Industrial Revolution Research Paper
The Origins of the Industrial Revolution in England | |
|The Industrial Revolution of the late 18th and early 19th centuries was revolutionary because it changed -- revolutionized -- the |
|productive capacity of England, Europe and United States. But the revolution was something more than just new machines, |
|smoke-belching factories, increased productivity and an increased standard of living. It was a revolution which transformed English,|
|European, and American society down to its very roots. Like the Reformation or the French Revolution, no one was left unaffected. |
|Everyone was touched in one way or another -- peasant and noble, parent and child, artisan and captain of industry. The Industrial |
|Revolution serves …show more content…
|
|The INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION can be said to have made the European working-class. It made the European middle-class as well. In the |
|wake of the Revolution, new social relationships appeared. As Ben Franklin once said, "time is money." Man no longer treated men as |
|men, but as a commodity which could be bought and sold on the open market. This "commodification" of man is what bothered Karl Marx |
|-- his solution was to transcend the profit motive by social revolution (see Lecture 24). |
|There is no denying the fact that the Industrial Revolution began in England sometime after the middle of the 18th century. England |
|was the "First Industrial Nation." As one economic historian commented in the 1960s, it was England which first executed "the |
|takeoff into self-sustained growth." And by 1850, England had become an economic titan. Its goal was to supply two-thirds of the |
|globe with cotton spun, dyed, and woven in the industrial centers of northern England. England proudly proclaimed itself to be the …show more content…
The cotton would be cleaned and then spun into yarn or thread. After a period of time, the merchant would |
|return, pick up the yarn and drop off more raw cotton. The merchant would then take the spun yarn to another household where it was |
|woven into cloth. The system worked fairly well except under the growing pressure of demand, the putting-out system could no longer |
|keep up. |
|There was a constant shortage of thread so the industry began to focus on ways to improve the spinning of cotton. The first solution|
|to this bottleneck appeared around 1765 when James Hargreaves (c.1720-1778), a carpenter by trade, invented his cotton-spinning |
|jenny. At almost the same time, Richard Arkwright (1732-1792) invented another kind of spinning device, the water frame. Thanks to |
|these two innovations, ten times as much cotton yarn had been manufactured in 1790 than had been possible just twenty years earlier.|
|Hargreaves' jenny was simple, inexpensive and hand-operated. The jenny had between six and twenty-four spindles mounted on a
|The Industrial Revolution of the late 18th and early 19th centuries was revolutionary because it changed -- revolutionized -- the |
|productive capacity of England, Europe and United States. But the revolution was something more than just new machines, |
|smoke-belching factories, increased productivity and an increased standard of living. It was a revolution which transformed English,|
|European, and American society down to its very roots. Like the Reformation or the French Revolution, no one was left unaffected. |
|Everyone was touched in one way or another -- peasant and noble, parent and child, artisan and captain of industry. The Industrial |
|Revolution serves …show more content…
|
|The INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION can be said to have made the European working-class. It made the European middle-class as well. In the |
|wake of the Revolution, new social relationships appeared. As Ben Franklin once said, "time is money." Man no longer treated men as |
|men, but as a commodity which could be bought and sold on the open market. This "commodification" of man is what bothered Karl Marx |
|-- his solution was to transcend the profit motive by social revolution (see Lecture 24). |
|There is no denying the fact that the Industrial Revolution began in England sometime after the middle of the 18th century. England |
|was the "First Industrial Nation." As one economic historian commented in the 1960s, it was England which first executed "the |
|takeoff into self-sustained growth." And by 1850, England had become an economic titan. Its goal was to supply two-thirds of the |
|globe with cotton spun, dyed, and woven in the industrial centers of northern England. England proudly proclaimed itself to be the …show more content…
The cotton would be cleaned and then spun into yarn or thread. After a period of time, the merchant would |
|return, pick up the yarn and drop off more raw cotton. The merchant would then take the spun yarn to another household where it was |
|woven into cloth. The system worked fairly well except under the growing pressure of demand, the putting-out system could no longer |
|keep up. |
|There was a constant shortage of thread so the industry began to focus on ways to improve the spinning of cotton. The first solution|
|to this bottleneck appeared around 1765 when James Hargreaves (c.1720-1778), a carpenter by trade, invented his cotton-spinning |
|jenny. At almost the same time, Richard Arkwright (1732-1792) invented another kind of spinning device, the water frame. Thanks to |
|these two innovations, ten times as much cotton yarn had been manufactured in 1790 than had been possible just twenty years earlier.|
|Hargreaves' jenny was simple, inexpensive and hand-operated. The jenny had between six and twenty-four spindles mounted on a