The Industrial Revolution

This is Unit Nine of Western Civilization Two, part one of two: the Industrial Revolution, the exam's sixth band. Unit eight ended with Vienna's balance and a century of peace. This unit is the revolution that ran through that peace on coal instead of conscripts, and its governing idea, which part two pays off, is the anchor's chain from a fuel to a franchise. Britain burned coal because it had burned its forests; Watt turned heat into motion; motion made cloth; cloth made Manchester; Manchester made classes; and the classes made the reforms. The anchor rejects the cultural explanation of why Europe won the century and answers with energy. Part one carries the chain from the farm to the fish-and-chip shop; part two takes it to parliament. By the end you will be able to state the thesis and the timeline. To describe coal, the engine and the cloth. To explain the continent and the connections. To describe the city and its cost. To describe class and the first answers. And to describe the home, the pub, the country and the table.

Four entries on why and when: the energy thesis, a revolution that took a century, the farm the anchor omits, and the surplus of hands it produced.

Energy, not culture.

WC2 0801 Why Europe? The Anchor's Answer Is Energy, Not Culture

Why did Europe dominate the nineteenth century? The anchor rejects the cultural answer and the racist one as self-serving and inaccurate. Its answer is energy: near-exclusive access to fossil fuels for about a century, which built the factories, steamships, telegraphs and calories that won the late century's contests. Dominance lasted under a century. The thesis is the anchor's, attributed.

A slow revolution.

WC2 0802 A Revolution That Took a Century: 1750, 1830, 1860 to 1914

The revolution began in Britain about seventeen fifty, spread to western Europe from about eighteen thirty, matured in the fifties and sixties, and gave overwhelming power from about eighteen sixty to nineteen fourteen: technology first, then economy and society. Historians dispute the word revolution for so slow a change; the anchor keeps it, and calls it as momentous as farming's invention.

More food from fewer hands.

WC2 0803 The Agricultural Revolution: Rotation, Tools, Enclosure

The anchor has no section on farming, so the witness supplies it: the Norfolk four-course rotation, turnips and clover replacing the fallow year; Bakewell's selective breeding; and enclosure turning open fields into consolidated, capitalist farms with more food from fewer hands. This entry rests on the witness texts, not the anchor.

Scrooge's surplus population.

WC2 0804 Population, Calories, and a Surplus of Hands

Rising population, sanitation lowering infant mortality, the end of the Little Ice Age, and commercial agriculture, a disaster for peasants but more calories overall, produced by eighteen hundred what the anchor, quoting Dickens's Scrooge, calls a surplus population. The factory's labor force was made in the countryside. Surplus is Scrooge's word, quoted.

Four entries on the engine of it: coal and where it lay, Watt's condenser, textiles first, and the conditions beyond coal that lined up.

A forest the size of the island.

WC2 0805 Coal: Why Britain Burned It and Where It Lay

Coal was long disliked for smoke, ash and flooded mines. Britain burned it because it ran out of forests, and by eighteen fifteen, the anchor says, British coal yielded the energy of a forest the size of England, Scotland and Wales. A coal band ran from England through Belgium to the Ruhr. Necessity, not genius, the anchor says.

Heat into motion.

WC2 0806 Watt's Engine: From Pumping Mines to Turning Wheels

James Watt improved Newcomen's pumping engine with a separate condenser, which the witness dates to seventeen seventy-four, and with Boulton manufactured engines from seventy-five. The rotary mechanism turned heat into motion for wheels, not only pumps: coal replacing muscle and water. Horsepower is Watt's word. The anchor's seventeen sixty-three is when he began; the patent came later.

Two hundred times the cotton.

WC2 0807 Textiles First: The Power Loom, the Mule, and Slave-Grown Cotton

Cartwright's power loom of seventeen eighty-seven and the steam-driven mule made thread two to three hundred times faster than by hand, the anchor says, and by eighteen fifty Britain wove two hundred times the cotton of seventeen eighty. The witness begins with Hargreaves's jenny. Raw cotton came from the slaveholding American South; women were preferred because paid less, the anchor's caption says.

Everything lined up.

WC2 0808 Capital, Free Trade, Fair Taxes, and Elites Who Did Not Sneer

Beyond coal the anchor lists politics and culture: a parliament of free-trade believers, capital from reliable banks at fair interest under favorable law, taxes neither arbitrary nor high, and elites who did not despise commerce, unlike continental nobles barred from trade until the Revolution. Unit four's Bank of England paid off a century later. Everything lined up; no one thing did.

