The Industrial Revolution, 1780-1914

The Industrial rotary motion, 1780-1914To what extent can the stage in Britain between 1780 and 1914 be termed correctly as an industrial change?The industrial alteration is precisely the expansion of undeveloped forces, the sudden ontogenesis and blossoming of seeds which had for years lain hidden or asleep.Paul Mantouxs refer regarding the industrial revolution is used to describe the range of different phenomena that constitute this watershed moment in British, European and world history. This is because the industrial revolution can non be pigeonholed. It was not a government policy and n unrivaled of what occurred government tout ensembley, socially, heathenly or economically in Britain between 1780 and 1914 came from design but earlier was the result of a historical accident of a sequence of chance upon factors all occurring during the same timeframe. The consummation represented a transition from wee modern history to modernity, with galore(postnominal) of the s ocial and economic ills that arrest oft of the contemporary world today low acted out in the impudently industrialised aras of the UK in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.The industrial revolution change the entire structure of British baseball club, from the monarchy to the previously numerically dominant tyke classes, from agricultural workers to merchants. There is no doubt that a momentous huckster had consentn place the remotereaching legacy of the changes that occurred during the period 1780 and 1914 culminated in the Great War where the casualty figures soared into the millions as opposed to the thousands who were, for instance, killed in the passage of arms of Culloden, testimony in itself to the frightful changes in machinery and manufacture that was witnessed during this revolutionary time. insofar to describe it as a revolution invites further analysis.Although the transformation was wholesale it would be incorrect to think of Britain in 1780 as bein g an underdeveloped nation. As is always the case when taking a chronological enumerate at history, it becomes apparent that the period immediately leading up to 1780 was a crucial time in laying the foundations for the sweeping changes which were about to take place. By this point in history England had the fastest growing pudding stone of any of the traditional European bureaus, was in possession of the largest navy in the world (essential in wrong of acquiring and maintaining an empire in the eighteenth century) and was home to a true metropolis with regards to the capital city. The dominance of capital of the United Kingdom was fully established, and this had helped to create that integration and rationalisation of the cultural, policy-making and economic brio of the nation which was to bring significant benefits in the eighteenth century.In umteen ways, Britain during this time was a country that had already shed its medieval skin. The vast transposition in the number of people who had to work to survive proves the rightfulness in the assumption that England had ceased to be a society based along the middle ages notion of landed aristocracy and its inherently unpopular feudal system. Thus, English history bore witness to the birth of the modern task not here meant in the special sense of the creation of the manufacturing plant labour force, but as a broad description of the prolonged process by which working for wages, characteristic of perhaps a fourth of Englands nation during the reign of Henry VIII, became the condition of more(prenominal)(prenominal) than 80 per cent by the mid nineteenth century.In certain areas of Britain the social, political, cultural and economic changes that this period of history bequeathed constitute a complete, grass root revolution whereby the look of certain places in 1914 bore no affinity to their appearance in 1780. While the early modern period that preceded the industrial revolution saw the development of capital of the United Kingdom and trade, the period of the later 1700s saw the northern closely of England experience something of a rebirth, as a direct result of the industrial revolution. Previously, many areas of the northwards were little more than buffer towns populations constructed to keep out any potential Scottish encroachment from the north but offering little to the growth of the English economy. still the industrial revolution altered the entire relationship between North and South, reinstigating a sense of purpose in the people north of Birmingham. Many once peachy centres were on their way to the pleasant lowliness of county sort of than national fame York, Exeter, Chester, Worcester, Salisbury.First and foremost, the industrial revolution, exacerbated by the increase in production of cotton in the NorthWest after the 1770s and the invention of Arkwrights waterframe, swelled the physical constitution of the population and began a permanent migration away from the countryside to the towns as a result of industry gradually usurping agriculture as the lifeblood of the nation. Liverpool, for example, was seventh in the list of European capital cities by 1850 with Manchester ninth. This had the overall effect of creating urban centres of concentrated wealth with large sectors of the new proletariat class.Yet it would be incorrect to forecast this creation of new centres of populace as tantamount to a redistribution of political military unit. The political system in Britain ensured that power remained in the hands of the privileged, traditional sectors of society which were still predominantly based in or around London and the SouthEast. Until the Great Reform encounter (1832) rotten boroughs and anachronistic political modelling resulted in the great northern cities such as Leeds, Sheffield and Manchester having only a fraction of the electoral power that their numbers suggested.But even after 1832 there was no political revolution in En gland in spite of the continued, and in some areas accelerated, growth of industry and population. Marx and Engels had written their communist manifesto in the 1840s predicting that the enormous sociological changes that England in particular was experiencing would lead to the birth of Europes first truly socialist nation. But there were very some recorded incidents of social unrest as a result of the industrial revolution and examples such as Peterloo (1819) were isolated and meagre in par to the widespread class revolutions that the continent witnessed in 1848. The true explanation is sort of simple wealth. Class conflict was deferred to the twentieth century when international markets and industrial wealth in the North began to contract and workingclass standards of liveliness levelled off or actually fell.It was not only the physical organiseup of England that was shifting as a result of the changes seen since 1780 but in