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- Bridgstock, Ch. 6 -

The Nature of the Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution that began sometime around 1750 in Great Britain was one of the pivotal events in human history. It not only initiated the mechanization of the economy but it also broke through the economic ceiling that had limited progress for over two thousand years. To find an equally important economic transition, you would have to go back to the time when hunter-gatherer societies discovered that they could establish permanent settlements by forming. The discovery of agriculture made civilization possible; the Industrial Revolution multiplied society’s productive capacity many times over.

That rapid increase in production can never be sustained by agriculture. Agricultural progress is more limited by the ability of the land to produce (although biotechnology may be changing this) and by the limits of demand. Once food fills the belly, demand ceases. Demand is never infinite. But the demand for manufactured and technological products, arguably, is unlimited.

Agriculture, however, is still the necessary condition for industrialization. The land needs to produce enough to feed all the people, including those who go into the factories to produce textiles, manufactured goods and other products. Britain was only able to have an Industrial Revolution in the nineteenth century because it had an agricultural revolution in the eighteenth-century. This led directly to population growth that could supply the new industrial towns with a cheap supply of labour. In the early days of industrialization, factory and workshop owners did not have to pay workers much more than the cost of food and shelter for themselves and their families - a subsistence wage. Great Britain’s highly efficient agricultural sector made grain - the staple of life - extremely economical.

Of course, once Great Britain industrialized and became the workshop to the world by selling value-added products at home and abroad, it became possible to use the profits from manufacturing and trade to pay for staples from abroad. In the case of Great Britain, and later countries like France and Germany, the supply of raw materials including grain, timber, wool, furs, etc. could be provided by colonies like Canada, Australia and the West Indies that were established for just that purpose. The problem for the colonies was that they tended to get locked into the staples trap - the disadvantage of being entirely dependent on the production of staples rather than developing their own manufacturing and technological base.

But the first Industrial Revolution needed to be proceeded by an agricultural revolution. The agricultural revolution began in the fifteen-hundreds when British landlords enclosed patches of land to use to as pastures for sheep. The wool of British sheep, rather coarse to be use, could be sold abroad at a profit and allow landlord aristocrats to adopt the more luxurious lifestyle of their European counterparts. In the sixteen-hundreds, landlords found that it was more profitable to rent the land to tenant farmers on 99 year leases or longer. The tenant farmers began to make the heavy clay soil more productive by: 1) draining excess water; 2) practicing mixed farming that allowed the use of manure; and 3) adopting the progressive crop rotation system pioneered by the Dutch. Unlike France, where the feudal system ensured that the land was cultivated in small relatively unproductive strips by peasants, English agriculture flourished and let to steady population growth. The excess labour, that could no longer find jobs in the countryside, migrated to the towns, providing the pool of cheap labour needed by industrialization.

Having the right conditions, including a solid agricultural foundation, doesn’t mean that you are going to have an Industrial Revolution. In order for that to happen, a number of conditions have to be just right. First, you need a modern scientific view of the world. Let’s be careful what this means. Scientific discoveries did not play a big role in the early stages of the Industrial Revolution but scientific attitudes did. Newtonian physics articulated a cause and effect clockwork universe. Another way to say this is that the scientific revolution of the 1600s encouraged the British to look at the world in a mechanistic way and to seek methods for controlling nature to benefit mankind. Although countries like China and India, were not intellectually or technologically stagnant, they never embraced the mechanistic and controlling

The Birth of the Factory

Although the mechanistic perspective was well developed in Great Britain, its widespread adoption in industry was limited by a number of factors. First, in order to mechanize sectors of the economy, you need a labour force, which was supplied thanks to the Industrial Revolution. Second, you need to find a product for which 1) there is a steady demand, 2) an insufficient supply and 3) that is capable of mass or mechanized production. The trouble was that, during the eighteenth-century, there was not much demand. The vast majority of people lived at, or close to, the subsistence level. Often, if they needed a product, they made it for themselves. The people who had more money - i.e. the aristocrats - wanted high quality luxury products. In the eighteenth-century, those were the kind of things that were custom made by craftsmen, not by machines. And, in any case, aristocrats were so few in number that their individual purchases could hardly stimulate a revolution. This was a society in which demand was relatively inelastic.

The only area where demand was high and supply low in a poor country experiencing a demographic (i.e. population explosion) is in textiles or clothing. Everyone needs items like shirts, pants, dresses and underwear, even if those were primitive. In those days, most clothing was made from cotton or wool. The silk clothing, laboriously made from the product of the silk worm, was way too expensive for most people and was a luxury item. In order to make cotton or wool clothing, it first has to be spun; then it has to be carded and put on spindles and woven on a loom; then, if you want to give it colour, you need to bleach it and dye it. At every step, there are potential bottlenecks. But the biggest bottleneck of all was spinning.

