AP European History

Barron’s

Industrialization Shapes Europe

Great Britain had begun industrialization by the 1790s and saw industrial output soar and demographics change mightily before the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, when Period 2 ends according to the AP European History Curriculum Framework, but the Industrial Revolution was just getting into full swing at that point. As yet, parts of Europe had not even seen enclosure or an agricultural revolution, much less an industrial one, so the slow cultural diffusion of enclosure and then industrialization, as well as the fact that its implementation came with bursts and lulls, make fitting this chapter into the framework a challenge. The issues of urbanization and the growth of consumerism are of particular concern as they occur over both time periods.

Overview

An Industrial Revolution fostered into existence by the growth of commerce, the development of capitalism, the introduction of improved technology, and the unique political climate in Britain during the eighteenth century, changed life in Western Europe in the 1800s more profoundly than had the French Revolution. The landowning aristocracy, which had its origins in the early Middle Ages and whose decline had begun with the growth of a commercial and professional middle class, lost more wealth and political power with the inception of a spectacularly wealthy capitalist class. The lives of the mass of Europeans shifted from the farm to the factory, from the predictable rhythms of a rural existence to the grinding and impersonal poverty of the industrial cities. Along with the capitalists, a new proletariat, or working class, was created, and a whole new set of social and economic doctrines sought to explain their rights and better their lives. The family was reshaped, concepts of time were changed, and trade unions and other organizations promoting social welfare were created. The European balance of power was shifted multiple times by industrial production as first the United Kingdom, then Germany dominated industrial output and thus gained international power. Because industrialization can also create the capability to reshape the world, industrialization became a national project with ramifications for those who advanced the slowest or the most quickly. Added to the “isms” that grew out of the French Revolution – such as republicanism, conservatism, and nationalism – were Socialism and Marxism. By the last third of the nineteenth century, an “Age of Progress,” a technological revolution, had altered the Western world and was to lead the way into the woes and wonders of the twentieth century.

Industrial Revolution

Industrialization was never really a “revolution” or a violent, drastic change but, rather, industrialization has been a continuous and usually gradual process throughout human existence, from the use of the first stone tools to the development of high technology. The so-called Industrial Revolution was a period of rapid development, roughly between 1780 and 1830, during which new forms of energy from coal and other fossil fuels powered machines rather than muscles, water, or wind. The advent of the steam engine allowed massive amounts of energy to be exerted by machinery, such as the water frame and power looms, that appeared in large factories, where most textile workers began to work. This contrasted markedly with pre-industrial society where textiles were made in cottages from thread spun on wheels and fabric was woven on human-powered looms.

Industrialization began in Britain in the second half of the eighteenth century and moved to France, Holland, Belgium, and the United States in the second decade of the nineteenth. It began in Germany, Austria, and Italy in the middle of the nineteenth, then arrived in Eastern Europe and Russia at the end of the century and in parts ofAsia and Africa well into the twentieth. It carries on today as new technologies continue to reshape society.

The Agricultural Revolution in Britain

After the Glorious Revolution of 1688, British landowning aristocrats dominated Parliament and passed the Enclosure Acts, which fenced off the medieval common lands. The Enclosure Movement is the least understood and possibly most important change that happened to legal rights in Europe during its history. It took centuries to complete and radically changed the relationship people had with the land, production, and each other.

1. The Enclosure Movement put into place the last of the four needed ingredients for capitalism: land, labor, capital, and markets (entrepreneurs and technology).
2. Allowed the struggle for money to be based on factors other than just birth and luck.
3. Opportunities for advancement were there for anyone who had a profitable idea and a work ethic.
4. The modern economy began.
5. The struggle between capital and labor became a true battle.

RESULTS OF THE ENCLOSURE MOVEMENT

1. √ Large landowners became prosperous; they invested in technology, meaning machinery, breeding, improved planting methods. Crop yields and livestock production soared.
2. √ Surplus production enabled agriculture to support a larger population in the cities.
3. √ The population of Britain doubled during the eighteenth century.
4. √ Small farmers who were displaced by the Enclosure Movement moved to the cities and made up the growing force of factory workers (the industrial proletariat).

