Industrialization In The 19th Century

During the 19th and early 20th centuries, England underwent vital and irreversible economic, political, social and industrial changes which revealed that England’s strength lay not in its military but in its economic capabilities. During this time England built a powerful trading system and generated the credit necessary to pay for a relatively small navy that protected and extended the trading system and destroyed those of its competition. At the same time, England was able to raise the funds to finance the ground-breaking industrial technology that launched England ahead of its rivals lasting more than half a century. It was this process, combined with skilled political management that enabled England to emerge the most powerful country in

During the 19th century England went from mercantilism to free trade evidenced by repealing the Corn Laws which opened the British market to unregulated competition, grain prices fell, and food became more plentiful. During this time England was also referred to as the “workshop of the world” because its finished products were produced so efficiently and economically that they could undersell locally manufactured goods in almost any other market, especially cotton cloth. England would import raw materials and manufacture goods from those materials in its factories to sell and create markets for its manufactured goods. An excellent example of this was the textile industry. By the middle of the nineteenth century, global cotton production was firmly locked into a trans-Atlantic pattern. Cotton was produced via slave labor in the United States and was processed into its raw form by the slaves. It was then sold by plantation owners to the major manufacturing firms in England. The production of raw cotton by slaves and the manufacturing of cloth by massive English industrial power resulted in high-quality cloth that was cheap enough to undercut the native cloth industries of practically every other place included in the global market