The 1750 And 1850: The Industrial Revolution

Industrial revolution Although it occurred around the same time as the French, American, Latin American, and Haitian Revolutions between, say, 1750 and 1850—the industrial revolution was really the most revolutionary of the bunch. No way, dude. All those revolution resulted in, like new borders and flags and stuff. We have studied 15,000 years of history here at crash course, me from the past. And borders and flags have changed plenty, and they’re going to keep changing. But in all that time, nothing much changed about the way we disposed of waste or located drinking water or acquired clothing. Most people lived on or very close to the land that provided their food. Expect for a few exceptions, life expectancy never rose above
Because they run on rails, railroads need steel. And because it is rather heavy, steel needs railroads. Secondly, there were Wages. Britain had the highest wages in the world at the beginning of the 18th century. In 1725, wages in London were the equivalent of 11 grams of silver per day. In Amsterdam, they were 9 grams. In Beijing, Venice, and Florence, they were under 4. And in Delhi, they were under 2. It’s not totally clear why wages were so high in Britain. Like one argument is that the Black Death lowered population so much that it tightened labor markets, but that doesn’t explain why wages remained low in, like, plague-ravaged Italy. Mainly, high wages combined with cheap fuel costs meant that it was economically efficient for manufacturers to look to machines as a way of lowering their production costs. To quote the historian Robert Allen: Wages were high and energy was cheap. These prices led directly to the industrial revolution by giving firms strong incentives to invent technologies that substituted capital and coal for