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Unit 5 Frames
Unit 5 Frames
The Industrial Revolution was a shift in the way people produced and distributed goods, but it also had a deep impact on concepts of identity and rights.
As this video progresses, key ideas will be introduced to invoke discussion.
Think about the following questions as you watch the video
What did preindustrial production and distribution look like?
Why did industrialized societies have an advantage over non-industrialized societies?
How did the movement of people away from villages and into industrial cities lead to new types of communities?
What were conditions like in many factories?
How did the conditions in factories lead to the development of new networks?
: In 1750, most people everywhere in the world were still farmers and herders and artisans
: —people who produced food, and made things, typically with their hands.
: In most communities, most people worked to produce food.
: They may have worked their own land or they may have worked land that belonged to someone else.
: But they grew the food and they sold what they didn't eat to other people.
: A much smaller group of people, much smaller, called artisans,
: had some expertise that allowed them to produce and sell goods, often made in small workshops.
: Now, artisans might accumulate a little bit of wealth based on their skills, but usually not a lot.
: It was only an even smaller group that could be wealthy.
: These people were merchants, nobles, or educated professionals.
: Now, of course, things did vary a little between societies around the world.
: Still, as late as 1750, the methods of production and distribution in every society around the world
: really continued to rely on the same energy sources that humans had for millennia
: things the sun and the wind and water and muscle power.
: But beginning around 1750, that all started to change.
: And we call this change the Industrial Revolution.
: Now the Industrial Revolution was first and foremost a dramatic transformation
: in how we make and move the things we use.
: And it ended up reshaping human societies in every part of the world.
: Industrialization began thanks to some innovations in the way to use of chemical energy.
: People discovered that by burning fossil fuels like coal,
: industrialized societies could do lots of automated work very fast.
: So this transformation would meant that they needed fewer farmers, herders, and artisans.
: And instead, more and more people became “workers”.
: Workers are people who work for wages in factories, or on the trains and steamships that transported industrialized goods.
: Because there were more workers, fewer people ate food they had produced themselves, instead buying it in a store.
: And fewer people bought specialized products made by hand by artisans.
: Instead, they bought identical, mass-produced goods made by dozens or hundreds of people working together.
: Of course, the changes created by the Industrial Revolution didn’t happen everywhere overnight.
: They began in a few places, and affected just select groups of people.
: But soon those changes began to spread. And spread. And spread. And here's why.
: You see, industrialized societies had a big advantage over non-industrialized societies.
: And that's because they could be spectacularly productive.
: This meant that fewer people could produce more things in less time.
: For example, an automated factory, driven by chemical energy,
: could produce more goods more cheaply and faster than any individual working with hand-tools.
: Of course, this new system increased the profits for business owners,
: and it also provided more products to be bought by a new a new group of people emerging at this time, the middle class.
: And all of this was really attractive to the people who made economic decisions, or who benefited from them.
: Lots of these people also had the ability to change laws to suit them,
: and so they began to create political and legal systems that favored industrialization.
: Of course, there were large groups of people who did not share in the new wonders of industrialization,
: and their story, which we tell in this unit as well, is as important as the stories of those who did.
: But overall the Industrial Revolution launched major transformations in people's communities.
: Think about it. As farming became less feasible as a way of life,
: many people were forced to move from the countryside to cities in order to find work.
: As more and more people crowded into industrial cities, new types of communities began to form.
: The old system of village life, which relied on people having extended families
: became less common, and we began to see the development of a model of a nuclear family.
: A father, a mother, and their children living together and relying upon themselves.
: Within these families, in order to afford life in industrial societies, more and more women joined the workforce.
: And children, too, often worked for wages to support their families.
: But the conditions in factories were dirty and dangerous, and wages people were paid were meager.
: So eventually, many working-class people began to band together
: to demand better working conditions and more money.
: Global networks of workers and activists eventually organized across borders
: to oppose what they saw as the social and economic inequalities caused by industrialization.
: These networks of workers were increasingly tied together with
: networks of other reformers: anti-slavery abolitionists,
: women’s rights advocates, and those who opposed child labor.
: Within these movements, many people saw their fight for better conditions
: as tied to the struggles of other groups.
: The Industrial Revolution created the world of our parents, our grandparents, and our great-grandparents
: —most of whom worked in mines and factories or on industrialized farms.
: Today, of course, things are changing again.
: Other revolutions are taking place.
: But our lifestyle remains in many ways an industrialized lifestyle.
: Understanding how that happened–and what the legacy of industrialization is–