AP European History
AP European History
Before the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars shook Europe, Britain had a foretaste of the tremendous economic changes that would dramatically change the world. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, several factors aligned that led to the creation of factories. Urban centers swelled as people left their rural homes and fields to make their livelihoods in cities.
• Great Britain was able to dominate the industrial economy by mechanizing the production of textiles, iron, and steel. Its supply of iron, coal, and other raw materials, its large work force, stable political climate, and forward-thinking political class served as a solid foundation for the Industrial Revolution.
• Economic growth during the Industrial Revolution both resulted from and supported the revolution. The creation of new technology required large amounts of capital (money or property). The handsome profits from that new technology made for strong economies that fueled the development of dynamic urban centers.
• The Industrial Revolution took place in France, Prussia, and other nations of Western Europe, often with state sponsorship, while Eastern and Southern Europe were held back by various factors, including geography, lack of resources, powerful traditional nobility, and the persistence of serfdom.
• New classes, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, developed in industrializing areas due to socioeconomic changes that created new divisions of labor.
• Europe experienced rapid population growth and urbanization, which led to overcrowded cities and rural depopulation.
• Liberals, radicals, and conservatives developed ideologies as a response to industrial and political revolutions.
The Protestant Reformation officially began on October 31, 1517, the date that Martin Luther posted the Ninety-Five Theses at the Castle Church in Wittenberg, but it had taken root long before, when political, economic, intellectual, and religious factors led to the questioning of papal authority and Church practices.
Mass production of goods in factories in the nineteenth century had three highly interdependent aspects: it used materials and labor efficiently, it exploited natural energy sources well, and it generously rewarded economic investment.
First, production was concentrated in one location. Materials and labor were brought to the factory to maximize the effectiveness of both. Factory owners got more out of their workers’ time, especially in comparison with the cottage system. More goods could be produced in a factory than by the same number of workers in cottages.
Mass production depended on a division of labor and standardization of parts for the efficiencies that boost output. Division of labor involves one worker performing only one operation – the model in previous centuries had called for a craftsman with apprentices, each taking a product from inception to completion. Along with the division of labor, standardization of parts affected output. Factories specified a set size and shape for parts so they could be used interchangeably in the goods the factory produced. This increased productivity also made for a more economical use of raw materials as there was less waste in such a planned, standardized system.
A second aspect of mass production was the location of factories near sources of power. Early in the Industrial Revolution, work was often situated near a concentration of either labor or markets. As the revolution progressed, machinery driven by water power – for example, looms – required factories to be near rivers or streams. When the steam engine was invented in the 1760s, factories were built near the mines that provided the coal or coke for it. The steam engine would revolutionize factory production, greatly amplifying productivity. Because of this increased productivity, more workers were needed in factories. As a result, cities grew tremendously.
Finally, the backbone of factory production was great capital investment. The men who invested in industry gained impressive personal profit from their investments, which they reinvested in their businesses to buy the expensive factory buildings and machines. Without this large influx of capital, the Industrial Revolution could not have taken place. These entrepreneurs led the development of a robust system of laissez-faire capitalism. Based on the economic theories expounded by Adam Smith a century earlier, it comprised five fundamental components: private ownership, free enterprise, profit motive, competition, and market economy.
The greater productivity of the eighteenth-century cottage system and Agricultural Revolution put Great Britain in a position to lead Europe into a new age of rapid industrial growth. Agricultural changes – for example, new techniques such as crop rotation – led to the need for new tools, which encouraged early industrialists to create better farming implements. As new techniques and tools made the land more productive and enclosure of that land continued, fewer farm workers were needed. These displaced workers often moved from the countryside to towns in search of work. The increased productivity on farms provided the food necessary to support this rapid urban growth.
Britons supported the Industrial Revolution. The enclosure movement – the consolidation by large landowners of small, privately held lands – and the loss of commons had left a large number of people in need of new work. Britain had a group of skilled workers with the experience to design the machines that filled British factories. Britain also had entrepreneurs who were willing to take financial risks to start new businesses.
These entrepreneurs felt secure investing in Britain’s industrial growth because of its strong economic state. Britain’s mercantilist relationship with its colonies had given rise to a wealthy class of merchants who helped bankroll the factory system. The British trading network, strong and extensive, quickly located markets for the new factory-produced goods. Finally, Britain’s well-organized, sound national banking system provided credit and economic stability, both of which were essential for ensuring the capital needed to buy the expensive machines mass production required.
A unified country with a stable, competent government, Great Britain provided the Industrial Revolution with a secure foundation. The parliamentary system gave greater voice to British subjects than many other European countries gave their citizens. The British government had also developed a solid infrastructure, especially good roads, which became part of the efficient British transportation system of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Finally, Great Britain had many geographic advantages. First, as an island it was exempt from many Continental disputes. Britain also had a number of great harbors that supported its worldwide trading network and numerous navigable rivers for transporting goods from inland factories to coastal harbors. In addition, the country was rich in mineral resources, including iron ore for machines and coal and coke to generate steam to power the machines.
Historical Causation is one of the most important thinking skills tested on the AP Exam. The reasons for the growth of the Industrial Revolution in Britain is a major theme in European history. Be sure you know the reasons and conditions the Industrial Revolution began in Britain rather than elsewhere.