English merchants saw an opportunity for making money by increasing production. That’s why merchants sent out raw cotton or wool to be spun by cottagers (women) who no longer had land to farm or who needed to supplement their income. The women spun the yarn; then the yarn was collected and distributed to weavers who used a loom to weave it into cloth. The handloom was a big advance on the previous technology - the spinning wheel. The original problem was getting enough wool lint to supply the market. Gradually, that problem was solved by using cotton that was more plentiful cheaper to purchase in large quantities. The second problem was that spinning yarn was so time consuming that it was difficult to get enough of it to the handloom weavers to meet demand. To remedy this problem, a simple machine called the spinning jenny was introduced to card yarn much faster. Once the yarn was available, the bottleneck was the handloom weavers themselves.

This problem allows us to introduce the critically important and all too often overlooked human element in technological advance. The handloom weavers began to proliferate during the second half of the eighteenth-century. By the early nineteenth-century, this cottage industry was all but wiped out and has only re-emerged on a very small and boutique scale recently. The handloom weavers were only interested in producing enough cloth for sale to feed their families. They resisted the demand for more cloth because they knew that an increased supply would decrease the price of the product. They saw it in their interest to maintain personal control over what Karl Marx called the mode of production. The solution to this problem in the cotton industry was the most revolutionary aspect of the early Industrial Revolution.

In order to control production on their own terms, some cotton merchants began to house looms in factories where they could better control the workforce. Because no one wanted to work in the new factories that were regarded as places of servile labour, the new factory owners were forced to recruit workers from among the poorest sectors of British society and to locate their factories in parts of rural Britain where unemployment and poverty was high. Many of the first factory labourers, therefore, were not able bodied men but the poor, indigent, women and children.

Recruitment was a huge problem until the 1830s because the poor could expect to perform odd jobs in Britain’s rural communities and receive a form of welfare that was distributed through the local parish (church community). Thus, factory owners and early industrialists lobbied to have this traditional poor law eliminated, which was exactly what they achieved in 1834. After that time, labour supply still remained something of a problem because the demand for workers was so high that workers often simply earned enough to feed their families for a time and then quit. When they wanted to work again, they could simply move to a new factory. Factory owners beat this problem by colluding with one another to keep wages so close to the subsistence line that people needed to keep working continuously just to feed their families. The subsistence wage remained an economic orthodoxy until after the eighteen fifties where some factory owners began to pay their workers higher wages as incentives to work hard and become more respectable.

The Introduction of Steam

The early Industrial Revolution was based overwhelmingly on the textile industry. It was scientific only to the extent that it reflected the highly mechanist, problem solving perspective that existed in the West following the scientific revolution initiated by people like Newton, Bacon and Locke. It was primarily technology based, although the actual technologies deployed were fairly rudimentary and really required no specialized scientific knowledge.

Prior to the nineteenth-century, there was no very strong connection between science and technology. The most we can say is that scientific attitudes encouraged literate people to be interesting in examining the way that things worked and trying to increase control over the working progress. Early pioneers such as Richard Arkwright (spinning jenny) or Josiah Wedgewood (pottery) may have had scientific attitudes but they did not have scientific training. They operated in the old crafts tradition, seeking to improve products by trial, error and experimentation.

When the marriage of science and technology occurred it transformed the nature of production in a number of important ways. First, it made scientific knowledge essential to increased productivity. Second, it dramatically increased the capital requirements for industrialization. In order to be competitive technologically, one now needed to keep abreast of scientific developments and to invest in scientific research. Finally, as countries began to compete with one another to introduce new technologies, there began to be a need to introduce more systematic planning into industrial production and processes. The hit and miss approach that allowed Great Britain to stumble into the early Industrial Revolution was no longer a recipe for success.

Great Britain achieved an economic jump-start on the rest of the world through textile production, but the textile industry was so simple that other countries in Europe and even in North and South America began to play catch up. In order to sustain its original competitive advantage, Great Britain now began to rely on technological innovation through science. The increasingly critical importance of specialized science and concomitant investment in scientific research can be seen in Watt’s advances to the steam engine. The first working steam engine was developed by Thomas Newcomen way be in the first decade of the eighteenth-century (1700s). It was a technical innovation that required very little scientific knowledge, just an understanding that by condensing and compressing steam in a cylinder, you can make a primitive engine (i.e. you can push a piston and make it work). The original simple steam engines were only developed to solve a particular problem. Britain is a marshy country with lots of coal deposits. Coal can be used as fuel, but you need to be able to get it out of the ground. The first steam engines were simply used to pump water out of the shallow mines. They could easily have been developed by trial and error.

Now consider the difference between James Watt’s more modern combustion steam engine and Newcomen’s earlier steam engine. Watt learned all about the known laws of heat and the properties of gases, vapours and vacuums from his friends who taught science at Edinburgh University. His day job was to design precise scientific instruments for professors. He was able to connect scientific theories to an effective new technology because he understood the basic concepts of the new science of thermodynamics. He did this by creating a chamber within the cylinder so that it would not be necessary to heat up and cool down the cylinder with each operation, thereby making the operations of the engine continuous and efficient.

