If you go back to 1800s, everybody was poor, I mean everybody. Industrial revolution kicked in, and a lot of countries benefitted, but by no means everyone
These lines can be said to be attributed to the richest man on earth bill gate, and it would seem he was right. Industrialization have had numerous impact on the people in our society and our society itself, everybody was poor then, industrialization came along and voila!!! Countries become modern and more industrialized, now everyone is happy.
In this post I will be talking about the concept of industrialization and how it affected Britain
Bill gate’s words didn’t exactly leave the people of Britain out, life in the British empire wasn’t so different it only varied a little bit, historians believe before 1750 80% of the British population lived and worked on small farms, planting menial crops year in year out, some might even say they engaged in the rearing of small herds of livestock. Agriculture was the main source of wealth in Britain. I wouldn’t want to say wealth though, seems overrated right? Let’s go with agriculture was the main economic activity in Britain. small farms with small herd of livestock wouldn’t make you wealthy. Trust me on this.
Well apart from agriculture there existed other activities that drove the economy of Britain. Manufacturing was one accompanied with a little bit of mining and trade
I am definitely not an historian but I believe there wasn’t much manufacturing happening then or even mining for that matter, manufacturing was, let me use the word, local, tools used for manufacturing were indeed crude tools mostly needed to be powered by people or animals.
towns and villages at the time were small, the road system was very poor as well, the populace mostly travelled by foot
Well what would you expect, the pretty face of industrialization was not present in Britain. Or rather let me say it was present “well compared to the stone age” but it was moving at a very small pace.
Towns and villages lacked a good road network between them, there were no roads linking towns to towns or villages to villages, this in turn compelled people to not travel very far from their place of rest.
The road network wasn’t the only one dwindling believe me, life expectancy was low, illness was common as a result of poor hygiene
Here comes the pretty face of industrialization
Even though industrialization existed in Britain, it was painstakingly slow. Emergence of industrial revolution could not be connected to any event in history, although manufacturing already existed in Britain and manufacturing was the target of industrial revolution. Industries connected to the production of iron, coal wool etc. that’s where industrialization began from.
Its difficult to determine when in history industrialization kicked off from but we can definitely determine the area it started from
during the industrial revolution Britain’s population quadrupled from an estimated 6.5 million people in 1750 to 32.5 million in the 1900
Now industrialization around us, we are seeing the positive result. Standard of living has improved, urban communities became the talk of the day, Britain was transformed, roads improved. Hygiene improved and therefore life expectancy also improved. People moved from the rural communities into the urban communities.
Britain was indeed transformed and that transformation was only possible through Industrialization
Development in Britain happened so rapidly and it sure happened in all aspect, it was really hard to keep track of
development led to modern towns and cities: cities like Manchester or London weren’t so great before the industrial revolution, but industrialization dwelled on them like wild fire and now London is so great, Manchester is so awesome. Factories developed in the cities, as a result of this people trooped into these cities to work at the new factories
industrialization also paved way for the emergence of steam power and electricity. What’s life without electricity huh?
” the middle class”” an unfamiliar development
Numerous development took place, development that were familiar, however an unfamiliar development took place, industrialization led to the emergence of the middle class. Yes the middle class!!
Modern towns and cities, new factories all this places saw the development of an unfamiliar trait, the emergence of a new social class, generally known as the middle class, this new social class were made up of people who were neither wealthy nor poor, mostly average, I can say I fall in to this category, there isn’t much fun to that though, but fuck it, that’s a post for another day!. This particular class led to the creation of more schools and universities.
As I put my pen to paper, writing this, or my fingers to keyboard, whichever, a question that comes to mind is why Britain?
There were lots of countries then, the united states was around during that time, why didn’t industrialization begin over there.
There are numerous factors listed by historians as to why industrial revolution kicked off in Britain but yet again I am not an historian, so I will be doing this my way.
Britain as we know it is the most organized country on the face of the planet, that’s my opinion though, you might have other countries in mind,
apart from the superiority in organizational structure of the British empire, the power of the British empire could not be rivaled by any country, there are other range of reasons as to why industrialization first took place in that perfectly organized country.
naval power and trading power
I think this is something we can all agree on, the British are the most superior in terms of naval power, well this was the same in the 1900s. as a nation surrounded by water, I wouldn’t expect less from them, Britain relied deeply on their naval prowess and this is one of the factor that led to why Britain was the first country to experience industrial revolution
Another factor is the enormous supply of coal, Britain was indeed very fortunate to have had an endless supply of coal in its borders, coal was one of the major fuel used back then and industrial revolution was driven on the supply of coal
Capitalism in other words, in my words means when properties, business are owned by individuals and not by the government
Unlike other countries on the planet, where there was less freedom being exhibited and where less capitalism was practiced, Britain’s case was otherwise, individual freedom was common
While Many countries in the world were experiencing unrest in the political and social aspect. Britain did not have to go through any of this, instead they enjoyed stability in government, and this stability brought about investors and also reduced the risk involved in performing business.
The British have been known to have a far more superior banking system than any other country, there were massive supply of capital and the meant people could borrow money to start up business easily
All this brought the easy transition from a point of stagnation into an era of industrial revolution for the British empire
okay now industrialization has shown us what it can do
Industrial revolution started in Britain and we all know why it did
Now let’s see how it developed the various aspect of the population
We learnt earlier that the Britain’s were only concerned in menial agriculture, localized manufacturing and so on.
Well these are the aspects that were most positively affected by industrialization
Transportation in Britain was painstakingly slow and expensive, majority of the population moved about on foot, but due to the emergence of industrialization, a faster and less expensive means of transportation was demanded by the populace, they felt the need for a faster means of transportation for their goods and easy movement between cities, due to numerous demand, improvement was made on the aspect of transportation.
Before industrial revolution, production of iron was done in small quantities and a large quantity of wood had to be used to make charcoal, because charcoal was used as the source of heat used in smelting iron ore.
in 1709 Abraham Darby, an iron producer in Derbyshire discovered the use of coke as the main heating system in heating the ore, though coke itself was made from coal
Short term or long term
Now we have new technologies, industrialized societies, new and modern production method. Yes, we have all that. Now can we all stop for a second and think how has industrialization affected us, has it affected us positively or negatively? Have we seen the full effect of industrialization, whether it’s the short-term effect or the long-term effect?
Many argue that we haven’t seen nothing of the effect of industrialization, we have only seen the scratch of the long-term effect, could this be the truth, are we still “industrializing”
Its difficult to determine when industrialization halted, historians believe it stopped just before world war one. I strongly believe we are still in the era of industrialization, new technologies are brewing everywhere, development of cities, development of new laws.
Industrialization can only stop when we stop being human beings, our instinct and inquisitiveness as humans will always make us want to engage industrial revolution.
Well there you have it my dear steemians!!
Thanks for reading
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