Someone wakes up in the morning. She makes breakfast from food she bought at a grocery store and keeps in boxes in her house. She gets on the train to go to work. She works all day in a factory, making things other people will buy. When her shift is over, she takes the train home.

Just modern daily life for many, right? It happens today in Los Angeles, in Kuala Lumpur, in Paris, and in Abidjan. It was also many people’s routine in the mid-nineteenth century, during the era of the Industrial Revolution. But there was a time before this lifestyle existed. Prior to 1750, there weren’t really any grocery stores. Food was not preserved in boxes and cans. The only “train” was a long line of camels. Hardly anyone worked, for a wage, in a factory.

All of these changes were part of the Industrial Revolution. In this unit, we explore how such an enormous transformation to our way of life came about. We also investigate how people experienced it and what impact it had. Was the impact the same for everyone? Did everyone become a wage worker, taking the train to the factory and buying their food from stores? Did women and men have the same experiences? What was industrialization like in different parts of the world? In rural and in urban areas? For people in different social classes and with different amounts of wealth?

Origins of the Industrial Revolution

The first part of the unit is the Industrial Revolution’s origin story. We often think of this transformation as being driven by Europe. And, it is true, a lot of early industrialization did happen there, especially in Britain, France, Belgium, and their neighbors. Still, to really understand where, how, and why the Industrial Revolution began, we have to think on local and global scales at the same time.

Locally, we must start in Great Britain. When the city of London hosted the 2012 Olympics, the theatrical opening ceremonies featured smokestacks suddenly looming darkly over what had been a peaceful green hillside moments before. Whether the ominous scene conveyed pride or perhaps a note of guilt, the message was clear: Industrialism started here.

How that happened, back in the 1700s, may have something to do with the British environment. Most of the British lived on one relatively flat island, with easy transportation between cities and the countryside. The land provided many important industrial resources, namely coal. It also had a large population, which meant many potential factory workers. British scientists were among the earliest adopters of the rapid technological innovation needed for industrialization. They developed the first useful steam engine, called the Watt steam engine. What’s more, they linked other inventions to the powerful steam engine, such as the spinning mule and the power loom. The earliest railroads were built in Britain. Their cities grew fastest in the eighteenth century as rural residents moved there looking for work. Many also moved because they were forced. British laws were so pro-industry, land could be taken from those who worked on it, turning British farmers into hourly wage factory workers, whether they wanted it or not.

From this local point of view, you can see some of the reasons Britain industrialized first. The particular shape of Britain as a community mattered a great deal, but so did the larger issues surrounding the changing methods of production and distribution.

So let’s switch scales and think globally, with particular attention to the expanding and changing global networks. For example, many of the early British innovations came after similar, if less successful, experiments elsewhere. Before the success of the Watt steam engine, Italian, Chinese, and Islamic scientists had built small steam engines of their own. In the same way, workplaces that sort of looked like factories had existed elsewhere—in slave plantations of the British Caribbean, for example, and in flour mills in the northeast United States. British scientists and innovators learned about these experiments in other regions and used them in their own work.

Great Britain’s empire—itself a vast network—similarly contributed to its industrialization. Laws, beliefs, and financial systems connected people in all parts of the empire, and these connections ended up increasing trade between Britain and its colonies. Farmers in Britain could become factory workers because they could eat food produced elsewhere in the empire. Fish from the Canadian coast, or foods introduced to Britain from elsewhere, like potatoes, fed the increasing number of workers. No wonder fish and chips became a staple British food! British factories also depended on raw materials from their colonies thousands of miles away. In particular, wool from Australia and New Zealand and cotton from India jump-started the British textile industry.

The variable impact of the Industrial Revolution

But industrialization in Britain was only the beginning of global industry. As we see in the second lesson in this unit, the Industrial Revolution soon went global. The United States, other parts of Europe, Egypt, and Japan all industrialized in the mid-to-late nineteenth century. But industrialization was lumpy. Some regions industrialized successfully, if under different models, as was the case in Japan. But in other places, like Egypt and India, European imperialist policies purposely reversed or prevented full industrialization. This protected British producers and networks from Indian or Egyptian competition.

The impact of industrialization varied within communities, as well. For some people, industry was a miracle of productivity and rising wealth. For others, it brought suffering and poverty. It was often more liberating for men than for women, who found themselves confined either to the home or to the grim interior of a factory. What created these differences? How long did they last? How do they endure today? These are all questions that are worth asking as we study the Industrial Revolution.