Four entries on the continent and the connections: why Belgium was first and France slow, a treaty that forced France's hand, the railway, and the wire and the ship.

Belgium first, France slow, Germany by customs union.

WC2 0809 Why the Continent Lagged: Belgium First, France Slow, the Zollverein 1834

Belgium, with waterways, coal and skilled artisans, industrialized by the eighteen thirties, alone before the forties. France lagged: skeptical elites, thin banking, costly transport, independent peasants, luxury artisans. Germany's Zollverein customs union of eighteen thirty-four and then railroads made the Ruhr by fifty, and unit eleven uses the Zollverein for unification. Northern Italy and western Russia came late, Spain later.

Free trade as a weapon.

WC2 0810 The Eden Treaty and the Tidal Wave of British Cloth

The Eden Treaty of seventeen eighty-six opened France to British manufactures, the anchor says, and a tidal wave of cheap cloth forced French industrialization in self-defense. British quality and cheapness cornered every market they could reach: free trade as a weapon of the first mover. The treaty is anchor-only; no witness names it.

Fifty miles an hour, and time zones.

WC2 0811 Railways: Manchester to Liverpool, 1830, and Time Zones

Experimental lines in eighteen twenty, then the Liverpool and Manchester Railway of eighteen thirty, the witness's first intercity passenger railway, with the Stephensons' locomotives. Fifty miles an hour by mid-century and six thousand five hundred miles of British track by fifty, the anchor's figures; Greenwich time zones invented for the timetable; a massive industry of booms and collapses.

Every place closer together.

WC2 0812 Telegraph, Steamship, Roads, and Canals

The electric telegraph, from the eighteen thirties and forties on the standard record, carried the first message faster than a horse; steamships from eighteen sixteen doubled sail's speed; roads and canals, the witness's Bridgewater Canal of seventeen sixty-one first, linked mines to mills. Every place closer together, the anchor says. The anchor's eighteen thirty for the telegraph is early.

Five entries on the city and its cost: Manchester's growth, its cellars and slag, the Corn Laws, the satanic mills, and the slave end of the cotton thread.

Two thousand percent in a century.

WC2 0813 Manchester: 20,000 to 400,000

Manchester had coal, a canal and wool artisans. By the anchor's count it grew from twenty thousand in seventeen fifty to forty thousand in seventy-five, two hundred fifty thousand in eighteen thirty-one and four hundred thousand in fifty, two thousand percent in a century. Urbanization, the anchor says, absolutely exploded. The witness has its dirt-floor shanties; the counts are the anchor's.

Taller smokestacks moved the smoke, not the harm.

WC2 0814 Cellars, Soot, Slag, and a Miner Dead by Forty

Families lived in one-room cellars and tenements without water or sanitation; soot darkened the moths; slag heaps and toxic runoff surrounded the mills; a miner, the anchor says, was dead by middle age, forty at the oldest. Epidemics followed. The conditions are the record; the life-expectancy figure is the anchor's.

Landlords' rents against workers' bread.

WC2 0815 The Corn Laws, 1815, and Wages at Subsistence

The Corn Laws of eighteen fifteen banned grain imports, the gentry's law, and kept bread dear; the witness calls them stiff tariffs on grain. Wages stayed near subsistence until about eighteen fifty, and downturns like eighteen thirty-nine to forty-two brought firings and starvation. Repeal in forty-six comes in part two.

Laws that protected horses before children.

WC2 0816 Satanic Mills: Blake, Dickens, and Deskilled Artisans

Blake's dark satanic mills and Dickens's Hard Times and Oliver Twist fixed the image. The anchor's cause is the ruthless pursuit of profit: manufacture simplified for cheap unskilled labor, artisans deskilled, hours long, women and children abused, and laws that protected horses before children, it says. Real wages rose only late in the century. The characterizations are the anchor's.

Brutality rather than technology.

WC2 0817 Cotton's Other End: Slavery in the American South

British mills ran on cotton from the slave South. After the trade ban of eighteen-oh-seven the enslaved population grew by natural reproduction under complete subservience, and output rose, the anchor says, through brutality rather than technology, the cotton gin of seventeen ninety-four the exception. Unit four's slave trade fed unit nine's factories; the transatlantic tie is the anchor's emphasis and the record.

Five entries on class and the first answers: identity by condition, Peterloo and the Luddites, three Acts, women's two shifts, and the largest sector economists ignored.

Identity by condition, not estate.

