Short History Of... - Industrial Revolution

Episode Date: February 19, 2024

During the years 1760 to 1830, British industry exploded. Thanks to advances in machinery, and forward-thinking inventions, the country shifted from a predominantly agricultural nation, to a modern state. This movement has become known as the Industrial Revolution. But why did these changes take place in Britain and not somewhere else? What were its impacts at the time, and how has it come to shape the modern world? And, are we indeed still living through it? This is a Short History Of the Industrial Revolution. A Noiser production, Written by Dan Smith. With thanks to Joel Mokyr, Professor of Economics and History at Northwestern University, and the Sackler Professor at the University of Tel Aviv. Get every episode of Short History Of a week early with Noiser+. You’ll also get ad-free listening, bonus material, and early access to shows across the Noiser network. Click the Noiser+ banner to get started. Or, if you’re on Spotify or Android, go to noiser.com/subscriptions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It's Sunday the 10th of November 1811 in Bulwell, a small village near Nottingham in the English Midlands. It's a cloudy, chilly evening. John Westley crunches along the frosty road towards a crowd of men, perhaps twenty of them. He greets them with handshakes and whispered salutations, careful not to attract undue attention. Their faces blackened with soot to make them invisible in the darkness, they stand outside the grand home of a man named Hollingsworth, a master weaver who has set up a small cotton processing workshop on his property. Through a window, Westley spies one of Hollingsworth's hulking new mechanical frames that can spin yarn and produce fabrics. Just the sight of these machines, that have taken so many jobs like his own, causes him to bristle.

In the cool night air, Westley listens to the instructions from the group's leader and weighs the hammer he has brought in his hands. Others have brought their own heavy tools. A few carry firearms. When word is given, they march up the pathway like a military unit. They pass a pile of debris, frames reduced to shattered wood and twisted iron, from the posse's previous attack earlier in the week. But violence wasn't their first course of action. Initially, they sent protest letters to Hollingsworth, signed by an imaginary worker named Ludd, a choice that will later cause those protesting

against the new technology to become known as Luddites. Having ignored the letters and seen the consequences, Hollingsworth is expecting more trouble. As the disgruntled workers approach, they see a guard of seven or eight employees, each bearing a musket. One of Westley's gang calls out into the darkness, demanding that Hollingsworth grant them access to the property. Then someone else, no one is quite sure who, fires a shot. calls out into the darkness, demanding that Hollingsworth grant them access to the property.

Then someone else, though no one is quite sure who, fires a shot. Panic takes hold, followed by an exchange of maybe twenty rounds. In the commotion, Westley sprints to a window, clawing at the shutters with his hammer. He almost has them down when he hears a shot whistle perilously close by, then another, but this time he feels the stab of agonizing pain, then the unmistakable sensation of his own blood spilling out of him. He drops the hammer, slumps to his knees and topples over. Someone rushes over and crouches beside him, pressing the wound. But Westley knows he is done for. With his last breaths, he manages a few words.

Proceed, my brave fellows, he tells his comrade. I die with a willing heart. A couple of his friends move his limp body back from the house before returning to complete the job. Their energy now fueled by grief and righteous anger, they overpower the defenders, break into the property, and rip apart the remaining frames. And as quickly as they arrived, they are gone, back into the night, their identities never to be revealed to the authorities.

Groups like the Luddite gangs were part of a counter-revolutionary movement. Their fight was against the sweep of industrialization taking over the nation, changing not only the way that people worked, but also the very nature of society. It was a struggle for the future that became known as the Industrial Revolution. Between roughly 1760 and 1830, Britain shifted from being a predominantly agricultural nation with small-scale cottage industries to a fully fledged modern industrial state. It was a revolution that eventually spread across the world,

raising incomes and living standards even as it fundamentally restructured societies. But why did the Industrial Revolution take hold in Britain in the second half of the 18th century, and not somewhere else at a different moment? What were its impacts at the time, and how has it come to shape the modern world? And are we indeed still living through it? I'm John Hopkins from Noisa. This is a short history of the Industrial Revolution. On a warm spring day in 1700 in a small village in northern England, a farm laborer attends to his crop of potatoes. Wiping sweat from his brow, he takes a moment to rest on the long hoe he uses for this tough, physical work.