Demographic Changes Altered Lifestyles

The population explosion of the sixteenth century resulted in both food shortages and food gluts throughout Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, resulting in mortality disasters. The European marriage pattern, which limited family size, became the most important check on population levels, although some couples also adopted birth-control practices to limit family size. By the middle of the 1750s, better weather, improvements in transportation, new crops and agricultural practices, less epidemic disease, and advances in medicine and hygiene meant a reduction of, or end of, the cycle of feast and famine. By the start of the nineteenth century, reductions in child mortality and increases in life expectancy led to the emergence of new attitudes toward children and families.

1. Economic motivations for marriage, while still important for all classes, diminished as the middle-class notion of companionate marriage began to be adopted by the working classes.
2. This demographic revolution, along with the rise in prosperity, produced advances in the general standard of living that allowed cultural and intellectual growth for the masses.
   1. Greater prosperity was associated with increasing literacy, education, and richer cultural lives.
      1. Growth of publishing and libraries.
      2. Founding of schools.
      3. Establishment of orchestras, theaters, and museums.
   2. As the nineteenth century began, it was clear that a large percentage of Europeans were better fed, healthier, longer lived, and more secure and comfortable in their material well-being than at any previous time in history.
   3. This relative prosperity was offset by increasing numbers of the poor throughout Europe.
      1. Poor depended upon charitable resources.
      2. Distressed government officials and local communities.
3. A consumer revolution changed the lives of the European people as it spread from the Dutch and British, first to Western Europe, then more slowly southward and toward the East.
   1. Consumers demanded new items such as porcelain, mirrors, manufactured cotton goods, and even printed art.
   2. New leisure venues, such as taverns and opera houses, attracted these emerging consumers.
   3. Blood sports and betting also common entertainments for the working classes.
4. Family patterns and ideas about privacy began to change:
   1. Explosion of illegitimate births between 1750 and 1850 throughout Europe.
      1. Labor became more mobile and social punishments for moral infractions were no longer easy to enforce.
      2. Infant and child mortality decreased, and commercial wealth increased; families could dedicate more space and resources to and child-rearing, as well as to private life and comfort.

Urbanization

Perhaps the most important change that took place during the nineteenth century era of industrialization was the huge migration from the rural village to the relative anonymity and fast pace of the cities. A trend that took centuries to spread throughout Europe, and one that is still occurring in parts of the world today, urbanization is a change that has reshaped human existence.

1. Communal values were eroded when families that did not know each other migrated from villages to the big cities.
2. At first, there were areas in cities with concentrations of many poor people, which led to a greater awareness of poverty, crime, prostitution, and other social problems, causing many to want better policing of those living on the margins of society.
3. Cities experienced overcrowding and filthy living conditions.
4. Rural areas suffered labor shortages and weakened communities.
5. Social activists brought the problems of the poor to light.
6. Cities were redesigned with urban planning and zoning.
7. Labor unions were established.
8. Governments responded to the problems of urbanization.
   The last four fit into Period 3.

Technological Advances

Inventions of new machines and improvement of production processes throughout the eighteenth century made large-scale production possible in textile manufacturing and coal mining. The steam engine revolutionized transportation.

THE SCARCITY OF ENERGY

By the eighteenth century, most of Britain’s forests were gone, and its supply of wood for fuel nearly depleted. The British were importing wood from Russia. Coal, plentiful, but traditionally shunned as a fuel because of its pollution of the air, gradually replaced wood as both a fuel and for industrial processes. Most British coal was mined near the coasts.

1. The most profitable energy source humans had yet found, producing a calorie extraction ration to yield result, at worst, 1:27 and possibly 1:200.
   1. This meant that for every calorie invested in mining they got 27-200 calories of energy back.
   2. Fossil fuels became the way for Europe to power a way to reshape the world.
2. Mines kept filling with water, so pumps were needed to empty them.
   1. The early steam engines, such as Thomas Newcomen’s clumsy contraption, a maze of rods and leather straps, used heat from burning coal to boil water that made steam power to set the engine in motion; they were employed as pumps in mines.
   2. James Watt in 1763 saw the problems of the earlier engines, such as those of Newcomen and Thomas Savery (that they lacked a condensing chamber), and created an improved steam engine that became a great success in Britain.
      1. Revolutionized every mode of production and transportation, starting with mining, then the textile industry, and culminating in the railroad.

