More handpicked essays just for you.
Impact of the industrial revolution
Impact on the industrial revolution
Impacts of the industrial revolution
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
The industrial revolution was a social and manufacturing boom that began in Britain during the 18th century, but the effects of it have continued on and steadily impacted the world ever since. The world was in need of new technology in order to keep up with the ever-changing demands of society, which was how the industrial revolution began. Britain’s desire for, and accessibility of, new products and ideas that the world was vying for led them to cause a global revolution. The industrial revolution became a global revolution due to the initial popularity and then long-term success of the products that emerged during it, such as the cotton gin and steam engine. The products and their effects created some mixed reactions, because some them benefited …show more content…
societies and the environment, while others caused more harm than good. If it were not for the industrial revolution, the world would have turned out much differently, because a large amount of technology that people became dependent on was invented and perfected during this time. The industrial revolution originated in Britain, and their society essentially became the nucleus of the world and its trading system because of it. The place of origination played a key role in how the industrial revolution became a global revolution. Britain, and Europe in general, was a hub for the distribution of new knowledge and technology, which allowed for the new ideas created during this time to be easily and rapidly spread around the world. But, the industrial revolution could have easily occurred in China several hundred years’ prior. The Chinese had both factors that were required for a mass system of collective learning, such as the industrial revolution, to occur, which are population numbers and connectivity (Fuel for the Ages). China was far more advanced than Europe and the Americas in agricultural skills, technical knowledge, and population. But they had little interest in expanding their presence in the worldwide trade, which is where they lost their capacity to begin a revolution (549). China also did not have the direct access to major trading railroads and waterways that Britain did, and along with Britain’s willingness to take advantage of these options, this was where the power to begin an industrial revolution laid as well. The British were primarily focused on spreading their skills and knowledge across the world, and they found the opportunity to do so by depending on the cotton gin, steam engine, and the rewards that ensued due to these inventions (548). Eli Whitney’s cotton gin supported Britain’s textile industry into becoming “the world’s most dynamic industry” (549).
Cotton and textiles were some of the most important products that became popularized during the industrial revolution. Cotton shirts and cloths were necessities all over the world, and since they could be cheaply and rapidly produced due to the cotton gin, most people were able to afford them. In fact, “the price of cotton cloth declined by nearly 50 percent between 1780 and 1850,” which helped boost Britain’s economy as well as their trading (548). While textiles became Britain’s more profitable industry, James Watt and Matthew Boulton’s perfection of the steam engine was perhaps the most important innovation of the era. Not only did the steam engine allow for vessels and locomotives to travel more efficiently, “steam-powered engines also improved sugar refining, pottery making, and other industrial processes,” creating even more opportunities for products to be cheaply and rapidly produced and then shipped off to trade …show more content…
(548). Occasionally the effects of the industrial revolution were not always as wholesome as they seemed. Due to the increases of factories and jobs that were required to keep the cotton mills and steam engines running, cities became packed and defiled. This did allow for Europe to catch up to China’s advances in population, because more jobs led to populations to nearly double as citizens were encouraged to move closer to big cities (551). The British economy and government benefited from the population upsurge, but the citizens certainly did not. The water was dirty, living spaces were overcrowded, and diseases were prevalent (551). Citizens who lived outside of cities were at a loss as well. Many farmers were run out of business with the new usage of equipment and machinery, which either led them and their families to move into the city, contributing to the filthiness, or to protest (551). Protests and unwillingness to cooperate was not only common in Britain, but in Afro-Eurasia as well. The industrial revolution had the most direct impacts in Europe and the Americas, but the rest of the world was obviously impacted by it, and not always positively.
Europeans continued on with their stereotypical ways of inflicting their ideas upon other groups of people, whether they should have or not. The new inventions brought about by the industrial revolution were appealing to many countries. Plus, as Europe was the societal epicenter of a majority of the world’s new products and inventions, the Europeans were strengthening their economies while sporadically harming others. India was manipulated into abandoning their traditional ways of trade and partaking in Europe’s East India Company, which ultimately led to the downfall of their industrial sector (557). India became an exporter of goods, like raw cotton, gold, and silver, that they were previously importing. Britain’s success with the cotton gin stripped away India’s role in the textile industry, as they could no longer afford to produce materials and make a profit, with the British textiles being produced so inexpensively (556-557). Europeans convinced the Indians, along with the Chinese and Egyptians, to become “more industrious, producing less for themselves and more for distant markets” (560). This manipulation was exceedingly beneficial for the greedy Europeans, but it caused for millions of people across the globe to lose jobs and
suffer. Overall, the industrial revolution was a global revolution because all people were impacted by it, but not everyone inevitably benefited from it like the British and other Europeans did. The desire for new forms of knowledge and inventions, which was the cause of the revolution, and then the effects of such new ideas, shown in the ultimate success of the cotton gin and steam engine, allowed for the entire world to be affected. Europe created an even grander global network that what was already previously existing, and “the explosion of cultural evolution that started 200 years ago has yet to cease” (Fuel for the Ages). The industrial revolution caused equally good and bad effects, as new inventions and ideas led to more jobs and prosperity in world trade, but people also began to suffer in new ways due to the working and living environments created by these inventions.