The land stretching out before him, he glances over at a larger, neighboring farm. There, a pair of horses haul a plow, preparing the land for the sowing of a new crop. This laborer lives a day-to-day life almost identical to that of his father. In fact, although this is 1700, it could be centuries earlier, for all that life has fundamentally altered for most ordinary people living in Britain. But the country is on the cusp of great change. Take Manchester, for instance. As things stand, London is by far the biggest city in the realm.

Its population of around 350,000 dwarfs the next largest city, Norwich, home to just 60,000. Manchester is, by any standards, a pretty middling town of less than 10,000. But within a hundred years, it will be Britain's second city. And where nearly three-quarters of the British population had been employed in agriculture, But within a hundred years, it will be Britain's second city. And where nearly three quarters of the British population had been employed in agriculture, by the advent of the 19th century, that figure will fall below half. Of those working in non-agricultural sectors, the vast majority will be employed in industry. It is a transformation more rapid and deep-rooted than anywhere else in the world.

But it is a revolution that creeps up unheralded. Joel Mokir is a professor of economics and history at Northwestern University and the Sackler Professor at the University of Tel Aviv. As far as revolutions go, there was no mob converging on the Bastille as they did in France in 1789. There was no Lenin running the Petrograd Soviet. I mean, it's not a revolution that people actually noticed when they were living through it, which of course wasn't true for the French or the Russian or the Chinese revolution. It was a more gradual thing. Russian or the Chinese Revolution. It was a more gradual thing.

Academics to this day continue to battle over the exact terms of reference around the Industrial Revolution. When did it start? When did it end? If, indeed, it ever did. The broad consensus that it begins in earnest in the 1760s is down to the spate of inventions from that time that vastly increase industrial efficiency. Just before this point, the world's manufacturing powerhouses are China and India, who can call on vast workforces to hand-make things like porcelains, cottons, silks, and metalwork. By comparison, Britain accounts for just 2% of the goods sold globally. But from the 1760s, that share rises, until reaching a peak in 1880,

when it accounts for almost a quarter of world production. It is only toward the end of this classical industrial revolution, around 1830, that people become increasingly aware that, you know, my golly, there is something happening here which we have never experienced before. Exactly how Britain becomes such a hub of groundbreaking innovation, not to mention the richest and most powerful nation on the planet, is largely down to the global expansion of trade in preceding centuries.

Britain has been hugely successful at spreading its influence across the continents, especially to North America and the Caribbean. By the middle of the 18th century, British businesses have found themselves with new international markets to exploit. British-made goods are taken out across the empire, traded for exotic produce like spices. There is more money than ever to be made from, for instance, traditional small-scale handicrafts like earthenware pottery, cloth, and basketry. And though the greatest technological innovations are yet to arrive, there has already been a significant improvement in domestic agricultural efficiency.

Celebrated agriculturalists like Jethro Tull have come up with ways to boost crop yields using fewer man-hours of labor. Since earlier in the century, his horse-drawn seed drill has made it possible for a single worker and a couple of horses to sow field after field with neatly regulated rows of seeds. More reliable crops have not only spawned a healthier population, but also opened up new opportunities for some. Previously, many workers had no choice but to toil the fields to feed themselves and their families. But now they can turn their attention to other work, like cottage production of handicrafts for sale at home and abroad,

to supplement their income, which can in turn be spent on goods from other producers, local or otherwise. It is a time of economic expansion in Britain, wherever you look. Among the more wealthy, there is a growing taste for exotic goods from Asia, like high-quality ceramics from China and textiles from India. This spurs entrepreneurs to explore how they can produce more of what the public wants, at better quality and at a cheaper price. Moreover, if manufacturers can work out how to replace some of their workers with machinery, as Jethro Tull has done in agriculture, they can lessen their ever-expanding wage bill. But machines need energy to drive them.