Consider further what Watt’s discovery eventually led to and you will understanding the radical change in technological development that occurred after 1840. Once an efficient engine could power pistons, it was possible to make all kinds of sophisticated machines. An important such steam powered machine was the new and larger looms that began to be used in the factories. But the age of textiles was receding. A much more important and capital-intensive use for steam was the locomotive. Within a couple of decades of the invention of the locomotive, Britain was engaged in a major revolution of its transportation network. Railway mania began in Great Britain and spread to the rest of the world. Canada also built railways, but it would be more accurate to say that the railway created Canada.

Once steam power was introduced with the aid, it was possible to eliminate a plethora of tasks that had for so long burdened human society. The steam engine was only the first example of an application of scientific knowledge to a practical problem. In order to more quickly railway networks all around the world, it was necessary to revolutionize the production of iron and steel. New metal smelting processes were soon developed that were applied to steamship, bridge and building production.

By 1840, Great Britain had one-third of all the world’s steam power and nearly one-third of its manufacturing plant. But it was clear that the competition was heating up, especially from the United States. The significance of scientific research for industry in America can be understood by the fact that America was a big country with a lot of land. The ready availability of land meant that more Americans wanted to be independent farmers than workers, leading to a severe and continuous labour shortage. Therefore, Americans began to invest in science and looking specifically for scientific applications in industry in the form of new machines. American engineers viewed themselves as scientific problem solvers rather than traditional mechanical engineers. By 1850, American engineering was beginning to outpace that of Great Britain, where a relatively cheap and available labour supply slowed down progress. By 1890, American engineers were transforming the traditional factory into modern

Science, Technology and Capitalism

The first Industrial Revolution began with fairly primitive technological innovations that were directed by individual capitalists. These technological developments were probably less important that the principle of the division of labour in the factories that allowed early capitalists to increase production and to make it more reliable. The amount of capital needed to get the early factories off the ground was not substantial. Entrepreneurs could usually raise the money from their own savings and by borrowing from friends and relatives. Industrialization, in this stage, makes some use of technology but little of science.

This stage of industrialization, therefore, conforms to the classic concept of the capitalist as a highly individualistic self-made man who relies on his/her own wits and risks his/her capital on the assumption that profits will be earned by meeting some social demand for certain goods. In this early form of capitalism, it is reasonable to assume that progress can be made best by allowing individuals the freedom to invest their savings and allowing the marketplace to balance supply and demand. If the classic entrepreneur or captain of industry fails to read the market correctly, he will fail. If he reads the market correctly, he not only will be successful but he will benefit society by providing goods that would not otherwise be available.

The fact that this simplistic formula could no longer be taken for granted by 1840 demonstrates the intricate linkages between technological and capitalist progress. By this time, the capital requirements for establishing some industries were so heavy that they were beyond the scope of many entrepreneurs. Capitalistic individualism became largely rhetorical as enterprises became so complex that corporations largely replaced the former captains of industry and professional managers replaced owner bosses. Intense competition between the new individuals - the corporations - meant the need for greater investment in scientific research and development. In some countries, technological competitiveness was considered too important to be left in the hands of capitalist corporations. Governments, particularly France and Germany, began to usurp the former role of the capitalist by investing in science centrally. In Germany, for example, rapid industrialization was centrally supported, as it would later be in countries like Sweden, Switzerland, Japan and, of course, the Soviet Union.

Concluding Remarks

The connection between science and technological progress is developing in interesting ways. Science was largely theoretical and academic before the industrial revolution. During the nineteenth-century, the importance of scientific knowledge to technological and capitalistic growth became much better understood. National governments began to invest in science as a discipline that led to technological growth and global competitiveness. During the past century, that public investment in R & D has become ever more urgent because technological change has become the one single imperative that everyone agrees upon.

It wasn’t always so, and we need to reflect upon the change. Science and technology now have an impact upon our lives that is huge and historically unprecedented. The Industrial Revolution was a major transformation and perhaps more significant than anything that has happened since. We are still inheriting and evaluating the effects of this revolution, in the form of a more materialist society and an impoverished environment and spirituality. On balance, most of us would probably prefer the world of the present to the world we have lost. But consider that the Industrial Revolution took 100 years to accomplish its work and establish stable societies. We are experiencing much more rapid change, directed by governments and corporations who are deploying modern science and technology, often without serious consideration, or understanding, of the potential effects on human communities and the global planet.

The notes presented here are for the AK NATS 1760.06 “Science, Technology and Society” course offered in the Fall/Winter Semester of 2001/2002 by the Atkinson College of York University, Toronto, Canada and taught by John Dwyer. The lectures are based on the following texts:

1. Martin Bridgstock et al, Science, Technology and Society: An Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 1998), ISBN 0-521-58735-2
2. Kevin Robbins and Frank Webster, Times of the Technoculture: From the Information Society to the Virtual Life (New York, Routledge, 1999), ISBN 0-415-16115-0
3. Albert H. Teich, Technology and the Future (New York, St. Martin’s Press, 2000), ISBN 0-312-01885-1

For more about John Dwyer, visit: http://www.sayitagain.com/ivorytower/