
smoke. Marx’s colleague Friedrich Engels wrote that rivers in certain parts of England were open sewers, full of
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human waste and industrial effluent. As late as the 1960s, American rivers were often contaminated with high
levels of detergent, phosphorous compounds, oil sludge, and other effluent.
• That’s not true today, however; the rivers of Britain and America are incomparably cleaner now than they
were half a century ago, even though productivity has continued to rise. The environmental movement
mobilized citizens to protest against pollution, at which point democratic governments passed legislation
to restrict it and to clean up the long legacy of industrial pollution. Environmental remediation became a
new entrepreneurial opportunity, and inventors hastened to supply the demand.
• Ironically, the way to correct a problem caused by industrialization was with more industrialization.
Historians recognize that there’s a close correlation between a society’s wealth and its ability to clean up
the environment.
The horribly destructive weapons made possible through industrialization remain with us. Even here, however,
there are a few offsetting factors to consider. The maturing of industrial societies has led to a steady fall in
violence.
• Psychologist Steven Pinker has demonstrated convincingly that war and violence are far less common
than they used to be.
• Three principal reasons for this, he says, are the rise of international commerce; the rise of the nationstate, which has advanced legal systems and a monopoly of force; and the rise of mass education, which
encourages people to be more reasonable and restrained—in other words, industrial society.
It seems reasonable, then, to claim that industrialization has created, on balance, a much safer world. It’s certainly
one that supports larger populations with greater life expectancy than ever before.
Questions to Consider:
1. Why do you think the functioning of democracy correlates so closely with industrialization?
2. Do you agree or disagree with the claim that industrialization has created a safer world?
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