Industrial Connections

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

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

Around the world, people experienced the changes of the Industrial Revolution in different ways. Some wealthy Europeans enjoyed new wealth and opportunity. But people in European colonies were forced to work so European imperialists could profit. In Europe, the working poor were given new work opportunities. But in those jobs, they often faced brutal working conditions in factories.

Britain’s “dark Satanic Mills”

The Industrial Revolution can be thanked for many products we enjoy today. Cotton underwear is one example. For the people who lived through it, however, the Industrial Revolution was dehumanizing and depressing. Millions of working poor people moved to cities. They faced dismal lives as wage laborers. The poet William Blake famously referred to the factories as “these dark Satanic Mills.” The German Friedrich Engels also felt that English workers were not treated as human beings. He wrote: “They were merely toiling machines in the service of the few aristocrats who had guided history down to that time.” The Industrial Revolution improved life for the few but many struggled in the harsh environment.

The Industrial Revolution had drastic 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 which provided a lot of support. In the cities, they lived in nuclear families, which are only the parents and children. In many cases, the family was just a mother and her children. Without the same level of family support, many people went into poverty or became homeless.

Children were exposed to very dangerous conditions. Early nineteenth-century England had more than a million child laborers. Many grew up in orphanages and then went to work in workhouses. Some children were forced to work for no money in exchange for food and a bed.

Women’s lives were changed as production moved out of homes and into factories. Rural women spun textiles for use at home. There were also opportunities in agriculture and domestic service. One of the few industrial jobs for women was to work in factories, often in textile production. Once a woman got married, though, husbands usually demanded their wives stopped working altogether.

Social mobility

Factory life was brutal, but many saw it as a chance to move up in life. They moved from their farms to the cities hoping to make more money.

The hardships of the Industrial Revolution caused many people to fight for better conditions. Britain became the wealthiest nation on Earth. 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 fought for children to be educated instead of being forced to work. 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

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

Europeans brought enslaved Africans to the Caribbean to harvest sugarcane. Then, the British government outlawed the slave trade in the early 1800s. This meant that Caribbean sugar which relied on forced labor became more expensive. European colonizers turned to Southeast Asia, particularly the Dutch East Indies (today’s Indonesia). The Dutch 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

Coal powered machines, but it was wheat that powered the workers. Britain’s demand for wheat changed wheat production in the nineteenth century.

In the early nineteenth century, bread prices soared. This created unrest in Britain’s cities, where many working-class people depended on cheap bread. The British needed cheap bread to keep factories running. Their efforts to import more wheat affected wheat-producing regions around the world.

To get more wheat, the British factory owners funded the construction of railroads in Russia. The British also paid for new ports and railroads in Argentina. In California, almost all wheat grown here made the 17,000-mile sea journey 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

For thousands of years, humans smelted metal ore near where it was mined. Smelting is the process of heating and collecting metal ore. This changed because of industrialization.

Copper is an orange-colored metal that conducts heat well. It was valued for making engine parts. The city of Swansea, in Wales, was a center of British copper smelting. Around 1830, steamships made it possible for Swansea to import copper ore from faraway places. Copper was brought in from the Caribbean, South America, Australasia, southern Africa, Algeria, the United States, and Canada.

By the mid-nineteenth century, Swansea produced 50 percent of the world’s copper. The network included enslaved Africans, Indigenous Americans, and Chinese laborers. Wealthy British and Indian bankers and sailors supported copper production. Copper made in Swansea was used in steam engines that brought wheat, sugar, and other materials around the world. But the high demand had poor effects on Swansea. The landscape soon smelled terribly of sulfur and smoke from copper furnaces.

Conclusion

Sugar, wheat, and copper industries depended on complex networks. These networks involved British steam engines, financial systems, and wage laborers. They reached people from different parts of the world. British children in factories, enslaved and colonized people farming sugar, and peasants of southern Russia were all affected. In each case, local communities and the lives of workers were changed.