Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Roger Osborne
Title Page
List of Capsule Texts
Introduction
PROLOGUE: BRITAIN ON THE VERGE
PART I: INVENTION
1. The Watershed
2. Inventors and Inventing
3. Navigating the Patent System
PART II: COAL
4. Fuelling the Revolution
Part III: POWER
5. Watermills and Wheels
6. Steam before Newcomen
7. The Newcomen Engine
8. James Watt’s Revolution
9. Richard Trevithick: Steam into Motion
PART IV: COTTON
10. The Rise of Cotton
11. Spinning and Weaving
12. Richard Arkwright: The King of Cotton
13. Arkwright on Trial
14. Manchester: The First Industrial City
PART V: IRON
15. Abraham Darby’s Blast Furnace
16. Henry Cort and Cheap Iron
17. Crucible Steel
PART VI: TRANSPORT
18. Rivers and Roads
19. Canals and Locomotives
PART VII: MONEY
20. Producers and Consumers
21. Money for Industry
22. Adam Smith and the Industrial Economy
PART VIII: WORK
23. The Nature of Work and the Rise of the Factory
24. Life in the Industrial City
EPILOGUE: BRITAIN IN THE 1830S
Notes
Index
Select Bibliography
Copyright
About the Book
In late eighteenth-century Britain a handful of men brought about the greatest transformation in human history. Inventors, industrialists and entrepreneurs ushered in the age of powered machinery and the factory, and thereby changed the whole of human society, bringing into being new methods of social and economic organisation, new social classes, and new political forces. The Industrial Revolution also dramatically altered humanity’s relation to the natural world and embedded the belief that change, not stasis, is the necessary backdrop of human existence.
Iron, Steam and Money tells the thrilling story of those few decades, the moments of inspiration, the rivalries, skulduggery and death threats, and the tireless perseverance of the visionaries who made it all happen. Richard Arkwright, James Watt, Richard Trevithick and Josiah Wedgwood are among the giants whose achievements and tragedies fill these pages. In this groundbreaking study Roger Osborne also shows how and why the revolution happened, revealing pre-industrial Britain as a surprisingly affluent society, with wealth spread widely through the population, and with craft industries in every town, village and front parlour. The combination of disposable income, widespread demand for industrial goods, and a generation of time-served artisans created the unique conditions that propelled humanity into the modern world.
The Industrial Revolution was arguably the most important episode in modern human history; Iron, Steam and Money reminds us of its central role, while showing the extraordinary excitement of those tumultuous decades.
About the Author
ROGER OSBORNE is the author of a dozen books that provide new insights into episodes, events and movements in world history. His major works include The Floating Egg: Episodes in the Making of Geology (1996) and Civilization: A New History of the Western World (2006). He is also a playwright; his political drama The Art of Persuasion was first performed in 2011.
Also by Roger Osborne
The Floating Egg:
Episodes in the Making of Geology
The Deprat Affair:
Ambition, Revenge and Deceit in French Indo-China
The Dreamer of the Calle de San Salvador:
Visions of Sedition and Sacrilege in Sixteenth-Century Spain
Civilization:
A New History of the Western World
The Art of Persuasion (play)
Of the People, By the People:
A New History of Democracy
Iron, Steam & Money
The Making of the Industrial Revolution
Roger Osborne
List of Capsule Texts
Eureka Moment: Thomas Newcomen
Eureka Moment: James Watt
Climbing Boys
The Energy Equation
The Engineering Profession
A Tea-Kettle Business
The First Watt Engine
Too Much Too Soon: William Lee
Death Threat
Henry Cort in The Times
Industrial Dynasties: The Walker Family
William Smith: Reading the Rocks
Land and Money
Atrocious Murder
The Population Paradox
Introduction
It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of the Industrial Revolution. Only the smelting of metals and the adoption of agriculture brought a comparable change in human history. Before the Industrial Revolution humanity, for all its ingenuity, lived in a precarious balance with the natural world.1 The overwhelming majority of people were vulnerable to starvation, disease and debilitation, and were rarely able to rise beyond mere subsistence. All work was done by human and animal muscle, and life for most was a continual struggle against exhaustion and the spectre of death. There were great civilisations of course, but none ever freed its people from the threat of imminent famine or disease.2
In contrast the Industrial Revolution laid the foundations of a new world in which famine and want could be eliminated, where machines replaced human labour and where technology could be harnessed for the benefit of humankind. More than that, industrialisation changed the whole of human society, bringing into being new methods of social and economic organisation, new political forces and new social classes. The Industrial Revolution also had a transforming effect on human psychology, dramatically altering humanity’s relation to the natural world and embedding the belief that change, not stasis, is the necessary backdrop to human existence.3 We have seen too the malign effects of industrialisation – the despoliation of the natural world, pollution, climate change and increasing inequalities; the overthrow of that precarious balance has brought its own problems. For good or bad, so pervasive are the effects of the Industrial Revolution that it is impossible for us to comprehend human history without an understanding of this momentous episode: everything was changed forever.
