Industrial Revolution Dbq

Since the beginning of humankind, there were many events that helped the world, but the most important event of all is the industrial revolution which surely helped influence many countries all over the world, but most specifically Great Britain. The industrial revolution caused major changes in Britain, it helped improve farming and trade. It also helped influence Britain scientists and engineers into building many other machines that helped improve the country by making workers life easier. And even though it did go through some kind of negative effect, by the end the negative obstacles were fixed and Great Britain was 50 years ahead of the rest of the world.

Many inventions were created to aid workers 12 hours a day and end up not producing

as much. For example the spinning jenny, the water frame, and the spinning machine, all those machines helped improve the cotton industry greatly by increasing the amount of product that were produced and make the workers life easier, as it was supported in the text “in fact, machinery raised the wages of spinners and weavers owing to the great prosperity it brought to the trade. In fifteen years the cotton trade trebled [tripled] itself; from 1788 to 1803 has been called ‘its golden age’.” (Document 2). Not just the cotton industry was affected by the industrial revolution but also the iron industry, where the iron industry was doing great where the amount of iron used was only increasing,“ The iron industry had been equally revolutionised by the invention of smelting by pit-coal brought into use between 1740 and 1750, and by the application in 1788 of the steam-engine to blast furnaces. In the eight years which followed this latter date, the amount of iron manufactured nearly doubled itself.”.

Many people might say “at what cost” and you may quote the fact “that many workers were injured and most of them were kids who were 10 years old when they started working, and their working hours were from 5 in the morning to 9 at night which caused them to leave school because they never have time so most of them can’t write or read or both but not just that but also they had the only couple of minutes to eat food once in that 16 hours.” (document 7), And I may say this is very inaccurate in fact many philosophers have said many good things about the working conditions for those kids in the factories like Andrew Ure “I have visited many factories both in Manchester and in the surrounding districts ,and I never saw a single a single instance of corporal beating inflicted on a child.

They seemed to be always cheerful and alert, taking pleasure in the light play of their muscle.” (document 8), as you can see children did not seem to mind the work, in fact, they seemed very happy and none of them were bruised or in pain from the work they were doing. “children are entirely fed, clothed, and educated by Mr. Dale. The others live with their parents in the village and have a weekly allowance for their work. The healthy appearance of these children has frequently attracted the attention of the traveler. Special regulations, adopted by Mr. Dale, have made this factory very different from the others in this kingdom. Out of the nearly 3000 children employed in the mills from 1785 to 1797, only fourteen have died.” (Document 10), people can never complain about how those children are being treated, they’re being fed, clothed, and educated and many if not all of these children are from poor families that most likely life in a small house with 15 other members of the family and the house is most likely filthy and filled with

diseases.

As it’s been mentioned earlier the industrial revolution helped inspire many of the British scientists and engineers to make amazing machines that not just helped Great Britain, but it also helped the whole world up till now. For example the “great changes in the agricultural world, the horse-drawn seed drill by Jethro Tull, the stock breeding by Robert Blackwell, and Mechanical reaper by Cyrus McCormick”. (document 19), that’s only for the farming technology, there is also in the “Textile Industry’s Machinery like the flying shuttle by John Kay, Spinning Jenny by James Hargreaves and the cotton gin by Eli Whitney.” (document 20) there are much more amazing inventions that happened during the industrial revolution that was not only useful at the time, but they are more than just useful today.

To sum all of it up the industrial revolution did help influence Great Britain which helped the whole world, from making very good working environment which influenced people into working in factories to influence scientists into working on making more amazing machines that helped the economy, without the industrial revolution in a Great Britain the world would of been very different place and our economy would not be as good as it is today.