like manner the period saw the birth of an entire su bnation at bottom the British Isles, namely the people of the industrial heartland of South Wales. Quite simply, without the undoubted industrial revolution, areas such as the Rhondda and Ebbw valleys would remain largely unpopulated today. Rates of urban and social growth in South Wales during the nineteenth century are truly astounding with consequences that the region has yet to come to terms with today.The Rhondda demonstrates, albeit to an innate degree, the nature of the new urban expansion. It was a society of migrants, often far re go awayd from their geographical roots in 1911, only 58 per cent of the Rhonddas people had been born in Glamorgan. The rest of Wales supplied 19 per cent, England 7per cent. A sixth of the population was drawn from elsewhere, from Ireland and Scotland, but alike from Spain, Italy and other lands. The partnership was disproportionately young and male. Between 1880 and 1914, males generally comprised at least 55 per cent of the population.South Wales thus became a edge nation, completely dependent upon coal for subsistence it would not exist as we crawl in it today were it not for industrialisation. The example of the new nationality which was borne out of the South Wales coalfields was diagnostic of the broader diffusion of ethnicity that the industrial revolution bequeathed to modern Britain. The influx to British cities of wide numbers of Irish after the potato blight of the 1840s changed always the local political, cultural and economic landscape. Along with a large influx of Jews, mostly displaced from Eastern Europe, the immigrants to British cities transformed the fate of the nation most were willing to perform the worst jobs which enabled grater numbers of the local population to move up the complex industrialised social spectrum. London, in particular, became, during the nineteenth century, a haven for traders, merchants and, increasingly, knowledge with the first university college of London established in 1826. It was a progressive, enquiring energy which animated all of these concerns. It has been termed the energy of empire since the vast power and resourcefulness of nineteenth century London, at the centre of the imperial world, had someways managed to infiltrate all aspects of its life.Indeed, it can be argued that the allencompassing pudding stone of the latter part of Queen Victorias reign could not have occurred without the impetus of the inexorable industrial revolution beforehand. The invention of steam alone necessitated a rail work and domestic infrastructure open of supporting an empire and, of course, economic imperialism was used much more oftentimes by the British invaders of India and Africa, as opposed to the militaristic imperialism which characterised the German acquisition of territory after the FrancoPrussian War (18701).Therefore, politically, socially and culturally, Britain was moving onward with great haste without instigating anything remotely close to a revolution in spite of the huge changes already described. Only in terms of political economy can this historical period really be seen as fundamentally altering the composition and character of the country, with industrialisation creating the worlds first truly capitalist society. This was the period when Britain enjoyed to the full the economic benefits of having become the shop of the world. Her sum up exports in 1850 were worth 71000000, in 1870 they were worth close 200000000. Her imports trebled in those years from 100000000 to 300000000 whichever way it is looked at, the total wealth of the country was growing fast, and it was more widely distributed throughout the community than before. The measure of the level of industrialisation ought to be gauged in social and political as well as economic terms. Yet, as contemporary Latin American analysts are discovering, facts and figures pertaining to these phenomena are notoriously difficult to calculate. Economically, however, it is apparent for all to see that the growth of Britain between 1780 and 1914 can only be explained in revolutionary language, as a direct result of an unprecedented industrial revolution.There is no doubt that the period 17801914 was the key timeframe in terms of the British experience of the industrial revolution. The difficulty for historians is the phraseology revolution implies one key date, a dramatic event and a sudden shift of national focus discernible after that occasion. In comparison to France, for example, British history at this time appears anything but revolutionary the French undergo three revolutions by the time that the Third Republic was declared passed with the frustration of NapoleonIII. Evolution, as opposed to revolution, would therefore be a more accurate term to describe the myriad of changes that beset British society and political life during this period.And where there did occur a revolution, it took place in factories across the country, in coal fi elds and the birth of trade unions rather than in the execution or dissolution of monarchy and tradition. Much of the greater social, cultural and political changes that occurred after 1918 were as a result of the groundwork cemented during the period 17801914, none greater than the formation of a society based upon class, itself a direct legacy of the industrialisation of the nation, as E.P. Thompson concludes in his own unreproducible dissection of the social consequences of the industrial revolution. This collective class consciousness was indeed the great spiritual gain of the Industrial Revolution, against which the disruption of an older and in many ways more humanly comprehensible way of life must be setthe slow, piecemeal accretions of capital accumulation had meant that the preliminaries to the Industrial Revolution stretched backwards for hundreds of years. From Tudor times onwards this artisan culture had large(p) more complex with each phase of technical and social c hange.BIBLIOGRAPHYP. Ackroyd, London the Biography (Chatto Windus London, 2000)P. Clark P. Slack, English Towns in Transition, 15001700 (Oxford University Press Oxford, London reinvigorated York, 1976)P. Jenkins, A floor of Modern Wales, 15361990 (Longman London New York, 1992)P. Mantoux, The Industrial Revolution in the Eighteenth Century (Metheun London, 1961)P. Mathias, The First Industrial Nation an Economic History of Britain, 17001914 Second Edition (Metheun London, 1983)F. Musgrove, The North of England a History from Roman measure to the Present (Basil Blackwell Oxford, 1990)J. Rule, The Vital Century Englands Developing Economy, 17141815 (Longman London New York, 1992)D. Thompson, England in the Nineteenth Century, 1815-1914 (Penguin London, 1978)E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Penguin London, 1991)E.A. Wrigley, People, Cities and wealth (Basil Blackwell Oxford, 1987)