The British Industrial Revolution: Innovations, Labor, and Societal Transformation

Summary

• The British Industrial Revolution began in the textile industry, with inventions like the flying shuttle, spinning jenny, and Watt’s steam engine revolutionizing production.
• The factory system transformed labor, shifting from small-scale, home-based production to large-scale, clock-bound factory work, leading to backlash from movements like the Luddites.
• The Enclosure Movement in agriculture displaced small farmers, creating a pool of unskilled workers who gravitated towards industrial cities for factory work.
• Government reforms aimed to improve working conditions, particularly for women and children, but had limited impact until the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The British Industrial Revolution was the starting point of a global shift towards mechanization and large-scale factory production that reshaped everyday life throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Historians generally define the period as lasting from the 1760s to around 1850.

Conditions in Britain, 1760

By the mid-18th Century, Britain had become a colonial power. This allowed them access to abundant raw materials, a wide trade network, and a shipping industry capable of moving both raw materials and finished goods around the world. The island itself had ample coal reserves and waterpower with which to generate energy, which could then be transported to major ports by interior waterways and later, canals and railways. Britain also had a growing population to serve as a workforce, and a stable government and currency. All of this gave them a competitive advantage over other parts of Europe.

Inventions of the Industrial Revolution

The British Industrial Revolution started in the textile industry. British weavers had access to good supplies of cotton and wool, but most of the spinning and weaving was done by small, home-based producers, which could not meet growing demand. An early move towards mechanization of the weaving process came in 1733 when a clockmaker named James Kay designed a simple device called the flying shuttle which dramatically cut the time and human energy required to weave cloth. In 1764, an inventor named James Hargreaves designed the spinning jenny (“jenny” being slang for “engine”). A simple machine small enough to fit in a weaver’s cottage, users could spin eight spindles of thread at once, an eightfold increase in production.

These and other innovations finally came together in 1769 when a barber and wigmaker named Richard Arkwright figured out how to connect the spinning jenny to waterpower in the form of a water frame. He built a large building at Cromford, Derbyshire, on the banks of the River Derwent, where more than one thousand men, women, and children tended to the machinery twenty-four hours a day. Arkwright’s factory became a prototype for spinning and textile mills across Britain.

The other great innovation that allowed for the massive growth of industrialization was the steam powered engine. First developed in 1708 to pump water out of coal mine tunnels, the steam engine garnered little attention until a Scottish instrument maker named James Watt decided to see if he could develop a more efficient machine around 1765. It took until 1781 to come up with a superior design and was soon adopted by both textile and iron manufacturers as faster and more reliable than waterwheels. Watt’s design also laid the groundwork for the development of the steam-driven locomotive in the 1820.

Labor in the Industrial Revolution

While factory-made products required less labor to produce, tens of thousands of workers were needed to manage the complex machinery. This represented a massive shift in how society viewed the nature of work.

For centuries, British manufacturing was based primarily on small shops and homes. Tradesmen and artisans operated independently. In many trades, new workers were brought in under a well-regulated apprenticeship system, where apprentices were contractually bound to serve under employers for a certain number of years in exchange for training, room, and board. At the end of the contract, successful apprentices were given the right to set up their own businesses. Other cottage industries, like spinning, weaving, straw-paiting, and knitting,  were centered around families who made goods to use for sale or barter. The work could be onerous, but there was also a certain amount of freedom, from setting one’s own schedule based on the season, to setting one’s own prices for goods. “By all the processes being carried on under a man’s own roof,” the labor reformer Peter Gaskell wrote in 1842, “he retained his individual respectability.”

When the factory system emerged, workers became bound to the clock. They traded their efforts for largely non-negotiable wages, toiling for 12 or more hours a day in often dangerous working conditions. Initially, there was a backlash from home-based weavers and workers who suddenly found themselves in a battle with local factories. The Luddite movement, named after an English folkloric figure, named Ned Ludd, sprang up around 1811. Over the next few years, Luddites, as they came to be known, would stage frequent attacks on factories, smashing looms and destroying equipment.

Luddite raids could turn deadly. In April 1812, a group of 100-200 Luddites under the command of labor activist George Mellor staged a midnight attack on a textile factory at Rawfolds Mill in Yorkshire. “…[T]he windows and the door of the mill were assailed by a furious mob,” read one newspaper account of the attack, “who commenced their activity by the firing of arms and the beating of hammers and hatchets. The guard of the mill instanatly repelled the assault by a steady, firm, and well-directed discharge of muskery from within.” Four Luddites were killed in the attack, and Mellor and 16 others were later rounded up and arrested for past attacks and various crimes. All were found guilty and hanged in January 1813.