Historically, the energy required to produce things has come from just a few sources. Humans, of course, and animals too. Charcoal and wood have been the major source of heat energy, while water is often used to power mills. As luck would have it, though, Britain happens to be home to some of the world's most extensive, accessible supplies of coal. A seemingly endless supply of cheap energy with the potential to drive machines to replace human labor. As far back as 1712, an engineer called Thomas Newcomen invented a rudimentary engine, the first to use steam to move pistons for hauling weights and turning wheels in coal mines.

pistons for hauling weights and turning wheels in coal mines. It is an imperfect creation, not always very efficient, but a harbinger of dramatic developments to come. Now Britain is in a unique position, full of innovators hungry to exploit new market opportunities with a supply of cheap energy and a desire to replace the burden of expensive labor. It's a situation not replicated anywhere else in Europe, nor indeed India or China. There, labor has generally remained cheap and energy expensive, making technological innovation much less profitable. But in Britain, the race is on to produce more, and to do it more efficiently and cheaply. And this commitment to learning and progress is a pursuit with a rich intellectual heritage.

The so-called scientific method, the acquisition of knowledge through evidence gathering and the vigorous testing of ideas and theories, has been in vogue since the early 17th century. The method has encouraged generations of practical problem solvers in Britain, with their poster boy, the aristocratic philosopher genius Francis Bacon. Although he died in 1626, his impact remains enormous. Actually, the guy who unwittingly opened up the possibility of an industrial revolution was Francis Bacon. So Francis Bacon, at his time, and particularly after he died, sort of 150 years after his death, had an incredible influence. And the main thing that I think people took from him is this notion that we do science not just to understand the world better and to illustrate the glory of the creator, but to improve our material life.

And that is, I think, the influence of Francis Bacon and his school. And no one is more influenced by his method of systematic observation than a young Scot by the name of Jamie Watt. It's 1751 in Greenock on the banks of the River Clyde in Scotland. It's a cold day and the wind rattles the windows. Jamie, a sickly, delicate-looking 15-year-old, sits in the kitchen of his well-to-do aunt, Jane. His cousin, Marion, is also there. Jane and her daughter delicately drink tea from expensive cups brought over from China

as they troll through the latest titbits of local gossip. The boy, though, is more interested in the stove. He's intently watching the kettle, as he has been for the last hour. With a piece of cloth to protect his hand, he lifts the lid and peers at the water bubbling away. Now he fetches a couple of logs from the wood store and feeds the stove. Now he fetches a couple of logs from the wood store and feeds the stove. The women watching on with puzzlement, he gets up to retrieve a cup, which he then holds over the kettle's spout. After a few moments, he takes it away and studies the cup's insides.

He makes a note of what he's observed, then goes to the dresser and takes out a silver spoon. As with the cup, he holds it over the spout, fixated on the steam that rises, and then counting the drops of water that condense on the piece of cutlery. His relatives roll their eyes at each other. Jamie is, they know, more of a thinker than a talker. He happily sits for hours at a time, filling pages with detailed mathematical calculations, or else taking apart his possessions to see how they work before reassembling them.

Aunt Jane, though, is becoming exasperated by the apparent inanity of his actions. Jamie what, she exclaims, I never saw such an idle boy. Take a book or employ yourself usefully. But he barely hears her, carrying on his experiments and taking notes. Because, contrary to appearances, Jamie Watt has not been wasting his time. He doesn't quite understand it all himself just yet, but there is something about the way steam heats up and condenses that fascinates him. All these scribblings, not to mention the complex calculations already forming somewhere deep in his expansive mind, will come into use soon enough. In a little under fifteen years from now, Jamie Watt, or James as he'll prefer to

be known in adulthood, will harness the power of steam in an invention that will change the world forever. It is 1763 when he is sent a steam engine to repair. By now he has set himself up in a musical instrument shop at the University of Glasgow and has gained a reputation for being able to fix all manner of gadgets. The engine he is working on was manufactured to the design of thomas newcomen what however is struck by its inefficiency

to work the engine has to undergo a cycle of heating and cooling down he ponders how to improve it but it's another couple of years before the answer comes to him ponders how to improve it, but it's another couple of years before the answer comes to him. The trick is to add a separate chamber where the steam can condense without cooling the whole system. He patents the design in 1769, just before he turns 33, and when it goes into commercial manufacture, it doubles or even triples the efficiency of Newcomen's device. It will take a few years for Watt's steam engines to overtake the water wheel as a source of power, but by the turn of the 19th century, it will be the driving force of the Industrial Revolution, first in factories and then in transportation with the birth of the railways and steam-powered ships.

and then in transportation with the birth of the railways and steam-powered ships. In a process that started with staring at the kettle in his aunt's kitchen, Watt is now responsible for arguably the single most important invention of the 18th century. He became, I would say, as close to a national hero that Britain ever had. I mean, he became the most celebrated engineer of British history. Watt clearly is the sort of paradigmatic inventor of the Industrial Revolution, and nobody will take that away from him. Watt is to technology what Isaac Newton was to science.

