The consequence was a steady flow of labour moving into rural industry and urban trades. It all helped to create an economy and a society uniquely positioned for the dramatic restructuring that we know was about to occur.
Between and , output from British mines increased 66 fold and by the end of the period Britain enjoyed the cheapest energy supplies in the world. This cheap energy was to have profound implications for future economic growth, but for the present Allen confines himself to questions of causation: why did this expansion occur in Britain not elsewhere and why now and not earlier? In a style that will be more fully developed in the second half of the book, Allen also pays close attention to the role that human actors played in causing economic change.
Before looking at the ways in which high wages and cheap coal came together to foster the technological innovation that underpinned the industrial revolution, the strands of these opening chapters are brought together in the and final chapter of the first half of the book, which turns to mathematical representation to explain why Britain succeeded in industrialising when it did.
Using simultaneous equations to represent social and economic development, Allen tests four variables — the wage rate, urbanisation, agricultural productivity, and proto-industrialisation — in several European countries. The model shows England and the Netherlands developing along a different trajectory from , characterised by urbanisation, rising agricultural performance, and high real wages.
In the second part of the book, Allen switches into a different gear. Part one has sketched the contours of the British economy with a broad brush, highlighting its key distinctive features — high wages and low energy costs — and developing an account of how it had come to take this form.
Part two, turns away from the general and focuses instead upon the particular. Rejecting the idea that the British possessed a special genius for invention, Allen instead focuses upon how the combination of expensive labour and cheap energy provided industrialists with an incentive to innovate.
What follows are three tightly-focussed case studies tracing the ways in which abstract ideas were transformed into inventions with practical utility, and contrasting British receptiveness to new technologies with the indifference towards them initially displayed by manufacturers in other parts of the globe. Chapter seven takes as it subject the invention often considered most pivotal to British industrialisation: the steam engine. Allen identifies two phases of the development.
The difficulty with the Newcomen engine, however, was that it operated with a jerky motion and had a prodigious appetite for fuel — both of which served to limit its usefulness to pumping water from coal mines. Allen convincingly argues that making versatile and fuel-efficient engines that actually worked was a complex and expensive process, and looks in detail and how and why British engineers invested so much time and effort into solving this problem.
The company helped Britain compete with its European neighbours and grow in economic and trading strength. Darby was able to sell 81 tons of iron goods that year. He would become a crucial figure in industry, discovering a method of producing pig iron fuelled by coke rather than charcoal. The new invention allowed for automatic machine looms which could weave wider fabrics and speed up the manufacturing process.
Cotton exports would help make Britain a commercial success. It was named after Francis Egerton, 3rd Duke of Bridgewater who commissioned it in order to transport the coal from his mines in Worsley.
The idea consisted of a metal frame with eight wooden spindles. The invention allowed the workers to produce cloth much quicker thus increasing productivity and paving the way for further mechanisation. To quantify the enormous power of his new engines, James Watt also invented a new unit of measurement: The Horsepower.
His steam engines would also go on to power the new mills that were starting to appear in the Industrial North. This involved making bar iron with a reverberating furnace stirred with rods. His invention proved successful for iron refining techniques.
The workers ate oat cakes for breakfast and dinner. They were rarely given anything else, despite the long hours. Although the food was often unfit for consumption, the workers ate it due to severe hunger. During this time of economic change and population increase, the controversial issue of child labor came to industrial Britain.
The mass of children, however, were not always treated as working slaves, but they were actually separated into two groups. It was work or die of starvation in this case, and their families counted on them to earn money. Therefore, they fell into the hands of government officials, so at that point their lives as young children turned into those of slaves or victims with no one or nothing to stand up for them.
So what was it exactly that ended this horror? Investments in machinery soon led to an increase in wages for adults, making it possible for child labor to end, along with some of the poverty that existed.
Video on child labor during the Industrial Revolution. The most intellectual scholars and authors of England expressed an early interest in the rationality and preciseness of science. This quickly changed, however, when Romantics came to view this evolution of machine as a threat to the individual Gale.
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