The Industrial Revolution

For almost all of human history, the amount one person could make in a day had a ceiling, and that ceiling was muscle. A weaver worked at a hand loom in a cottage; a miller ground corn with the help of a stream or the wind. Then, in Britain from roughly the 1760s, something began that nobody planned and nobody yet had a name for. Within a century, cloth was being made in buildings the size of cathedrals, iron was being poured in quantities that would have astonished a medieval kingdom, and people travelled faster than a galloping horse. Historians argue about the dates, and some dislike the word "revolution" at all, since the change took three or four generations rather than a single year. But the shape of it is not in doubt: between the reign of George III and the reign of Victoria, Britain stopped being a country of villages and became a country of towns, and the way people made their living was rebuilt from the ground up.

Why Britain, and why then? It is safer to give several answers than one. Britain sat on abundant coal, much of it close to the surface and to water. Through a burst of canal-building from the 1760s, and later through the railways, that coal could be moved cheaply to wherever it was wanted. Changes in farming meant fewer hands were needed on the land, so labour was available. Capital and raw materials flowed in through a colonial and slave-trading empire: it must be said plainly that the cotton industry, the spearhead of the whole transformation, ran on cotton grown by enslaved people in the American South. Patent law gave inventors a reason to invent, and a culture of practical tinkering turned ideas into machines. Banks and a stable government made borrowing possible. No single one of these explains the whole thing, and you are free to disagree with the historians about which mattered most.

The device at the centre of the story was not invented in this period. Thomas Newcomen's atmospheric engine had been pumping water out of mines since the early eighteenth century; it worked, but it swallowed coal. In the 1760s James Watt, an instrument-maker in Glasgow, realised that enormous energy was being wasted by heating and cooling the same cylinder over and over, and solved the problem by adding a separate condenser. The idea reached the world thanks to the Birmingham manufacturer Matthew Boulton, who had the capital and the factory, and who went into partnership with Watt in the 1770s. Between them they made it possible to harness steam almost anywhere — not only beside a coal pit or a river. That is the hinge of the whole story: once power could be placed wherever an owner wished, output stopped depending on the weather or the flow of a stream, and depended only on how much coal could be fed to the fire.

The first industry to be thoroughly mechanised was cotton. A run of inventions — Hargreaves's spinning jenny, Arkwright's water frame, Crompton's mule and later Cartwright's power loom — meant that thread and cloth could be produced faster than by any number of hands. The consequence was social as much as technical: work left the home. A hand loom could sit in a cottage; a water frame and an engine could not. So the work went to the machine, and the workers went with it. Arkwright's mill at Cromford, opened in the early 1770s, is often taken as the model. Inside, a large workforce kept the machinery running by day and, by artificial light, into the night. Time itself was reorganised: the seasons gave way to the factory bell, and lateness became an offence for which a worker could be fined. Twelve- and fourteen-hour days were ordinary, the machines were unguarded, and children — some no more than five or six — were employed precisely because they were small enough to crawl beneath the moving frames.

Beneath the mills lay the mines, and beneath the mines lay the whole system, because everything ran on coal. Men, women and children worked underground in the dark, dragging tubs of coal along low tunnels, with flooding, roof falls and gas explosions ever possible. Above ground, the towns swelled. Manchester, Leeds, Glasgow and Birmingham grew at a pace no authority was equipped to manage, and this sudden urbanisation created a crisis that had nothing to do with machinery at all. Back-to-back houses were thrown up without drains and without clean water; whole families shared a single room. The result was squalor of a kind that shocked even visitors who thought they knew what poverty looked like. Cholera arrived in the 1830s and returned again and again, killing rich and poor but the poor far more efficiently, and only slowly was the link between filth, water and disease understood and acted upon.

Then came the railway, and distance stopped meaning what it had always meant. The Stockton and Darlington line opened in 1825 and the Liverpool and Manchester in 1830, and within two decades Britain was laced with track. Goods that had crawled by canal now moved in hours; people who had never left their county travelled to the sea, to the capital, to a new job. The effect on time was stranger still. Every town had kept its own local noon, differing from London's by a few minutes — an irrelevance until a timetable made it a danger. The railway companies imposed a single time along their lines, and through that quiet decision the country was persuaded to standardise its clocks. It is a small example of a large truth: a change made for the convenience of an industry reached into every pocket in the country, and nobody had voted for it.

People did not accept all this quietly. Between roughly 1811 and 1816, groups of skilled textile workers remembered as the Luddites broke into workshops at night and smashed the frames that were making their trade obsolete. They are often dismissed as men who simply hated machines; in fact their quarrel was with employers who used machinery to cut wages and replace trained hands with cheap unskilled labour. The government answered with troops and the gallows. In 1819 a huge crowd gathered at St Peter's Field in Manchester to demand parliamentary reform, cavalry were sent in, and a number of people were killed and hundreds injured — an event named Peterloo in bitter imitation of Waterloo. Out of this long unrest grew the trade unions. Reform came slowly: Factory Acts from the 1830s limited the hours children could work and sent inspectors to check; an Act in 1842 removed women and the youngest boys from underground work; and public health legislation from the late 1840s began at last to treat sanitation as a duty of government. What reformers called exploitation, mill owners called business.

Did ordinary people actually become better off? This is the great quarrel among historians of the period, and it has been running for over a century. One side points to cheaper cloth, cheaper goods, longer lives and a population growing as it never had before. The other points to evidence that real wages moved very little for decades after the machines arrived, while hours lengthened, cities poisoned their inhabitants and skilled trades were destroyed. The most careful modern answer is uncomfortable: the gains were real but late, so that a generation, perhaps two, paid the price for a prosperity their grandchildren enjoyed. Meanwhile the model spread. Belgium industrialised early, followed by France and the German states, each borrowing British techniques and engineers; the United States went further and faster; and from the 1870s Japan compressed the process into a few decades.

The echoes are still sounding, and they are not simple. Mass production eventually made the consumer economy possible — the ordinary abundance of clothes, tools, medicines and machines we take for granted. The movement it began has never stopped: for the first time in history, most of humanity now lives in cities rather than in fields. It created industrial capitalism and, in the same motion, organised labour, since factories that gathered thousands of workers under one roof also taught them that they could act together. It is no accident that Karl Marx wrote his analysis of capital in London, using the reports of British factory inspectors as evidence. And there is one echo that would have astonished everybody involved: the fossil-fuel economy begun in these decades is the root of the climate crisis we are now trying to escape. That is what makes the final accounting so hard — the same century that lifted so many out of hunger also lit a fire its grandchildren are still trying to put out.