A graduate from Yale University had thoughts of becoming a lawyer, but he needed a job urgently. After a tutoring job fell through, he accepted a position on a plantation in Georgia. His employer, Catherine Green, saw much talent in him and encouraged him to find a way to make cotton profitable. He promptly began working on a solution to the problem of separating the seeds from the cotton. On March 14, 1794, Eli Whitney was granted a patent for the cotton gin.1 The cotton gin impacted American industry and slavery changing the course of American history.
The Industrial Revolution was a fundamental change in the production of goods that altered the life of the working class. Similar to most other historical turning points, it had skeptics, or people that doubted the change, and fanatics, people who saw the value in the change being made. The Industrial Revolution and the period that followed shortly after highlight these varying opinions, as people were more conflicted than ever about the costs of industrialization. While Industrialization started in England as an attempt to capitalize on the good fortune they had struck, it quickly developed into a widespread phenomenon that made the product of goods more exact and controlled by higher level people. Many industries, such as the cotton and textile
The Cotton Gin was an invention that allowed the mass production of cotton. Cotton was previously a very difficult crop to profit from, because of the long hours required to separate cotton seeds from the actual cotton fibers. This all changed when Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin in 1793, a machine that sped up the process, thereby making cotton farming a profitable industry for the Southern States. With large areas of prime land ready for crops the Southern states bought and transported slaves in record numbers in order to work on their cotton farms. Although there are no definitive statistics approximately 1,000,000 slaves were moved west from the 'old Southern states' to the new ones; i.e. Maryland, Virginia and the Carolinas to Georgia, Tennessee and Alabama. The new ease of cotton ginning coupled with the high demand for cotton in the textile industry gave rise to the need for a workforce to harvest the cotton. The farmers turned to a readily available labor force they didn't have to pay: slaves.
The factory system was the key to the industrial revolution. The factory system was a combination of Humans and new technology. New technology was arriving every day. The greatest invention during this time was the steam engine. The creation of the steam engine was credited to James Watt. There had been other steam engines before James Watt’s but none of them were efficient. Watt’s engine was the first efficient engine that could be used in a factory. The steam engine had the strength of ten thousand men.(Pollard) This was not the only invention that helped the factory system evolve. Textiles were a major product of the Industrial Revolution. Production was slow at first in the factory. In 1764, a British inventor named James Hargraves invented the “Spinning Jenny.” This lowered production time which enabled the factory to produce more per day. In 1773, John Kay, an English inventor, created the “flying shuttle” which lowered the production time even more.(Encarta) If production had not been speed up, the Industrial Revolution would have not had that big of effect as it did in North America.
In the late 1700’s the slave population in the United States had decreased. Before the invention of the cotton gin the South, which could only make money by farming, was loosing money because it didn’t have a major crop to export to England and the North besides tobacco and rice. However, these crops could be grown elsewhere. Cotton was the key because it couldn’t be grown in large amounts in other places, but only one type of cotton that could be cleaned easily. This was long-staple cotton. Another problem arose; long-staple cotton only could be grown along the coast. There was another strain of cotton that until then could not be cleaned easily so it wasn’t worth growing. The cotton gin was the solution to this problem. With the invention of the cotton gin short stemmed cotton could be cleaned easily making cotton a valued export and it could be grown anywhere in the south. The era of the “Cotton Kingdom” began with this invention leading into an explosion in the necessity of slaves.
The Industrial Revolution was the major advancement of technology in the late 18th and early 19th century that began in Britain and spread to America. The national and federal government helped the United States grow into a self reliant nation with improvements in transportation, technology, manufacturing and the growth of the population. Americans had an economy based on manual labour, which was replaced by one dominated by industry and the manufacture of machinery. It began with the expansion of the textile industries and the development of iron-making techniques, and trade expansion was enabled by the introduction of canals, improved roads and railways. One of the first to kick off, was the textile industry.
In conclusion, essentially cotton got the United States of America up and running, with some help of course. There were many things that pushed the cotton industry along including the British textile industry, to the Cotton Gin, to the steam boat being able to transport more cotton. Cotton, or “white gold” was a key factor in American history, claiming the south as “The Cotton Kingdom.”
