AP European History
AP European History
The agricultural and industrial revolutions brought immense changes to the economy of Europe and ultimately, the world.
During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. the pace of the agricultural revolution quickened. The development of scientific agriculture. the introduction of new crops. the enclosure of agricultural land. and increasing mechanization expanded agricultural production and ended the specter of famine in Europe. Fewer farm workers were needed to produce food for Europe's growing population. and surplus agricultural labor migrated to the new industrial towns to find employment in the factories.
The industrial revolution. which began in Great Britain in the late eighteenth century. involved a number of elements. including the invention of power-driven machinery. the introduction of the factory system. and advances in the production of coal and iron and eventually. steel. In addition. the expansion of banking and credit facilities and the broader application of the principle of limited liability to business organization helped promote the process of industrialization. The industrial revolution was both accompanied and encouraged by contemporaneous revolutions in transportation and communications.
The industrial revolution was preceded and accompanied by a revolution in agriculture. in which Great Britain led the way, as it would later do in the industrial revolution.
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, science and technology were increasingly applied to British agriculture.
Around 1700, Jethro Tull (1674-1741) developed a device that planted seeds in neat rows. Tull's seed drill replaced the less efficient method of scattering the seed. Viscount Townshend (1725-1767), an eighteenth-century aristocrat and statesman, urged Britain's farmers to plant clover, which would nourish the soil, and to practice crop rotation. Townshend also advocated the growing of turnips, which would both enrich the soil and provide food for livestock during the winter months. Townshend was such a fervent promoter of turnips that he gained the nickname "Turnip" Townshend. The increased cultivation of turnips ended the need for the mass slaughter of livestock at the onset of winter, and fresh meat gradually replaced salted meat in the British diet during the winter months.
Later in the eighteenth century, Robert Bakewell (1725-1795) introduced the scientific breeding of cattle and sheep, while Arthur Young (1741-1820) became an effective publicist for the new methods of scientific agriculture, founding the periodical Annals of Agriculture in 1784.
Early in the nineteenth century, German agricultural scientists succeeded in extracting sugar from beets. The cultivation of sugar beets soon ended Europe's dependence on imported cane sugar. A few years later, Justus von Liebig (1803-1873) and other German chemists developed chemical fertilizers.
The invention of the reaper, patented by Cyrus McCormick (1809-1884), an American, in 1834, represented a major step forward in the application of technology to agriculture. The combine, a harvesting machine that threshed the grain as it was reaped, was developed later in the nineteenth century.
Scientific and technological advances in agriculture were accompanied by the introduction of new crops. The potato, which originated in the Western Hemisphere, had become the basic foodstuff of Ireland by the mid-eighteenth century, although many continental Europeans continued to believe that potatoes were poisonous. During the eighteenth century, peas and new varieties of beans were introduced into Great Britain from the Netherlands.
British advances in agriculture won only gradual acceptance on the European continent. Nevertheless, the agricultural revolution ultimately made it possible for Europe to feed its growing population.
The agricultural revolution in Great Britain was accompanied by an intensification of the enclosure movement, which had begun during the sixteenth century. Enclosure involved the efforts of landowning aristocrats and country gentry to enclose common land by building fences and stone walls and planting hedges, thereby ending the medieval practice of providing free access to grazing lands and woodlands. By the early years of the nineteenth century, almost all of England's agriculturally useful land had been enclosed. While peasants were supposed to receive their fair share of the enclosed land, they were often cheated in practice.
The enclosure movement resulted in an increase in the number of large and medium-sized farms, as well as an increase in the production of food and other agricultural products. At the same time, many peasants were reduced to the status of impoverished farm laborers. A growing number of these displaced peasants migrated to the industrial towns to find employment in factories.
Although the precise reasons for Great Britain's leadership in the industrial revolution cannot be fully explained, several elements helped make that role possible. First of all, Great Britain possessed ample resources of coal and iron, which were basic necessities for modem industry. In addition, British merchants had become wealthy as a consequence of their activities during the commercial revolution and thus had capital available for investment in the new industries. The British could also apply their mercantile experience to sell the products of their industries in the world market. Furthermore, the British government adopted policies designed to promote the interests of the country's merchants and industrialists.
The British cotton textile industry, centered in the area of Lancashire and its major industrial town, Manchester, was the first to experience the application of power-driven machinery on a wide scale.
In 1733, John Kay (1704-1764), a Lancashire weaver, invented the flying shuttle, which enabled one weaver, rather than two, to operate a loom. In the mid-1760s, James Hargreaves (d. 1778) invented a spinning machine that he called the spinning jenny. in honor of his wife. Although the spinning jenny made it possible for a single worker to spin a number of threads simultaneously, the thread produced was relatively weak.
The water frame, patented by Richard Arkwright (1732-1792) in 1769, produced a stronger thread, although it was coarser than that made by the spinning jenny.
In 1779, Samuel Crompton (1753-1827) perfected a spinning machine called the mule, which combined the best features of the spinning jenny and the water frame and produced thread that was both fine and strong.
The first power loom was patented by Edmund Cartwright (1743- 1823) in 1785.
As the new textile machinery was placed in wider use, the demand for raw cotton grew. The problem of removing the seeds from the cotton, however, made it difficult to meet the demand. Then, in 1793, the American Eli Whitney (1765-1825) invented the cotton gin, an effective device for removing the seeds from the cotton fiber. The cotton textile industry benefited from other inventions as well. Mechanical engineers studied the techniques used by watchmakers and developed precision parts that increased the operational efficiency of the new machines. The next step involved the development of standardized, interchangeable parts for industrial machinery. Eli Whitney, who operated an arms factory in Connecticut, made important contributions to this development.
