The Age of Exploration – besides leading to the discovery and conquest of new lands such as the Americas, and overseas expansion and new trade routes such as with Asia – brought about national economic changes. The fierce competition for trade and empire among European monarchs led to the widespread adoption of mercantilism, an economic policy under which nations sought to increase their wealth and power by obtaining large amounts of gold and silver and by exporting more goods than they imported. The increased gold and silver flowing into Europe from the Spanish colonies contributed to a price revolution known as inflation, which encouraged trade and businesses of all types. As prices of goods went up, businessmen were willing to take risks to invest money in the hope of making more money. This new attitude spurred the growth of early European capitalism. As trade routes shifted in the sixteenth century from the Mediterranean and the Baltic to the Atlantic, Venice and Genoa soon declined and Portugal and Spain became the dominant powers. In the seventeenth century, cities like London, Paris, and Amsterdam became the centers of commercial activity. These changes were part of the Commercial Revolution that influenced Europe.
The Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions, like the Commercial Revolution, also impacted European society. The discovery of new machinery and science in farming had far-reaching effects. The use of new crops, techniques, and the introduction of better methods of soil rotation enabled Europe to grow more food. This helped to raise the standard of living. The Agricultural Revolution provided the food for the expanding city population and directly led to a population explosion in Europe. The Industrial Revolution, which occurred in Great Britain, had a greater effect on society than the French Revolution. The transformation from an agrarian to an industrial society influenced the political, economic, and social structure of European society. The landed aristocracy, which had begun to lose influence with the rise of the middle class, would be completely overshadowed by the birth of a newly capitalist class of businessmen. The shift from the rural to an urban society created new problems on how to deal with the conditions created by the factory system. New philosophies and economic ideas such as Romanticism, Socialism, Nationalism, and Communism arose to meet the problems created by industrialization. The Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions transformed not only Europe in the nineteenth century but also had a major impact on the world in the twentieth century.
From the sixteenth through the seventeenth centuries, European monarchs adopted a policy of mercantilism aimed at strengthening their national economy.
Mercantilists supported several basic ideas:
The establishment of European colonies in the Americas, the direct trade with Asia and Africa, and the continued expansion of the Commercial Revolution led to some major changes in Europe:
Expanded trade and the push for building overseas empires promoted capitalism’s growth. Entrepreneurs or merchants organized, managed, and assumed the risk of doing business by hiring craftsmen, supplying them with raw materials, and selling the finished goods. It was the beginning of the domestic system, which was a system in which weavers and crafters produced goods at home. When entrepreneurs were unable to raise money for a project or thought it was too risky, capitalists developed new ways to create wealth by forming joint stock (also known as trading) companies that allowed people to pool large amounts of capital needed for overseas ventures. The Dutch, British, and French founded trading companies, such as the Dutch East India Company and the British East India Company, in the 1600s. Capitalists also reduced the risk of liability from dangerous investments during the seventeenth century by creating insurance companies such as Lloyds’ of London.
In the ways mentioned above, the European expansion of money and goods revolutionized Europe’s economy and transformed its society. These changes in trade, manufacturing, and investments laid the foundation for the Agricultural and Industrial revolutions.
Up until the middle of the eighteenth century, farming remained very much as it had been under the manorial system of the Middle Ages. Although farmers labored hard and long, they produced scanty crops.
Before the Agricultural Revolution, farmers did the following:
The Dutch led the way in the Agricultural Revolution. In the 1600s, they built dikes or dams to reclaim land by draining it and thus making it useable. They also used fertilizers from livestock to renew the soil and combined fields into larger ones to make better use of the land.
During the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries, British and Americans improved on the Dutch experiment by inventing new tools and processes that led to the mechanization of agriculture.
The following is a table that lists some of the improvements in agriculture:
The Enclosure Movement contributed to large-scale farming. Between 1760 and 1830, the English Parliament – the majority of which were large landowners – passed a series of laws called the Enclosure Acts, in which they took over and fenced off land formerly shared by peasant farmers. In the 1500s, enclosed lands gained pasture for sheep and increased work output. By the 1700s, the land-owning aristocracy began to fence in the common lands of villages and replace the strip farms of medieval times with larger fields that could be cultivated more efficiently. The large landowners employed new farming techniques that led to increased production, but at a price. Machines displaced many farm laborers. Small farmers were forced off the land because they could not compete with the larger, more efficient farmers. They migrated to the towns and cities in large numbers to seek factory jobs.
The Agricultural Revolution contributed to a rapid growth of population in Europe. In Great Britain alone, the population soared from 8.6 million in 1700 to almost 15 million in 1800. Similarly, the population in Europe rose from 120 million to about 190 million by the beginning of the 1800s.
Reasons for this population explosion included the following:
The Agricultural Revolution helped to trigger the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution can be viewed in two ways:
A slow, gradual process began during the Stone Age and continues to evolve to the present with changes in technology.
A shift took place between 1750 and 1830 in the production of goods from handmade items to items made by more expensive and complicated machines. These changes also resulted in the transfer of work from home (the domestic system) to the factory system.
Although both views are valid, for this book’s purposes I will adopt the second view.
The Industrial Revolution began in England in the second half of the eighteenth century for the following reasons:
The Industrial Revolution in England began with a series of technological developments in the textile industry, improvements in the sources of power (steam), and revolutions in transportation.
Below are lists of important inventions that improved production, provided sources of power, and instituted changes in transportation:
The improvement of production in the textile industry opened up new markets, and the adoption of Watt’s steam engine meant that factories could now be built in any convenient location, not just near bodies of water. The development of the steam locomotive paved the way in England (1830-1850), which meant lower transportation costs, larger markets, and cheaper goods. Building railroads also took workers from their rural life and made them more inclined to become urban dwellers.
Industrialization swept across Europe from west to east, from England in the eighteenth century to Holland, Belgium, France, and the United States by 1830. By the 1850s, Germany, Italy, and Austria became industrialized and by the end of the nineteenth century, industrialization had spread to Eastern Europe and Russia. In the twentieth century, it spread to Asia, Africa, and Latin America.