Britain's preconditions for industrialization
Between 1750 and 1850 Britain became the first country in the world to industrialize. In 1750 it had roughly 7.5 million people, and most lived in villages or small towns and earned a living from farming. By 1850 the population had reached about 21 million, half of all Britons lived in cities and more than 40 per cent of workers were employed in factories. Work, travel, living conditions and politics all changed, which is why the period is called the Industrial Revolution.
The change in Britain, roughly 1750–1850, from an economy based on farming and hand-made goods to one based on machines, factories and new sources of power.
Several conditions were in place in Britain at the same time, and each one strengthened the others.
- Britain's population began rising around 1740. More people created more demand for goods, especially cloth, and provided plenty of workers for factories.
- Britain held many colonies, which gave its merchants wide opportunities for overseas trade. Many merchants grew rich enough to have capital to invest in new businesses. The empire supplied raw materials and bought British goods. Raw cotton from India, for example, was made into cotton goods in Britain and sold back to India.
- An earlier agricultural revolution raised food output. There was enough food for the growing population, including people in towns who could not grow their own, and higher farm wages gave workers money to buy the products of the new industries.
- Transport improved greatly between 1660 and 1750 through better roads, improved rivers and new canals. Coal and iron could be moved more easily and cheaply, finished goods reached wider markets, and orders, letters and new ideas travelled faster.
- Britain had entrepreneurs willing to risk money on new ventures, and a strong interest in science and technology. The result was a run of inventions in the textile and iron industries.
- Britain had plenty of its own raw materials, with iron for machines and later railways, and coal to fuel steam engines.
- Britain enjoyed relative political stability and was at peace, so business and trade with the colonies could flourish.
A territory ruled by another country. Britain's colonies supplied raw materials and bought manufactured goods.
Natural substances, such as cotton, coal or iron ore, that are used to make other goods.
Finished products made from raw materials, often by machine, such as cotton cloth or iron tools.
A person who risks their own money to start or expand a business in the hope of making a profit.
The factors connect. Trade created the capital that entrepreneurs invested. Better farming fed a larger population, and that population became both the workforce and the customers for factory goods.
Canals carried the coal and iron the new industries needed. When you explain a cause, show how it links to at least one other.
Textile inventions and the factory system
Textiles were the first industry to move into factories. Rapid population growth after 1750 meant cloth had to be produced in far larger quantities than before, and the old way of making it could not keep up.
Cloth, and the fibres and yarn used to make it, such as cotton and wool.
The way cloth was made before factories, with spinning and weaving done by hand in people's own homes.
Under the domestic system, spinning was usually women's work. Mothers, daughters and sometimes grandmothers worked together at a simple spinning wheel. Their hours could be long, but the workers set them themselves. The thread might be woven into cloth by someone else in the same house, or a wool or cotton merchant collected it and took it to a weaver's cottage. The merchant then carried the finished cloth to town to sell.
Raw cotton or wool went through three main stages before it became cloth.
- Washing and carding, where the fibres were cleaned and combed so they lay in straight lines.
- Spinning, where the fibres were twisted together into thread or yarn.
- Weaving, where the yarn was woven into cloth.
Because these stages were linked, speeding up one of them created a bottleneck at another. Inventors then had a reason to solve the new problem, so each invention tended to prompt the next.
- In 1733 John Kay invented the flying shuttle, a hand-powered device that let one weaver produce as much cloth as two had before. Hand-spinners could not keep up, so yarn ran short.
- In 1764 James Hargreaves invented the spinning jenny. It had 16 spindles but was small enough to use at home, and 20,000 were in use by 1788.
- In 1769 Richard Arkwright, a wig-maker in Bolton who was born in Preston, invented the water-frame, a spinning machine driven by water power. It was too big for a house, so he built a mill at Cromford in Derbyshire, the world's first water-powered cotton spinning mill.
- In 1779 Samuel Crompton invented the mule, which improved on the water-frame by producing much finer but still strong thread. It also needed a factory. With so much yarn now available, weavers were busy and well paid.
- In 1785 Edmund Cartwright invented the power loom to speed up weaving. It only worked efficiently and produced good cloth from the 1820s.
Picture cloth-making as a line of people passing buckets of water. If one person suddenly works twice as fast, buckets pile up beside the next person in the line.
Kay's flying shuttle made weavers faster, so spinners became the slow point. Spinning machines then made weavers the slow point, until the power loom caught up.
The water-frame and mule moved spinning out of homes and into mills, but water power meant those mills had to be built beside rivers. The power loom gradually put hand-loom weavers out of work. In Bolton, weavers' weekly earnings fell from 25 shillings in 1800 to 5 shillings in the 1830s, and thousands joined the unskilled poor looking for work in the new factories. Life inside those factories is the focus of the lesson on impact of industrialization on daily life.
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