Industrial_Revolution

The Industrial Revolution was he major technological, socioeconomic and cultural change in the late 18th and early 19th century resulting from the replacement of an economy base on manual labor to one dominated by industry and machine manufacture. It began in England with the introduction of steam power and powered machinery. The development of all-metal machine tools in the first two decades of the nineteenth century the manufacture of more production machines for manufacturing on other industries. Cities and towns grew dramatically in the first half of the nineteenth century, a phenomenon related to industrialization. Cities had traditionally been centers for princely courts, government and military offices, churches, and commerce. By 1850, especially in Great Britain and Belgium, they were rapidly becoming places for manufacturing and industry. With the steam engine, entrepreneurs could locate their manufacturing plants in urban centers where they had ready access to transportation facilities and influxes of people from the countryside looking for work. The dramatic growth of cities in the first half of the nineteenth century produced miserable living conditions for many of the inhabitants. Of course, this had been true for centuries in European cities, but the rapid urbanization associated with the Industrial Revolution intensified the problems and made these wretched conditions all the more apparent. Wealthy, middle-class in habitants, as usual, insulated themselves as best they could, often living in suburbs or the outer ring of the city where they could have individual houses and gardens. Workers in the new industrial factories faced horrible working conditions. They worked anywhere from twelve to sixteen hours a day and six days a week with only a half hour for dinner and lunch. There was no security of employment and no minimum wage. Both women and children were employed in large numbers in early factories and mines. Children had been an important part of the family economy in preindustrial times, working in the fields or carding and spinning wool at home with the growth of the cottage industry. In the Industrial Revolution, however, child labor was exploited more than ever. Therefore children made up a particularly abundant supply of labor, and they were paid only one-sixth to one-third of what a man was paid. Before long, workers in Great Britain began to look to the formation of labor organizations to gain decent wages and working conditions. Despite government opposition, new associations known as trade unions were formed by skilled workers in a number of industries. These unions served two purposes. One was to preserve their own workers’ positions by limiting entry into their trade; another was to gain benefits from the employers. Efforts to improve the worst conditions of the industrial factory system also came from outside the ranks of the working classes. Their efforts eventually met with success, especially in the reform minded decades of the 1830s and 1840s. the Factory Act of 1833 stipulated that children between the ages of nine and thirteen could work only eight hours a day; those between thirteen and eighteen, twelve hours. In 1842, the Coal Mines Act eliminated the employment of boys under ten and all women in mines.