Nonetheless, Watt's engine is only one innovation, albeit a hugely important one, in an era full of them. It is an extraordinary period of boundary pushing. There are great leaps forward, for example, in the extraction of usable iron from iron ore. These new techniques produce a metal that is purer, stronger stronger and more manipulable than ever before. It is the basic building block that underpins so many of the great engineering projects of the age. There is a striking synergy between many industrial developments. The engine is developed with a view to making the exploitation of coal easier. Coal is crucial to improving the production of iron,

which is used to make more engines. It is a hallmark of the Industrial Revolution that discoveries and developments feed into and off of one another. And one number that I think I always found very convincing is the number of patents that are taken out by British inventors. And the patent system is established much before the Industrial Revolution in 1624. And you look at the number of patents taken out each year, and you know, between 1624 and the middle of the 18th century, it sort of goes a little bit up, it goes a little bit down. But I would say in the long run, it's basically flat.

And then you look at 1760 and all of a sudden this thing takes off like a rocket. Allied to these technological breakthroughs is the arrival of the factory, which becomes a totem of the Industrial Revolution and the new world order it ushers in. These early factories typically have a single distinct owner, a large staff, and a complex of buildings with different areas devoted to different parts of the production and distribution processes. They also tend to use machinery running from a single power source, like a water wheel or a steam engine. One of the earliest is opened by Matthew Bolton, a toy manufacturer who launches a large factory close to Birmingham in the 1760s. In due course,

he links up with James Watt to produce engines on a commercial scale, supplying countless other factories up and down the country. Some developments garner less acclaim than the steam engine or the factory, but have an enormous impact in their own way, like the development of gaslight. From dependence on candles and oil lamps, which were frequently unreliable and limited in their impact, it is now possible to shed light where darkness had dominated. Towns and cities remain active after nightfall, and factories are illuminated through shift after shift. Though inventors across Europe and America are also experimenting with the new lighting, Britain is once more at the forefront. Experimenting with the new lighting, Britain is once more at the forefront. Entrepreneurs become household names.

One of the most famous is Josiah Wedgwood, who dreams of cashing in on the hunger for high-quality pottery. He sets himself the task of producing something to rival Chinese imports. Through relentless experimentation, he pulls European standards of production up several notches, developing new techniques, such as methods of glazing, that can be reproduced on a mass scale in his factory. But nowhere is the industrial revolution more deeply felt than in the cotton industry, a business that has existed ever since Britain started importing raw cotton from abroad in the 16th century.

The change starts in 1764, when James Hargreaves, a weaver and carpenter in Lancashire, northern England, notices his wife's spinning wheel lying on its side. As he bends down to right it, he sees how, although it's been knocked over, the wheel and the spindle continue to turn. It sparks an idea. that if he positions several spindles upright and next to each other, a single wheel operated by a single worker can produce several spools of yarn at once. He develops a prototype and finally patents it six years later. Now one laborer can produce no fewer than eight times their previous output. The only problem is that while his machine can guarantee quantity, the quality is not so impressive. Fortunately, though, there are other inventors on the case

who duly produce a spinning frame powered by water wheel, which produces much better thread. Not long after, Samuel Crompton demonstrates his so-called spinning mule, a colossal piece of apparatus that can carry over 1,300 spindles. Another sprightly mind, Edmund Cartwright, develops a loom powered by water, but later adapted to steam to weave the yarn into textiles with unrivaled efficiency. In just a few decades, a millennia-old industry is dragged into the modern age. Skilled and expensive workers are laid off in their droves, their jobs taken over by machines. Meanwhile, the raw cotton is imported from far-flung corners of the empire, where slave labor is used to harvest it. This new boom industry turns the economic landscape of the country upside down.