In the 1780s, a rolling press was introduced for the printing of textiles. replacing the hand-operated plates that had previously been used.
French inventors made significant contributions to the cotton textile industry. Count Berthollet (1748-1822). a chemist. developed a process for using chlorine to bleach cloth that reduced the time required for bleaching cloth from months to hours. Joseph-Marie Jacquard (1752-1834) developed a power loom capable of weaving intricate patterns.
The introduction of larger and more complex industrial machinery gradually resulted in the construction of factories. which replaced small workshops and cottage-based industries.
In England. some workers blamed machine industry for their low wages and unemployment. Between 1811 and 1816. angry mobs of workers assaulted factories and smashed machines. These Luddites, as they were known. were named for Ned Ludd, who had destroyed machinery a generation earlier.
The invention and perfection of the steam engine provided a dependable and efficient source of power for the new industrial machinery.
About 1700, Thomas Savery, an English inventor, built a practical steam pump. A few years later, Thomas Newcomen (1663-1729) built a steam engine that was first used in 1712 to pump water from a coal mine. Although it was wasteful of fuel, the Newcomen steam engine met a need, and by 1760 about one hundred Newcomen engines were operating in Great Britain.
In 1769, James Watt (1736-1819) patented a more efficient version of the Newcomen engine. Watt's steam engine required substantially less fuel.
While most of the early steam engines were used to pump water, by 1800 several hundred steam engines powered machinery in cotton textile mills and other factories.
The interrelationship among the steam engine, coal mining, and iron production was a central aspect of the early industrial revolution.
The steam engine was used not only to pump water out of coal mines but also to power ventilating fans that pushed fresh air into the mines, making it possible for the miners to work longer hours underground. Coal mining also benefited from the invention of the safety lamp, in which an oil flame burned behind a metal screen, reducing the danger presented by dangerous gases in the mines. These technological innovations led to a tremendous increase in British coal production.
The increased production of coal provided the fuel needed to power the growing number of steam engines. These steam engines, in turn, were also applied to the production of iron. The steam engine was an essential part of the blast furnace, which produced a purer and stronger iron. This stronger iron, in turn, made possible the manufacture of more efficient steam engines.
Even the best quality of iron lacked the strength and flexibility of steel, which is iron whose carbon content has been reduced by a process of intense heating. In the early nineteenth century, it was possible to manufacture steel, but it involved a costly process that was economically justifiable only in special circumstances.
In 1856, Henry Bessemer (1813-1898), an English inventor, developed the Bessemer converter, the first efficient method for the mass production of steel. At about the same time, an American inventor, William Kelly (1811-1888), developed a similar process.
A decade later, in 1866, William Siemens (1823-1883), a German-born inventor living in England, and his brother, Ernst Werner von Siemens (1816-1892), developed the open-hearth process of steelmaking. As a result of these inventions, the steel industry experienced a rapid growth.
The revolution in transportation began with improvements in road construction and the expansion of canal systems. About 1815, John McAdam (1756-1836), a Scotsman, developed a durable road surface made of crushed stones cemented by stone dust and water. These macadam roads, as they were known, represented a marked improvement over the dirt roads then generally in use. Extensive canal systems were built in both Europe and America. In 1869, the great Suez Canal, linking the Mediterranean Sea with the Indian Ocean by way of the Red Sea, was opened to shipping.
The development of the steam engine and improvements in the quality of iron led to the creation of railroads. For several generations, horse-drawn carts, operating on wooden rails, had been used to move coal and iron. During the eighteenth century, iron replaced wood for both the rails and the wheels of the carts. The next step was to develop a steam-powered locomotive to pull the carts. George Stephenson (1781-1848), a British inventor, was the first to develop an economically successful locomotive. In 1825, a Stephenson locomotive was put into operation on the world's first real railroad, running some forty miles from the coal fields around Darlington in northern England to the port of Stockton. In 1830, Stephenson's famous locomotive, the Rocket. demonstrated its speed on the new Liverpool to Manchester railway, running twelve miles in fifty-three minutes.
A great boom in railroad construction began. In 1830, only a few miles of railroads were in operation. By 1870, European railway mileage totaled almost 900,000.
Steam power was also applied to water transportation. In 1807, Robert Fulton (1765-1815), an American, introduced the first economically successful steamship, the Clermont, which operated on the Hudson River between New York City and Albany. In 1816, the first steamship crossed the English Channel, and three years later the Savannah, an American sailing ship equipped with auxiliary steam power, crossed the Atlantic in twenty-nine days. In 1833, the Royal William, a Canadian vessel, became the first ship powered entirely by steam to cross the Atlantic in a voyage taking twenty days.
In 1840, Samuel Cunard (1787-1865), a Canadian, inaugurated regular passenger service by steamship from the English port of Liverpool to Boston. The marine steam engine was still relatively inefficient, and the coal required for the voyage occupied about half the available space on the ship. While the cost of transporting passengers by steamship could be justified economically, freight continued to be carried by sailing ship. By the 1860s, a more efficient marine steam engine had been developed, while the screw propeller replaced the paddle wheel. Steamships soon operated on the seaways of the world, and the days of the great sailing ships came to an end.