The Industrial Age or Industrial Revolution began in Britain in the 1770s and involved a move towards more intense industrial activity. There were numerous elements to this including the development of the first modern factories, a massive increase in the use of fossils fuels such as coal, and also the application of new technologies such as the steam engine to mechanize industrial processes which had previously been carried out largely by hand. Over a period of decades it led to mass migration to the cities of England from the countryside as people sought work in the new factories. The Industrial Revolution spread to other countries like Germany, France, Russia and the United States in the course of the nineteenth century, with historians often speaking of a Second Industrial Revolution which took place between 1870 and 1900 as the earlier innovations spread and new ones emerged. In tandem new technologies and medical innovations resulted in a population explosion across the continent and this in turn led to the migration of tens of millions of people from Europe to the western hemisphere between the 1820s and 1920s. Overall the Industrial Age not only led to mass urbanization within Europe, but ultimately mass migration from Europe to the Americas and other parts of the globe such as Australia.[1]
Industrial Age chronology of eventsIndustrial Age chronology of events
Industrial activity had been growing in Europe since the High Middle Ages (1000–1300) as trade expanded and a consumer society began to emerge. This was compounded in the centuries that followed by the Renaissance and early modern society’s desire for new consumer goods like books, newspapers, cheaper and better clothes and better-built homes, as well as demand for new dietary consumables like sugar, coffee, tea and spices. As all of this happened in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, proto-industrialists and merchants were on the lookout for ways to increase their profits and produce ever greater amounts of goods.
This growing consumer market and emergence of capitalism combined in the eighteenth century with practical developments in the Scientific Revolution such as the invention of the first steam engines and also new machines such as the ‘spinning jenny’, a contraption which made weaving and spinning of cloth and other textiles much more efficient. Then, beginning in the 1770s, businessmen in England realized that if they placed machines like the steam engines and the ‘spinning jenny’ in large buildings which were purpose-built for textile production they could begin to produce ever greater amounts of goods and generate higher profits. Thus were born the first factories and the Industrial Age.[2]
The Industrial Revolution was largely confined to England at first. As it developed it led to the first stirrings of the urbanization which comes with modern, industrial society. Fewer people were needed on the farms in the countryside as ploughs and other farming machines replaced some of the back-breaking work which people had carried out by hand in centuries gone by, whereas more and more people were needed to work in the factories which were appearing in cities across northern England like Manchester and Sheffield which lay close to Newcastle, the center of coal-mining in England, the fuel which drove the Industrial Revolution. Consequently, there was mass migration to the towns and cities between the 1770s and the end of the nineteenth century.[3]
These innovations soon spread to other parts of Europe. For instance, within the wider United Kingdom, Belfast in the north of Ireland became a center of the linen industry. Germany and the Rhineland cities in particular also adopted industrialization relatively quickly. Other countries were slower, but France and the Netherlands began to acclimatize to the changes in the first half of the nineteenth century, while in the second half of the nineteenth century, Russia, the cities of northern Italy and other places like Austria and Poland also industrialized. Many regions remained very under-developed in this respect until the late nineteenth or even the twentieth century, notably large parts of Spain, Portugal, southern Italy and the Balkans. The impact, though, of the Industrial Age was unquestionably immense. It ushered in the modern world.[4]
Extent of migration associated with the Industrial AgeExtent of migration associated with the Industrial Age
The migration which occurred as a result of the Industrial Revolution was immense, although it did take place gradually. For instance, in the 1770s and 1780s it turned into a significant flow of people from the countryside into the towns, but it was really in the first half of the nineteenth century that the massive explosion in migration began. Much of this was tied into changing methods of transport as the railways and then the steamships were introduced in the 1830s and 1840s. The city of Manchester provides a good snapshot of this. In 1750, on the eve of the Industrial Age, it was a sizeable town of about 20,000 people, but was hardly a massive city. A century later its population had grown by more than 1200% to roughly quarter of a million people, growth which was fueled by the emergence of Manchester as a center of the spinning and processing of cotton into textiles.[5] Overall the migration of people from rural areas into expanding urban areas saw England move from a country in which approximately 20% of people lived in towns in the 1750s to one with about 45% urbanization by 1850.[6]
Demographic impact of the Industrial AgeDemographic impact of the Industrial Age
The demographic impact of the Industrial Revolution is hard to under-estimate. It led to mass migration into the new cities across Europe in the nineteenth century. For instance, in 1800 there was only one city in Europe with a million inhabitants; London, and the continent of Europe only accounted for 28 of the world’s 100 largest cities. Jump forward to 1900 and there were nine cities in Europe with a million inhabitants or more and over half of the hundred largest cities in the world were found across the continent.[7] Furthermore, the growth of large cities only tells half the story. The greater movement still was into mid-sized cities and large towns. For every Milan, Paris and Berlin there were ten cities like Torino, Lille and Leipzig that emerged from obscurity to become major demographic and economic centers in the nineteenth century.[8] Overall the continent switched from having a level of overall urbanization of around 9% in 1800 to approximately 40% in 1900.[9] Researchers of demography and genealogy can get a sense of this by, for instance, comparing the first modern census undertake for England in 1841 and comparing it with the census of 1901.
The wider demographic impact wasn’t just about urbanization. There was also a staggering explosion in population levels overall. The population of Europe was an estimated 150 million people in 1800. This doubled to nearly 300 million in 1900.[10] It would have been greater still had the Americas not acted as pressure release on population expansion in Europe as tens of millions of Irish, Italians, Poles, Germans and others arrived to the western hemisphere from the 1830s onwards. This overall population expansion was tangentially related to the Industrial Revolution as industrialization brought greater access to things like vaccines against diseases such as smallpox and improved healthcare, which in turn drove up life expectancies and reduced child mortality, while at the same time the rise of crippling urban poverty saw families get bigger and bigger as people had more children who worked from a young age to help provide for the family. Hence, the Industrial Age set off a chain reaction of events which transformed the demography of much of the world.[11] The ubiquitous image of Ellis Island in New York City as the point of arrival for millions of people to the Americas was effectively a byproduct of the Industrial Age as industrialization set of a chain reaction of events which led to mass migration across the Atlantic.
See alsoSee also
Explore more about the Industrial AgeExplore more about the Industrial Age
- 1841 England & Wales Census record collection on MyHeritage
- 1901 England & Wales Census record collection on MyHeritage
- Ellis Island and Other New York Passenger Lists, 1820-1957 record collection on MyHeritage
- How the Industrial Revolution Changed the World at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
- Who Really Founded Labor Day? at the MyHeritage blog
References
- ↑ https://www.history.com/topics/industrial-revolution/industrial-revolution
- ↑ https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/topics/zm7qtfr/articles/z6kg3j6
- ↑ https://www.bl.uk/georgian-britain/articles/the-rise-of-cities-in-the-18th-century
- ↑ https://www.erih.net/how-it-started/the-industrial-revolution-in-europe
- ↑ https://research.ncl.ac.uk/pauperlives/ManchesterInfantMortality.htm
- ↑ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7186836/
- ↑ https://www.jstor.org/stable/resrep01253.5
- ↑ https://theconversation.com/how-europes-industrial-cities-bounced-back-from-the-brink-of-ruin-59776
- ↑ https://www.sociostudies.org/almanac/articles/the_nineteenth-century/
- ↑ Rondo Cameron, Concise Economic History of the World (Oxford, 1993), p. 193.
- ↑ https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/research/centres/cage/news/05-02-21-epidemic_disease_and_real_wages_during_the_british_industrial_revolution/