The Archaeology of Britain: An introduction from ... - waughfamily.ca

The industrial revolution
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porcelain and the introduction of the rotative engine. Many of these increased the gap between
what could be achieved mechanically and what could be achieved by an individual alone. The
factory system replaced more traditional forms of working, as people were brought together into
single workplaces. Towns grew as population moved from the countryside to work in the new
factories, but also as the population itself increased. Real income per capita grew, as self-sufficiency
diminished, and people relied more upon obtaining food and consumer goods from others.
Britain sought and exploited new overseas markets throughout Europe, Africa, America and
the Far East, becoming a major world trading power. Profits from this, and the notorious triangular
trade between Britain, Africa and the Caribbean, provided capital for investment as well as new
industrial opportunities for processing raw materials for re-export. London became the financial
centre of the world, and capital was diverted into industrial enterprises.
In Britain, the landscape was transformed by the pattern of enclosure and by massive increases
in the exploitation of raw materials, leaving great scars across the countryside, whilst in towns,
houses were built for the newly industrialized workforce, and factories, warehouses and other
industrial buildings added whole new quarters to what had been small market towns. The focus
of settlement moved from the south and east, to the north and Midlands, and the population
grew, perhaps as a result of changing marriage patterns or more likely falling death rates due to
improved health. Transport of goods and people became easier as the roads were turnpiked and
straightened, the navigable reaches of rivers were linked by a network of canals, and the beginnings
of the railway system were laid down (see Chapter 15).
Accompanying all this physical change were alterations in the financial and political institutions
of Britain, in the role of the State, the nature of capital and banking, and in the system of
privileges and monopolies that had dominated trade.
There is no single agreed date for either the beginning or the end of this process—the start of
the process is variously placed in the mid-sixteenth century, in 1750 or in the early 1780s as the
point at which statistical indicators move significantly upwards; at the other end there is even less
agreement on whether one cuts off in 1802, marking the end of a major watershed, or extends
the process through the nineteenth century when sectors such as brick-making were finally
mechanized.
Interpretative models of the industrial revolution
The following is a sweeping and fairly conventional version of a complex process. Historians
have many different views on why this transformation took place, and indeed whether it was
quite such a transformation as the history books might suggest (Hudson 1992).
Early nineteenth-century observers were aware of the way in which society was changing;
whilst some were impressed by the ingenious machinery and the personalities of the great
inventors, others were worried by working-class organization and the atmosphere of distrust
between workers and capitalists that had grown out of the appalling conditions accompanying
industrialization. The idea of a ‘revolution’ came from French writers at the end of the eighteenth
century, who themselves had seen extraordinary changes in their own society, and was perhaps
best formalized in English history by Arnold Toynbee in his Lectures on the Industrial Revolution in
1884, outlining the basic model of economic transformation set out above.
This interpretation was questioned during the 1930s, when writers such as J.U. Nef, looking at
the coal industry, saw a more evolutionary process at work, recognizing that it was necessary to
look back into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in order to understand the changes of the
eighteenth. Coal was already replacing wood as fuel in a range of manufactures in the sixteenth
century, and the transport systems, mining techniques and capital formation that accompanied
the growth in coal production were essential preconditions for later industrialization. Others