Industrial Connections

The Industrial Revolution started in Britain’s factories. It was made possible by advances in technology, such as steam engines and farming technologies. Materials such as coal and steel also fueled the revolution. These created connections that reached across the globe. The ways people worked and lived were also changed.

How did these connections shape the lives of people in Britain? How did these changes affect people around the world? We’ll start by looking at how industrial production changed British economics, labor, and culture. Then, we’ll examine three valuable materials. We’ll see how these changed communities, production, and trade globally.

Different people in different places were affected by the Industrial Revolution in different ways. Wealthy Europeans enjoyed new wealth and opportunity. Colonized peoples were forced to labor for Europeans. The working poor in Europe had new opportunities. They also faced brutal working conditions in industrial factories.

Britain’s “dark Satanic Mills”

The Industrial Revolution can be thanked for many products we enjoy today, such as cotton underwear. It was a hard time to live through, however. Millions of working poor moved to cities to work in factories. They faced dismal lives as wage laborers. Poet William Blake called the factories “these dark Satanic Mills.” The German Friedrich Engels also felt that English workers were not treated as human beings. Engels wrote: “They were toiling machines in the service of the few aristocrats who had guided history down to that time.” The Industrial Revolution improved life for a small group of people. But these changes made life worse for many.

The Industrial Revolution had serious effects on communities and culture. Millions of people moved to cities for factory work, affecting life in rural areas. People traditionally lived in extended families. Now, families were becoming nuclear, meaning only parents and children tended to live together. In many cases, the family was just a mother and her children. People lacked the same level of family support. As a result, many people went into poverty or became homeless.

Industrialization endangered many children. In the early 1800s, England had more than a million child workers. Many grew up in orphanages and then went to work in workhouses. Some children were forced to work for no money. Instead, these children received food and a place to sleep.

Women’s lives changed as production moved out of the home. Rural women spun textiles for use at home. There were also opportunities in agriculture and domestic service. One of the few ways women could make money in cities was by working in textile production. Often, married women had to stop working if their husbands demanded it.

Social mobility

Factory work was hard, but sometimes it gave workers new opportunities. For some, it was a chance to earn more money. This could lead to a better social standing.

Many people fought for better conditions. Britain became a wealthy nation. But workers, politicians, and writers began to question why so many British people lived and worked in awful conditions. So people pushed for reform, or change. Reformers pushed for children to be educated instead of working. They also fought for a minimum wage, safe working conditions, and for the work day to be limited to eight hours. Sadly, these reforms often did not reach Britain’s colonies.

Industrialized sugar comes home

Industrial production in Britain depended on materials from around the world. We’ll look at how sugar, wheat, and copper were affected by the Industrial Revolution.

Europeans used enslaved Africans in the Caribbean to harvest sugarcane. In the early 1800s, the British government made slavery against the law. This essentially ended the Atlantic slave trade. It then became harder to make money growing sugarcane in the Caribbean, without the labor of the enslaved. European colonizers turned to Southeast Asia. They forced local peoples to work in large sugar factories.

The sugar became cheaper and the Europeans made more profit. The people in Southeast Asia suffered under difficult conditions. The Caribbean economies were hurt by lower sugar prices.

Wheat-fueled industrialization

Machines were powered by coal. But the people working those machines were powered by wheat, or bread. Britain needed to feed its workers to keep factories running. The British demand for cheap bread changed wheat production around the world.

To get more wheat, the British factory owners paid for railroads to be built in Russia. This allowed wheat to be more easily brought from Russia to England. Britain also paid for new ports and railroads in Argentina. In California, almost all wheat grown here traveled 17,000-miles from San Francisco to Liverpool, England. This money-making crop turned gold miners into wheat farmers. As a result, large parts of inner California then became wheat fields.

Copper connects the world to Wales

Metal ore was historically smelted near the place it was mined. Smelting is the process of heating and collecting metals. But industrialization changed this process. Metals could be brought in from faraway places.

Copper is an orange-colored metal. It is used to make machine parts. The city of Swansea is in Great Britain. Swansea was a center of British copper smelting. Around 1830, steamships made it possible for Swansea to import ore from new places. Copper was brought in from the Caribbean, South America, Australasia, southern Africa, Algeria, the United States and Canada.

By the mid-1800s, Swansea produced 50 percent of the world’s copper. The network relied heavily on forced labor from people from Africa, Indigenous Americans, and Chinese workers. Wealthy European bankers and sailors supported copper production. Copper made in Swansea helped to build steam engines. These ships brought wheat, sugar and other materials around the world. But the high demand had terrible effects on Swansea. The landscape smelled horribly and became covered in smoke.

Conclusion

Sugar, wheat, and copper industries all depended on complex networks. They involved British steam engines, financial systems, and wage laborers. They reached people from different parts of the world. Children in British factories, enslaved people in colonies, and Russian peasants were affected. In each case, industrialization changed local communities. The way people lived and worked would never be the same.