Clothes, bandages, medical supplies, carpets, blankets, and many other common materials and supplies that we use daily are made from cotton. Hundreds of materials that we wear, sleep on, and walk on daily use cotton. Everyone in the world uses cotton in some way every day. Cotton contains very unique qualities which have made it into an extremely useful crop for hundreds of years all over the world. Cotton stands atop all charts as the most used fiber plant in every country. It held a very influential place in the economic system and influenced many world trade markets. Cotton known by its famous nickname of “King Cotton” in the U.S. was the driving factor behind the widespread and lucrative American slave trade in the Atlantic. Before and
The Industrial Revolution did not start simultaneously around the world, but began in the most highly civilized and educated country in Western Europe – England. An empire like Great Britain was able to prevent the flow of new technology and experienced technicians to its colonies even while new machinery, like the spinning shuttle and the spinning jenny, was being used to develop textile manufacturing at home in England. The British Parliament was able to control its territories through laws and other restrictions. However, Britain’s futile attempts to block the development of new technologies in the American colonies led directly to the rise of the textile industry and the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the United States. From the first Navigation Act in 1651 to the “Intolerable Acts” and Trade Acts, the British Parliament attempted to dominate the world’s textile industry by passing increasingly strict taxes and acts designed to prevent the establishment of textile manufacturing in the American colonies. Concurrently, American textile companies began to offer rewards and bounties to mill workers who would emigrate from England bringing their knowledge of textile technology (World of Invention). At the same time, English-born, textile mill-trained, Samuel Slater illegally emigrated to the new country of America with secrets and memories of English textile technology. Within a year, Slater had established the first spinning mill in America, thus beginning the American Industrial Revolution.
Industrial Revolution, which took place over much of the nineteenth century, had many advantages. It provided people with tools for a better life; people were no longer dependent on the land for all of their goods. The Industrial Revolution made it possible for people to control nature more than they ever had before. However, now people were dependent on the new machines of the Industrial Age (1). The Revolution brought with it radical changes in the textile and engine worlds; it was a time of reason and innovations. Although it was a time of progress, there were drawbacks to the headway made in the Industrial Revolution. Granted, it provided solutions to the problems of a world without industry. However, it also created problems with its mechanized inventions that provided new ways of killing. Ironically, there was much public faith in these innovations; however, these were the same inventions that killed so many and contributed to a massive loss of faith. These new inventions made their debut in the first world war (2) ).
The Industrial Revolution was a major turning point in mankind's history. It is no more viewed as the drastic change that its name prescribes, for it was the consequence of an economic evolution that began in the sixteenth century. However, the eighteenth century does speak to an unequivocal change in innovation, technology and the growth of the economy. The acclaimed inventions–the spinning jenny, the steam engine, coke smelting, thus forth–deserve their eminence, for they mark the beginning of a process that has conveyed the West, in any event, to the mass thriving of the twenty-first century. The motivation behind this article is to identify what happened in the eighteenth century, in Britain, and how the methodology of their invention has changed the world.
The Industrial Revolution was the rapid growth of industrialization in Europe and later the U.S. Starting in England in the late eighteenth century, the Industrial Revolution was a time of great advancements. Changes took place in almost every industry including transportation, mining, textile, and more. But didn’t just stop there, modifications were also made to the social world. All of these new ideas combined made what we know today as the Industrial Revolution.1
The steam engine use throughout the several professions revolutionized numerous aspects of Western European Society. The first important use of the steam engine came in 1776. The steam engine was used to show the Cornish miners how successful it could be in removing the water from the mineshafts. This proved to be of great importance to the Cornish, because one of their biggest problems was the flooding of the mining shafts. (The Penetration of the Industry by Steam Power) The mine owners “worried…that the mines would have to be shut down unless water could be pumped out of the shafts.” “The engine successfully raised water from the bottom of deep mines.” (Siegel, 17) This saved the shutting down of the mines, which were essential to further the economy. Not only did the steam engine save the mines, it provided a method of mining that proved to be extremely quicker than the traditional techniques. One of the biggest incomes for the British was found in their textile industry. In the textile industry, the domestic system presented many problems for merchants. They had difficulty regulating standards of workmanship and maintaining schedules for completing work. Workers sometimes sold some of the yarn or cloth in their own profit. As the demand in cloth increased, merchants often had to compete with one another for the limited amount of workers available in manufacturing, which increased merchants’ costs. As a result, merchants turned increasingly to machinery, which was powered by the steam engine, for greater production and also turned to factories for central control over their workers.
The industrial revolution of 17th and 18th centuries saw the transformation of Britain from a Neolithic nation into an industrious nation. However, this spread quickly throughout the world, introducing the modernisation of agriculture, revolution in power and manufacturing of textile.
Most famously recognized as a time of great technological innovation, the Industrial Revolution gave birth too two of the most transforming technologies, which came to spur the revolution on; cotton spinning and steam power. The two technologies are closely linked, the improved Steam Engine, invented by James Watt and patented in 1755, was originally used ...