And Lancashire, from basically being a fairly sort of fringe area, and particularly Manchester and the greater Manchester area, become the major industrial center of Britain and shifting the centre of gravity from the south. Manchester's population of 10,000 at the beginning of the century is now careering towards 100,000. The city is a symbol of the vast social and demographic changes overtaking the country. People are moving en masse from the countryside to take up jobs in factories and mills there, and in other cities like Birmingham,

Leeds and Liverpool. In a little less than a hundred years from 1750, the urban population in Britain swells from less than a quarter of the country's total to more than half, and continues to skyrocket from there. It feels like a time of exponential growth. The population expands from a pre-revolution 6.5 million to 10.5 million by the end of the 18th century, and there is more food to eat than ever before. And for those reaping the financial benefits, the rewards are impressive. However, not everyone is convinced that this seemingly endless expansion can last. In 1798, the cleric and political economist Thomas Malthus publishes an influential essay on the principle of population. His contention is that the planet can only sustain

growth for so long. As populations soar, they put pressure on the Earth's finite supplies of food until poverty takes hold and large numbers die off. Those left behind can then start again, charging more for their labor and once again enjoying the benefits of a smaller population exerting less pressure on resources. enjoying the benefits of a smaller population, exerting less pressure on resources. In other words, we are locked into an eternal cycle of growth and regression. Yet somehow, the Industrial Revolution seems to defy this orthodoxy. There are more people eating more plentiful food and producing and consuming more goods. But the predicted Malthusian decline never kicks in.

Although that is not to say everyone benefits equally. For those made redundant by the rise of technology, life can be very grim. And the difference in the living standards enjoyed by a factory owner compared to his workers is striking. To some, the factory represents nothing less than a temple of industry, propelling Britain's global domination. But to many of those who work within them, those dark, satanic mills, as the poet William Blake so memorably describes them, it feels very far from a brave new world.

The hours are long and conditions tough. It is routine for workers to sloke through 12-hour shifts, often for poor pay. Workers become reliant on their meagre earnings to avert immediate financial catastrophe, but are deprived of any real opportunity of career progression. A good many factories run on the labor of women and young children, too. What the Industrial Revolution did because of the factories, it needed workers who would show up on time and work until the bell rang. And one of the reasons that they were so keen on employing children and women is that they

were more docile. Men were trouble, but women and children, you know, were obedient because they had been obedient at home to their husbands and fathers, so now they're obedient to the foremen. There are other, more subtle ways that the factory is changing the social contract, as workers find themselves exposed to new pressures not endured by previous generations. People worked hard, but they basically set their own hours.

If you were an artisan or a handloom weaver or a farmer, basically you work all day from dawn to dusk, but basically you decided when to work. You would basically determine your own hours. What the factory did, it imposed something called discipline on people. So the factories, not only that they were smoky and dirty and dangerous and noisy and unpleasant, but they also imposed on people something that was very rare before the Industrial Revolution. I think humans are not hardwired to be obedient to people to whom they are not related.

I always did what my mother told me, but nobody else. Enforcing discipline is tough, and people don't like it. And so economists would say that is a decrease in their living standards because they lose something that may be a little bit intangible, but it's their freedom to determine where and when they work, which I've always thought was extremely important. And it's not always fully recognized. Then there is the constant lurking threat of physical danger.

Some hospitals report that as many as 40% of the injuries they deal with are the result of industrial accidents. It's 1800 and eight year old Robert Blinko is hard at work inside a cathedral-like cotton mill in the English East Midlands. Cathedral-like at least in terms of its footprint and loftiness. At its summit there is even a cupola, a church-like dome. But for little Robert it feels more like the realm of the devil. Machinery thrums and bangs incessantly, rattling his eardrums and making it difficult to think straight.

The building is kept monstrously hot, since the cotton thread becomes more delicate at lower temperatures. The air is thick with dust, making Robert and the small army of children like him cough and splutter like old men. Then there is the oppressive stench of the oil greasing the axles of 20,000 wheels and spindles. Shoeless and dressed in trousers and shirt cut from the coarsest material, Robert sighs and gets back onto the ground. the coarsest material, Robert sighs and gets back onto the ground. His job is to crawl into the tight space beneath the machines to tie off broken threads and collect any dropped cotton.

