The Industrial Revolution

For most of history, economic growth was slow and mostly absorbed by population growth. Starting in Britain in the second half of the eighteenth century, output per person began to rise steadily and kept rising. That break with the past is what historians mean by the Industrial Revolution.

The change had three linked parts: machines replacing hand tools, new sources of power such as the steam engine replacing muscle, wind and water, and the factory replacing the home workshop as the place where goods were made.

• Plentiful coal close to the surface and near water transport.
• High wages relative to the cost of energy, which made labour-saving machines worth inventing.
• A large internal market without internal tolls, plus overseas colonies and trade.
• Banks, joint-stock companies and patent law that helped finance and protect inventions.
• An agricultural revolution that raised farm output and freed people to work in towns.

Textiles led the way. A series of inventions, including John Kay's flying shuttle, James Hargreaves's spinning jenny, Richard Arkwright's water frame and Samuel Crompton's spinning mule, multiplied how much thread and cloth a worker could produce.

Arkwright's mill at Cromford, opened in 1771, is often called the first modern factory. Workers kept set hours, machines set the pace, and the owner controlled the whole process. Much of the raw cotton came from plantations in the American South worked by enslaved people, which tied industrial Britain to slavery.

Early steam engines, such as Thomas Newcomen's of 1712, pumped water out of mines but wasted most of their fuel. James Watt's separate condenser, patented in 1769, made engines far more efficient, and later improvements let them turn wheels and drive machinery anywhere, not just beside rivers.

Abraham Darby's use of coke instead of charcoal to smelt iron made iron cheap. Cheap iron and steam together produced the railway. The Liverpool and Manchester Railway, opened in 1830, was the first intercity line to rely entirely on steam locomotives, and within decades rail networks were transforming travel and trade across Europe and North America.

Manchester, Birmingham and other towns grew at astonishing speed. Housing, clean water and sewers could not keep up, and diseases such as cholera and typhoid spread through crowded districts. Life expectancy in the worst industrial cities was lower than in the countryside.

Factory work was long, dangerous and closely supervised, and children worked in mills and mines. Reformers, journalists and workers themselves pushed back. Britain's Factory Acts, starting in the early nineteenth century, limited child labour and working hours, and trade unions slowly won legal recognition.

From about 1870 a second industrial revolution brought steel, chemicals, electricity, the telephone and the internal combustion engine. Germany and the United States became leading industrial powers, and research laboratories turned invention into an organised business.

In the long run, industrialisation raised living standards to levels unimaginable before, and it spread to country after country. It also increased the use of fossil fuels, beginning the rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide behind today's climate change, and widened the gap in power between industrial and non-industrial societies.