WC2 0818 Class as Condition: Workers, Industrialists, the Middle Class, and the Petty Bourgeoisie

Class replaced legal estate as identity by condition: workers united by poverty, industrialists by wealth and control, a middle class of engineers, foremen, accountants and bureaucrats proud of morality, sobriety and work, and a petty bourgeoisie of shopkeepers and artisans fearing descent. In the middle-class view workers were animals and old nobles archaic. Marx's classes, in unit ten, are built from this.

Machines smashed, a meeting charged.

WC2 0819 Peterloo, 1819, and the Luddites

Before parties there were struggles: the Luddites, whom the witness describes as skilled workers smashing machines used to undercut them, and Peterloo in eighteen nineteen, when middle-class volunteer cavalry charged a reform meeting in Manchester. The anchor says hundreds were gunned down; the standard record is sabres, about fifteen dead, hundreds injured. Peterloo rests on the anchor, and its toll is the anchor's.

A girl hauling coal.

WC2 0820 Factory Act 1833, Mines Act 1842, Ten Hours 1847

The Factory Act of eighteen thirty-three limited children's hours and, the witness adds, barred those under nine; the Mines Act of forty-two barred women, girls and boys under ten from underground; the Ten Hours Act of forty-seven capped women's and young workers' days. A parliamentary inquiry's image, a girl hauling coal, moved a parliament appalled, the anchor says, more by impropriety than conditions.

Two shifts, one wage.

WC2 0821 Women's Work: Lower Wages and a Second Shift

Working-class women labored in factories, mines and mills at lower wages, with equal-pay laws only late in the century and rarely enforced, and then did the domestic work at home. The anchor's caption: employers preferred them because they cost less. Two shifts, one wage, and the largest women's employer was not the factory.

A seventeen-hour day, invisible to economists.

WC2 0822 Domestic Service: The Largest Sector, Invisible to Economists

Domestic service was nineteenth-century Britain's largest employment sector, the anchor says, ignored by economists including Marx. A maid of all work rose before dawn for a seventeen-hour day, and as late as nineteen forty more than half of Europe's earning women were servants. Servants existed because middle-class women did not earn. The figures are the anchor's.

Four entries on home, pub, country and table: the middle-class family the servant made possible, working men and drink, an island shrunk by rail, and food from everywhere.

The Victorian family as a product of the servant.

WC2 0823 The Middle-Class Home: Servants, Sentimentality, Idleness Feared

Middle-class women did not work for wages, and since idleness was sinful they raised children, visited and did charity. With drudgery outsourced and more children surviving, the anchor finds a new cult of sentimentality in family life, the Victorian family as a product of the servant. Unit twelve names this culture Victorianism.

The pub as the working man's parlor.

WC2 0824 Working Men, Alcohol, and Temperance

Working-class families could not live on one wage, masculine worth strained, and artisanal skills went obsolete. Alcohol was the consolation, and the anchor ties first-wave feminism to temperance because drink meant domestic violence. The pub as the working man's parlor; temperance as feminism's ally is the anchor's link.

Revolutions of one city, read about afterward.

WC2 0825 Closer Together: Holidays, Newspapers, Standard Languages, and Capitals

Railways ended localism: middle-class seaside holidays, cheap presses and mass newspapers spreading the capital's standard language over dialects, and capital cities growing enormous, London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, St. Petersburg. Revolutions became revolutions of one city, Paris in eighteen thirty and forty-eight, read about afterward; unit ten's revolutions are this entry's cities.

The first fast food.

WC2 0826 Food From Everywhere: Tea, Coffee, Sheep Ranches, Fish and Chips

Rail and steamship moved food across the world: Indian tea and South American coffee daily for workers, fruit, a more varied diet. New Zealand became Britain's sheep ranch, the anchor says, and fish and chips, cheap parts fried in newspaper, the first fast food. Single-product appendages fed the industrial core. Varied is not nutritious; the anchor keeps the distinction.

Look at what you can now do. You can state the anchor's energy thesis, the century-long timeline, the farm the witness supplies, and Scrooge's surplus. You can describe coal burned for want of forests, Watt's condenser, two hundred times the cotton, and the banks, parliament and elites that lined up. You can explain Belgium first and France slow, the Eden Treaty, the railway of eighteen thirty, and the wire and the ship. You can describe Manchester's two thousand percent, its cellars, the Corn Laws, the satanic mills, and the slave South at the thread's other end. You can describe class as condition, Peterloo and the Luddites, three Acts, women's two shifts, and the maid of all work. And you can describe the sentimental home, the pub and temperance, the island shrunk by rail, and fish and chips. Part two takes the chain to parliament: the Reform Bill, Chartism, repeal and the unions, and four procedures.