His shift started almost 12 hours ago at 5.30 sharp, and he's hungry and exhausted. He catches sight of his friend, Mary, across the floor. Although she is nine, she is smaller even than him. She, too, is shoeless, and with her pallid complexion and long pinafore dress, she looks to him like a discarded doll. As she scrabbles beneath the machines, she yawns deeply, and her eyes close for a mere second. she yawns deeply and her eyes close for a mere second. But it is long enough. The final stretches of these long shifts are always a dangerous time.

Robert sees it all happening in slow motion. Mary's apron becomes caught in the shaft that turns the frames. The machine pulls her towards it with an irresistible force and then dashes her to the floor. Mary's screams resound even above the roar of the engines. Robert gets to his feet and runs towards her, bellowing with all his might for help. The shaft spins her round faster and faster, pulling her tighter into its works. Helpless, Robert can only watch until eventually her body jams between the shaft and the floor, and the machinery stops moving. The horrified workers extract her carefully, but as Mary is taken away, Robert's legs fail him.

He has no doubt she is dead. way Robert's legs fail him. He has no doubt she is dead. But by some miracle, plus a combination of the local surgeon's skill and her own determination, she survives. Despite her dreadful mauling, her spine was undamaged, and so too her mental faculties. She'll have to walk with a stick now, but that seems like a light price to pay. After a few weeks' recovery, she is back in the factory to earn her keep again. With mass industrialization here to stay, working people look towards politicians to address their problems and changing aspirations. Not long ago, having enough to keep yourself fed today and tomorrow, and for a little longer than that, meant you were doing just fine. But the Industrial Revolution has altered the playing field.

Now, great masses of humanity live cheek by jowl in cities. And with this greater contact comes the spread of new ideas. And complaints. Why are we working every hour God sends in hot, stuffy, dangerous factories for a pittance, hardly more than we used to survive on tilling the land, when we can see our bosses in their grand houses and fine clothes? Matters start to come to a head in the 1810s, as inflation and high unemployment grip the economy. Britain is engaged in a long-running and expensive conflict with the French armies of

Napoleon. Relations with the still nascent United States are also perilously fragile, culminating in the so-called War of 1812. The national coffers are stretched to breaking point. Growing discontent among the working class notably finds expression through the Luddites, whose numbers include the ill-fated John Wesley, the victim of a fatal musket round on a machine-breaking raid in Nottinghamshire in 1811. And so there is always suspicion, there's always resistance. Almost every new innovation that I know of has been resistant. Particularly, I think, by workers who are, in many cases, rightly so, worried about not

just being displaced, but essentially that their skills become obsolete. From its origins in Nottinghamshire, the movement spread northwards, with particularly strong support in Yorkshire and Lancashire. Not only focusing on machine-breaking, the Luddites also organise public demonstrations and make demands for reform. They call for a fair minimum wage and for greater safeguards around child labor. With the French and American revolutions still fresh in the mind, such displays of domestic dissent worry the powerful and influential in Britain.

Their response is to crack down hard on protesters. is to crack down hard on protesters. There are mass Luddite trials, with harsh penalties, including transportation to Australia, and even execution. Parliament makes machine-breaking a capital offence. The celebrated literary figure Lord Byron feels compelled to challenge the government's heavy-handed response in the House of Lords. Never under the most despotic of Lords. Never, under the most despotic of infidel governments, he says, did I behold such squalid wretchedness as I have seen

since my return in the very heart of a Christian country. And the authorities don't restrict themselves to challenging the protesters through the judicial system. They use military might too. Protecting the rights of the landowners and industrialists who after all have a strong overlap with those in charge of the country if the factory bosses are not themselves members of the ruling class they frequently are the friends and family of those who hold the levers of power the government government in Britain unflinchingly stood by the side of the manufacturers. And when there was any sort of violence and threats on the new factories,

the government would send in the troops. Somebody once pointed out that during the Luddite riots in the Midlands, there were more soldiers fighting British workers than there were soldiers fighting Napoleon in Spain. The war with America finally draws to a close in 1815, the year that Napoleon suffers decisive defeat against the British at Waterloo. But even this brings little economic respite. Instead, Britain struggles to reintegrate

hundreds of thousands of decommissioned troops who swell the ranks of the unemployed. A desperate situation is made infinitely worse when Parliament passes the first of what become known as the Corn Laws that ban the importation of cheap grain from abroad. It is a calculated move to maintain the high price of home-grown crops for the benefit of the land-owning class. To workers in the cities already struggling to make ends meet, it's a devastating blow that results in riots. By now, the Luddite movement is on its knees and disappears altogether by 1817.