The British government swiftly moved in to put down the rebellion and arrest the ringleaders. In 1812, Parliament passed the Frame Breaking Act, which made industrial sabotage a capital crime.

The Enclosure Movement

The early Industrial Revolution paralleled changes in British agriculture that had led to widespread unemployment. The Enclosure Movement, where wealthy landowners purchased and fenced off land that had historically been used by the community, had forced many small farmers off their rental lands. Improvements in agricultural methods had allowed large-scale farmers to increase their crop yields while reducing the number of laborers need to work the land. As agricultural work declined, a large population of relatively unskilled workers gravitated towards towns and cities to take their place on the assembly line of these shining new factories.

The rise of a local industrial base in turn opened-up other forms of work. Factories needed warehouse workers, repair men to fix machines, and clerks to keep track production and inventory. Goods had to be hauled to railroad lines, which needed their own sets of workers. The exploding urban population needed shops from which they could obtain food and goods; and a beer or two at the end of a hard day. The British industrial revolution, in other words, created was a constellation of different employment opportunities that never would have existed in the villages of pre-industrial Britain.

Government Reform

Some factories were relatively well run. An 1833 report on a Scottish textile mill described an airy work floor, with big windows that allowed fresh air to flow through and carry off the heat of the steam-driven equipment. The owner provided a room for the female workers with fresh water and outhouses. Workers were allowed to build little cottages on a plot of land about a mile from the factory, each with its own little garden, and “a more cheerful, happy-looking sent of industrious men and women, and of young people, is seldom, if I am not mistaken, to be found.”

The majority of factories, though, were less than ideal. During multiple investigations in the 1820s-1840s, government officials and reformers found average workers to be malnourished, sallow, bow-legged, hollow-eyed, and exhausted from working 12-16 hours a day, six days a week, in deplorable conditions. “Some of these lords of the loom have in their employ thousands of miserable creatures,” thundered reformer William Cobbett in 1824, “In the cotton spinning work, these creatures are kept, fourteen hours in each day, locked up, summer and winter, in a heat of from 80 to 84 degrees.” Factory owners made few accommodations to comfort, and less to safety, causing horrific injuries if workers got pulled into the powerful looms. “The shawls of the females, or their long hair, and the aprons and loose sleeves of the boys and men, are in this way frequent causes of dreadful mutilation,” said a report to Parliament in 1842, which noted these incidents could be avoided if employers just put up a small safety fence.

Children as young as 10 were put to work for the same long shifts as their parents. Many reformers didn’t have a problem with young children working long hours per se; it had been common for children to be put to work on farms for centuries. But factories were dangerous, both physically and morally. Investigators found many factories to be hotbeds of sexual impropriety, swearing, and other forms of immorality.

To try to create better conditions, particularly for women and children, Parliament passed multiple acts between 1800 and 1850, including the Cotton Mills and Factories Act of 1819, the Mines and Collieries Act of 1842 and the Factory Acts of 1844 and 1847. These bills tried to reduce working hours, place age limits on workers, and limit abuses by owners and supervisors. Most failed to have much impact, however, because the majority of bills had no enforcement mechanisms. The worst abuses wouldn’t be solved until the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Impact of the Industrial Revolution

By 1850, Britain had become a leader in the manufacturing of textiles, paper, glass, concrete, chemicals, iron, and machine tools. The Industrial Revolution increased the pace of urbanization, sped the growth of the middle class, and laid the groundwork for the social and economic changes in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Historians have debated the pros and cons of the British Industrial Revolution for the past 150 years. The overwhelming consensus is that the factory labor system was fundamentally exploitative. Generations of men, women, and children were forced to spend their lives toiling in dangerous conditions for wages that barely paid the rent on squalid housing in crowded and unsanitary cities.

Some economic historians argue that, along with all the drawbacks, there were also benefits. People no longer had to content themselves with life in the same small village their ancestors had called home. Some workers were able to save enough that they could catapult themselves  into more prosperous careers, while others laid the groundwork upon which their children and grandchildren could build. Others joined the great political and social reform movements of the era. A century after Arkwright constructed the first textile factory, British workers, on the whole, were arguably better nourished, better housed, better clothed, more literate, and more prosperous than in the pre-industrial age.

Further Reading

Allport, Alan. The British Industrial Revolution. Chelsea House, 2011.

Humphries, Jane. Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution. Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Mokyr, Joel. The British Industrial Revolution: An Economic Perspective. Taylor & Francis Group, 2018.

The Industrial Revolution and British Society. Cambridge University Press, 1993.