With excellent sources of raw cotton in India and the American South, Great Britain became a major producer of the world’s woven cotton cloth, moving the textile industry from homes to factories. The spinning jenny, invented by James Hargreaves in 1764, the water-frame spinning machine patented by Richard Arkwright in 1768, and various machine-driven looms, coupled with the placing of factories by rivers as sources of power, greatly increased the output of workers. This increase eventually ended the cottage industry system.
The invention of the steam engine further transformed the production of textiles. With the steam engine as a source of power, factories no longer had to be situated near a river, and they could produce cotton cloth much faster than ever before. This created more demand for cotton, including more imported from India and the American South, and led to the sale of British textiles around the world.
The development of the iron industry also spurred industrial development in Britain. Not only was it used to manufacture the machines that were essential to factories, it was an industry in its own right, growing tremendously during the nineteenth century.
To move raw materials and finished products, new types of transportation were needed. Rivers had provided an effective way to move goods, but with the rapid growth of production and with factories no longer needing to be next to rivers for power, canals and railroads were constructed to provide more transportation connections.
By the end of the eighteenth century, canals linked factories to rivers, greatly facilitating trade. Goods could be moved more quickly and safely on canals than on roads. Canals also provided a more reliable method of moving materials across the country, because the transport of goods along roads could be slowed by bad weather.
The biggest revolution in transportation, however, was the railroad. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, railroads in Britain were powered by steam engines and could carry large loads faster and more cheaply than boats in canals. The railroad eventually took on the major role of transporting goods in Britain.
This growth of British industrial might was clearly on display at the Great Exhibition of 1851. Held in London in the Crystal Palace, a huge glass and iron building set in Hyde Park, it brought together in one place many of the great machines of the day. There, along with the wonders of exotic lands around the world, the public could see the tremendous industrial power of the growing British factory system.
The factory system that became so entrenched in Britain grew more slowly on the Continent. After the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, most of the Continent was physically and economically devastated. Countries struggled just to rebuild their governments, financial systems, and manpower.
There were other obstacles on the Continent. Initially, there was little capital available to build the machines necessary to compete with Britain in a global market. In addition, guilds were stronger there than in Britain, and they worked against the development of industry; with industrialization, the guilds would lose their ability to monitor the quality of goods, a role that they had had for centuries. The Continental nations also did not have the network of good roads and ease of river transportation that supported the Industrial Revolution in Britain.
Finally, the British, eager to protect their edge, did not allow machines, skilled workers, or even plans for machines to leave the country. As industry developed in Britain, little of it moved to the Continent.
But as the nineteenth century progressed, France and Belgium began to grow as centers of industry. British factory workers who escaped their country’s regulation of industry took plans for factories and machines with them, to the benefit of nations nearby. The French and Belgian governments put in place protectionist policies to help their fledgling industries grow. They set very high tariffs, taxes on imports, to keep out foreign manufactured goods, and provided the infrastructure – especially railroads – needed to carry both raw materials to factories and finished products to markets. The development of joint-stock banks also encouraged industrial growth in Continental Europe by providing the required capital. With the discovery of major concentrations of coal in Belgium and the German states, they eventually took the lead in manufacturing on the Continent.
Like Continental Europe, the United States was slow to begin industrializing, but by the mid-nineteenth century, it had embarked on a period of great industrial growth. With help from emigrating Britons, who brought their plans and their know-how, the United States built the workforce and infrastructure for an American Industrial Revolution that rivaled Europe’s and England’s by the end of the century.
The failure to industrialize in Eastern and Southern Europe was due to various factors, such as geography and lack of resources in some cases, and in other cases the continuation of serfdom and powerful landed political elites. As in the United States, where the North industrialized and the South stayed more agriculturally based with a system of slave labor doing the work on large plantations, Russian nobles kept serfdom and an agriculturally based economy alive until the 1860s.
As industrialization spread across Europe, society changed in many ways. The interaction among the Enclosure Movement, the Agricultural Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution led to a tremendous population increase. Along with this came a growth of cities, as factories drew thousands of workers. Rapidly growing cities, such as Manchester, England, could not keep up with the demand for housing and infrastructure, including roads, sewage disposal, and police. With the overcrowding of workers came those who took advantage of them through a wide variety of crimes. Thus, these squalid living conditions led many reformers to push for public health improvements and public safety.
City life was substantially different from rural life. The old class of tradesmen that had flourished under the guild system no longer had the power it once held. As factories hired more and more workers, the importance of artisans diminished. Factory workers performed monotonous, repetitious, sometimes dangerous tasks. Women and children were employed in mines, as well as factories – indeed, prior to the Factory Act of 1833, women and children made up the majority of workers in British textile factories. This was a far cry from the old system of families working side by side on farms or in cottage industries.
Factory workers often went home to packed, unsanitary tenements. Soot from the factories blackened the buildings and tilled the air. Diseases such as typhoid and cholera swept through crowded cities, killing thousands. Those who survived were generally less healthy than those who worked in the countryside.
Social history is an important thread through all of European history. Be prepared to discuss the impact of the Industrial Revolution on society as a part of a continuum of how major social issues reflect their eras.