The mastery of coal, then oil and natural gas, gave Western Europeans the power to dominate the world and to improve the lives of workers, who could now accomplish much more with machines powered by fuel than by using animals, water, and wind.

TEXTILES

1. The flying shuttle (John Kay, 1733) cut manpower needs on the looms in half.
2. The spinning jenny (James Hargreaves, 1764) mechanized the spinning wheel.
3. The water frame (Richard Arkwright, 1769) improved thread spinning.
4. Use of the steam engine (Arkwright, 1780s) powered the looms and required factory production of textiles instead of domestic industry.
5. The cotton gin (Eli Whitney, American, 1793) separated seed from raw cotton fiber and increased the supply of cotton, which was spun into thread and then woven into cloth.

COAL

1. Steam pump (Thomas Newcomen, 1702) rid coal mines of water seepage.
2. Condensing chamber steam engine (James Watt, 1763).
3. Plentiful coal boosted iron production and gave rise to heavy industry (the manufacture of machinery and materials used in production).

TRANSPORTATION AND COMMUNICATION

New efficient methods of transportation and other innovations created new industries, improved the distribution of goods, increased consumerism, and enhanced the quality of life.

1. The steamboat (Robert Fulton, American, 1807).
   Marker
   From this point until the “Theories on Economics” section, everything covered is in Period 3, but some of it is called for in both periods.
2. The railroad steam locomotive (George Stephenson’s Rocket, 1829).
   1. Both the steamboat and steam locomotive enhanced an already-efficient system of river transportation that had been expanded in the eighteenth century by a network of canals.
   2. The canals meant that transportation was cheap and easy for most of the nation, leading to trade networks and higher demand for goods as well as for higher transportability of resources.
   3. Together they opened new sources of raw materials and new markets for manufactured goods, and they made it possible to locate factories in population centers.
   4. The railroad building boom, from 1830 to 1850, brought about massive social and economic changes in Britain’s largely agrarian economy.
   5. The ease of transport encouraged rural workers to move to the cities.
   6. The lower costs of shipping goods in bulk fostered expanding markets.
   7. The railroad was a culminating invention of the Industrial Revolution because it utilized steel and a steam engine, and was so massive that it induced many workers to learn the skills needed for an industrial society.
   8. It also allowed the creation of mass marketing through the use of catalogs.
   9. Refrigerated rail cars added much to the ability to feed the world cheaply.
   10. Gained the ability to more easily gather raw materials.
   11. Led to the advent of trolleys, streetcars, and eventually subways, which opened the cities to new designs.
3. New technologies and means of communication and transportation – including railroads – resulted in more fully integrated national economies, a higher level of urbanization, and a truly global economic network.
   1. Streetcars and trolleys revolutionized the cities and allowed their redesign.
   2. Bicycles allowed the common person some freedom of transportation at an affordable price.
   3. Automobiles, and eventually airplanes, would complete the transportation network by the advent of the First World War in 1914.
4. Communication advanced notably with the invention, first of the telegraph, then the radio and telephone.

OIL

By the end of the nineteenth century, the refinement of petroleum allowed its use as a fuel for the newly developed internal combustion engines that propelled automobiles, locomotives, and even ships, and also for heating and industrial processes.

Britain Was First in Industrialization

Great Britain was the first nation to industrialize for many reasons, not the least of which was the availability of coal, the energy source that powered the first Industrial Revolution. The Continent did not see industrialization until after the end of the Napoleonic Wars, which ravaged the continent for the first 15 years of the nineteenth century. Why was it the first nation to industrialize?

1. Stable governments and government institutions supported business.
2. Availability of coal, iron ore, and a shortage of wood.
3. High levels of economic freedom.
4. Economic institutions and human capital were available there.
5. No wars at home.
6. Enclosure made land, labor, markets, and entrepreneurship available.
7. The British government supported industrialization with financial rewards for inventors.
8. Britain already had a strong network of canals and roads.
9. Private businessmen created many of the inventions and networks needed to
10. industrialize.