Effects of the Industrial Revolution

My high school granddaughter asked me to help her with a recent assignment about the Industrial Revolution. It brought to mind my college teaching experience of over fifty years ago when I taught a unit on the Industrial Revolution as part of a basic course in Western Civilization. I thought then and still believe today that the Industrial Revolution was one of the most significant developments in the history of the world.

Try to imagine a world today without the following:

Electricity

Clean water delivered by pipeline to your home

Modern sewers and waste removal systems

Automobiles

Home heating without firewood

Computers

Televisions

Air Conditioning in homes and cars

Trains, Planes, and Buses

Indoor Plumbing—before the IR there was no such thing.

Elevators

Washing Machines for clothes and dishes

Hospitals with their incredible technology

Cell Phones—most important of all!

It is hard to believe but our ancestors before the Industrial Revolution had none of these essential elements of modern life. Actually, many parts of the world today still live in the pre-industrial age without many of the items listed above. 

Industrial Revolution is the term given to the transformation of manufacturing from homes and shops to factories employing hundreds or even thousands. The transformation began in Great Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and eventually spread all over the world. However, before there could be an industrial revolution, there had to be three other revolutionary developments. 

First, there was a Demographic Revolution involving a substantial increase in population. This increase happened not so much because of a rise in the birth rate but because of a decline in the death or mortality rate due to a dramatic drop in infant mortality, a drop caused by advances in diet and sanitation. For example, in Italy in 1860, 232 of every 1000 infants died in the first two years of life but 60 years later only 127 of 1000 infants died during the same period. 

An Agricultural Revolution accompanied the Demographic Revolution. Human ingenuity devised new methods of farming, land management, and animal husbandry to feed the growing population. While doomsayers like the British clergyman Thomas Malthus were predicting mass starvation, they could not predict that the profit motive and human resourcefulness would provide for the needs of an ever increasing population. 

A Transportation Revolution also accompanied the Industrial Revolution. The nineteenth century was the great age of canal and railroad building. At the same time, steam power replaced wind power as a safer and more reliable source of energy. The revolution in means of transportation allowed mass migrations of people from rural areas to the urban centers of manufacturing and commerce. It also allowed goods and services to be delivered faster and at less cost. 

From the beginning the tremendous social, economic, and political changes caused by these revolutions had both good and bad consequences. Rural areas lost population and industrial cities became overcrowded. Writers and social commentators were quick to point out the terrible working conditions in the factories, and the deplorable living conditions in the slums surrounding the factories. 

Moreover, critics objected, as they do today, to the incredible disparities in wealth and income between the factory owners and financiers (capitalists) who profited and the workers who toiled. The misery of the urban poor could not be overlooked. Nevertheless, in countries that did not industrialize, like Ireland or southern Italy, the poor were even worse off and literally starved to death either from actual food shortages or malnutrition. Why else would millions from Ireland and Italy leave their beautiful countries to live in the overcrowded cities of the New World?

I suspect that the Industrial Revolution still has a bad name today. Capitalist is a term of opprobrium and even capitalists shun to describe themselves as such. Even union members whose pensions are invested throughout the American industrial sector do not realize that they are capitalists. Of course, Progressives are outspoken in decrying the terrible effects of corporate greed and inequality.

It’s true that few of us will have the income or assets of CEOs, politicians, Rock stars, TV personalities, or professional athletes. But more than anywhere else in the world, we do have the opportunity to acquire and keep property. We can even buy and sell shares in the companies we work for. You may call it Capitalism but I prefer to call it a free-enterprise system. Whatever you call it, it has worked to raise the standard of living in this country to the highest level that has ever been seen in the world. 

My granddaughter’s class was asked to evaluate the relative merits of Capitalism, Socialism, and Communism. All three systems were responses to the Industrial Revolution. You can judge for yourself which of the three systems did the best job of providing the necessities of life listed at the beginning of this essay. Before the Industrial Revolution, as one seventeenth century commentator noted, life was “nasty, brutish, and short.”

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