But the hunger for social change does not. As things stand, only a very small section of society, men of wealth above a defined level, have the right to vote, a surefire way to maintain the status quo. But the call for expanded suffrage is growing. If working people want a better deal, they realize they need to win it through the ballot box. And one impact of the Industrial Revolution is that they are now more easily able to organize into a mass movement. One August afternoon in 1819, at St. Peter's Field in central Manchester, some 60,000 working-class people from the city and beyond gather to call for fair political representation.

While places like Old Sarum, little more than a field down south in Salisbury, have two MPs despite the absence of a single resident voter. Manchester doesn't have a dedicated representative. How can such anomalies be right? Men, women, and children listen to speaker after speaker. Among the crowd are three sisters, Isabella, Ellen, and Elizabeth Harvey, aged between 14 and 24. Young people who have never known anything other than life in the Industrial Revolution. To start with, the gathering is a peaceable affair, but local magistrates eyeing the proceedings from a distance are getting nervous. An order is issued for the arrest of some of the event's leaders. An order is issued for the arrest of some of the event's leaders.

But the constable charged with executing the warrants asks the local cavalry for reinforcements. Within minutes, a mass of horses is stampeding towards the crowd, their riders wielding drawn sabres. As the crowd surges in retreat, the Harvey sisters are lifted off their feet and swept back several yards. Along with many others, Elizabeth falls before the horses, sustaining serious injury beneath their hooves. Ellen then feels a saber cut through the quarter-inch-thick whalebone of her corset before striking her in the stomach, sending her flailing. Meanwhile, the youngest sister staggers to her feet after being struck by a horse, only for a cavalryman to slice her arm with his blade. Incredibly, all three girls

survive their ordeal. They are just three of hundreds to be injured, and somewhere between 15 and 20 people are killed. It falls to a journalist to nickname the encounter Peterloo, in reference to the famous battle with Napoleon.

Peterloo certainly feels like a defeat for the reformers. Their calls for sweeping change go unheeded. But progress, albeit gradual, does eventually come. In 1832, the Great Reform Act is passed, expanding the franchise, even if only to middle-class men. Working-class men will need to wait until 1911 for suffrage, while for women it does not come until 1928. Then, in 1833, the Factories Act addresses some child labor issues, specifically the length of the working day.

From now, a shift can be no more than 12 hours, with no child under 12 to work more than 48 hours in a week. The Industrial Revolution is traditionally seen to end around 1830, just before Queen Victoria ascends to the British throne throne and the rates of technological innovation and economic expansion begin to slow. Nonetheless, its impact is enduring and turbocharges Britain's global ascendancy that peaks later in her reign. Of course, there has been impressive innovation in Europe all the while that Britain has experienced its revolution.

Towards the end of the 1700s, for example, the first forays into aviation via the hot air balloon were made by brothers Joseph Michel and Jacques-Étienne Montgolfier. People would come and watch this balloon and applaud. And what they were applauding is not just the ballooning. They were applauding the final success of humans to defeat gravity and fly. But, you know, something like hot air ballooning drives home the power that humans have. Once they are capable of understanding nature, to harness it to do things that weren't possible before.

If we just know enough, if we get smart enough, if we can organize our thinking and apply it, we can do things that would have been unimaginable for hundreds of thousands of years. The seeds had cautiously been sown for the modern age of aviation. The French clearly had great innovative minds to compete with the world's best, but the conditions were not yet ripe in France for the kind of industrial revolution that took place across the Channel in Britain. There was not the push and pull of cheap energy and high

labor costs to drive sustained innovation. Neither was there the appetite, especially among France's post-revolution leaders, to protect the wealthy entrepreneurs and crack down on protesting workers, as happened in Britain. But as the 19th century progresses, Western European rivals take the British blueprint and build upon it. Machine shops have already been opened in Belgium, Switzerland and France. As the revolution gives way in the UK, it picks up pace on the continent.

