7.1 The Industrial Revolution

• Resources: plentiful coal and iron ore, often close together, plus rivers and canals for moving heavy goods.
• New technology: James Watt's improved steam engine (patented 1769) powered factories, mines, railroads and ships. In textiles, machines like the spinning jenny, water frame and power loom turned cotton into cloth far faster than hand work.
• Capital: money from overseas trade, including the Atlantic slave trade and colonial plantations, could be invested in factories.
• Labor: the Second Agricultural Revolution (5.4) pushed rural workers off the land and into cities looking for work.
• Markets and stability: a growing population at home, colonies abroad, a strong navy, banks and laws protecting property and patents.

Industry moved work from homes and small workshops into factories. Factory towns grew around coalfields and ports, such as Manchester (cotton textiles), Birmingham (metalworking) and Newcastle (coal and shipbuilding). Cities grew so fast that crowded housing, pollution and disease became serious problems. Class structure changed too: a large industrial working class earned wages in factories, and a growing middle class of managers, merchants and professionals gained wealth and political influence.

Industrialization also raised output enormously. Over time it brought higher incomes, cheaper goods and a shift of workers from the primary sector into manufacturing (7.2), along with falling death rates as countries entered stage 2 of the demographic transition (2.5).

Industrialization spread outward from Britain through expansion and relocation diffusion as machines, engineers and investors moved. Belgium was the first continental country to industrialize, followed by France and the German states, especially the coal-rich Ruhr valley. In the United States, textile mills appeared in New England in the early 1800s, followed by steel in Pittsburgh and manufacturing across the Midwest. Japan industrialized rapidly after the Meiji Restoration of 1868, and Russia began in the late 1800s.

Much of Africa, Asia and Latin America didn't industrialize in this period. Instead, many of these places were drawn into the industrial economy as colonies supplying raw materials.

Factories needed huge amounts of raw materials (cotton, rubber, palm oil, copper, tin) and new markets to sell finished goods. Industrial powers used colonialism (direct rule of other lands) and imperialism (extending power and control over other places) to get them. The Berlin Conference of 1884–1885 set rules for European powers claiming African territory (4.2).

Colonies were organized to export raw materials cheaply and import manufactured goods. British factory cloth, for example, undercut India's handloom weavers, and India supplied raw cotton instead. In the Congo Free State under Belgium's King Leopold II, forced labor for rubber caused enormous loss of life.

These patterns left many former colonies with economies built around exporting a few raw materials, weak links between their own regions, and infrastructure aimed at ports. World-system and dependency theories (7.5) see this history as a root of today's global inequality.