The Ruhr Valley in the Germanic state of Westphalia is nicknamed Miniature England for its rapidly industrialized urban hubs. And just as in Britain, these industrial changes bear enormous social impacts. In the German state of Prussia, a young man by the name of Karl Marx is beginning to ruminate on the changing relationship between the capitalist class who run industry, the bourgeoisie, and workers or proletariat. In the 1840s, he begins to publish his hugely influential writings of political philosophy. Marxism, as it becomes known, is the bedrock of socialist thought and the foundation

upon which the world's communist regimes are built. And they are rooted in the experience of the Industrial Revolution. I would mention that the first really serious writer who fully realized the far-reaching implications of this was Karl Marx. He basically over and over says the world is changing in profound ways. Clearly, socialism as we know it today is a product of the industrial revolution in the sense that it created what Karl Marx called an industrial proletariat. And socialism thrived on the industrial proletariat. Remember, socialist parties were almost always based on manufacturing or service workers, so railroad workers, dock workers, factory workers, less so in agriculture. And so clearly, as the economy industrializes and urbanizes,

and you get these people living in cities, they are more receptive to socialist ideology. Socialism, communism, and to a great extent fascism are all unthinkable had it not been for an industrial revolution. or unthinkable had it not been for an industrial revolution. Over the coming decades, the industrial revolution spreads organically from Western Europe to North America. In both regions, much of the raw materials that industrialization demands are sourced from imperial possessions and through forced labor. While enslaved people in the United States have long been used to harvest tobacco and sugar,

the surging market for textiles places a renewed emphasis on slavery as an economic tool. And eventually, I think, had it not been for the Industrial Revolution, American slavery would have sort of collapsed under its own weight. But what the Industrial Revolution did is it needed cotton, and cotton changed everything. And instead of these slaves slowly being manumitted, being freed,

and sent on their way because they were expensive to maintain, all of a sudden slavery got sort of a second life. And American slavery and the Civil War that eventually ended it would be unthinkable without the industrial revolution and the huge demand for raw cotton that it engendered.

By the end of the 19th century, the economies of Germany and the United States are positioned to overtake Britain. Many historians cite a second industrial revolution beginning towards the end of the century, spearheaded by these countries and centered around the steel, petroleum, and electric industries. Meanwhile, in a bid to remain competitive, first China and then more strikingly Japan begin their own variants of industrialization. Even into the 21st century, we see countries like India undergoing revolutions of their own. And so, what is remarkable about the Industrial Revolution is that it is not a one-off thing. It keeps giving and it gets bigger and bigger.

And we're still in the middle of it in that sense. But the rate at which we are able to come up with new ideas in order to, in some way, try to make our lives better, that's still going on. So, I mean, it's not just that you get these sort of 70 years of feverish intensive activity. It's that after it, there's a second wave and a third wave and a fourth wave, and it keeps getting, in some sense, better and better. The Industrial Revolution that was birthed in the provinces of England in the 1760s has a contested legacy.

It wiped out ways of life that had endured for centuries and replaced them with new ones. It took people out of the countryside and into towns and cities, producing winners, but also many losers. The story of the Industrial Revolution is one of progress and poverty, unity and division, hope and despair. And no one alive today can escape its extraordinary impact, for better and worse. I think economic historians, particularly over the last 20 years, have basically reached some kind of an agreement that it was in fact a watershed event, not just in British history, but in world history. And that it wasn't a flash in the pan, it wasn't an efflorescence in the sense that this was kind

of an event, you know, like the printing press, there's a big deal, it comes and then once it's there, you know, fine, we can print books now and that's it. Whereas the Industrial Revolution really is more than that. It's a complete change in the dynamics of history, not just economic history, but social history and political history and every kind of history, because it's more than just about economics. It changed our lives forever in ways that nobody imagined in 1800. Next time on Short History Of, we'll bring you a short history of the River Nile. If there is a message or metaphor, it is as a sort of parallel to our greater understanding

of how we fit into the world, you know, and how the river itself might even be thought of as an organism in its own right. And we finally maybe are respecting that and at least understanding it much better than we did before. That's next time.