What then was the Industrial Revolution? That may seem like an odd question. After all, every schoolchild knows about the spinning jenny, Samuel Crompton’s mule and James Watt’s steam engine, even if we are a little vague about how they worked; and we all know about cotton factories, smoky cities and steam locomotives. All these, and much more, certainly came into being in Britain in the late eighteenth century – but does this justify the claim that there was a revolutionary change in human existence?
In fact the very idea that there was an Industrial Revolution in Britain has come under attack from many quarters.4 Historians of technology have pointed out that important inventions have occurred throughout human history, often in clusters, so there is nothing unique about Britain in the late eighteenth century. In addition, several of the major innovations associated with the Industrial Revolution – from Abraham Darby’s blast-furnace technique to Thomas Newcomen’s steam engine and John Kay’s flying shuttle – were invented decades before that period. Moreover, Britain had been developing a strong manufacturing and commercial economy since 1650, with large numbers of people involved in production of textiles, iron and steel, tin, copper, brass, metal goods, salt, glass, shipbuilding, coal minin
g, brick-making and construction.
Early eighteenth-century Britain already had a large urban population, boosted by the phenomenal growth of London in particular. Urbanisation became a crucial element in the process of industrialisation but London in 1700 managed to support half a million people through trade, commerce and craft-scale manufacturing. Historians have argued that the inventions of the classic period of the Industrial Revolution were mainly concerned with the cotton industry, but this remained a small part of the British economy until the first quarter of the nineteenth century, while the factory system did not make significant inroads until after the first great phase of the Industrial Revolution had passed. Economic historians have also pointed out that the British economy grew extremely slowly through the eighteenth century. Sustained growth – the sign of a significant change in the productive capacity of the economy – did not kick in until the middle decades of the nineteenth century, at a time when the likes of Richard Arkwright, James Watt, Henry Cort and Matthew Boulton were all in their graves.
All of this provides ammunition for the argument that Britain went through a long period of gradual and sustained change, the effects of which were felt only from the 1830s onwards. If the Industrial Revolution did bring about the alteration of human society, this process had begun much earlier and its effects were felt much later than we have been led to believe. The much-vaunted transformation begins to look less and less like a revolution and more like a gradual, centuries-long process.
And yet, the Industrial Revolution has emerged from this process of intense analysis bloody but unbowed, and in many ways stronger and more clearly defined. Historians have been forced to seek answers to fundamental questions. Firstly, if this was a revolution – i.e. an episode of rapid and fundamental change – then what exactly was that change? And second, what precisely do we mean by the word ‘industrial’?
The answer to the first question is that, in a period of just three and a half decades, a series of innovations ushered in an entirely new kind of productive economy. The spinning jenny, Arkwright’s frame, Watt’s steam condenser, Crompton’s mule, Cort’s new method of iron-making, the rotary steam engine, the automatic loom and Trevithick’s steam locomotive all had effects which were threefold. Firstly, they laid the foundations for the mechanisation of industrial production – the spinning frame and the mule, for example, were designed to be driven by external power not by human or animal muscle. Secondly, they brought in a new source of power for these machines – steam engines. Thirdly, they adapted steam power to locomotion, opening up the possibility of rapid transport. All of this was brought into being between the registration of patents for Arkwright’s frame and Watt’s steam engine in 1769, and Trevithick’s successful trial of a steam locomotive at Pen-y-darren in 1804. This was, in any sense, a revolution in technology and the direct effects of these innovations were felt and appreciated at the time. Watt and Arkwright became famous in their lifetime and everyone soon saw that mechanised production powered by steam was opening up a new world.5
What, then, is the answer to our second question: what exactly do we mean by ‘industry’ and ‘industrialisation’? It is important for us to pin this down at the outset since these words have long carried a host of meanings that can easily bring confusion. Beneath the mechanised production, the smoky factories, the technical wizardry and the reordering of society that began in the Industrial Revolution lay two essential forces that made Britain the birthplace of industrialisation.
The first was the emergence of an economy fuelled by coal. As we shall see, Britain had access to almost limitless amounts of cheap coal that were used in increasing amounts for heating and manufacturing during the eighteenth century. Thermal energy enabled Britain to become more prosperous and productive; but the crucial breakthrough into an industrial economy came with the use of coal to produce mechanical energy. Applying steam power to productive industry enabled Britain to break free from the constraints of the so-called ‘organic economy’ where everything was finally dependent on the resources of the land. In the past, expansion of production had been constrained by the amount of wood, grain and grass that could be grown, the number of animals raised and the amount of power produced by waterwheels. The new mineral or industrial economy had no such constraints – providing the coal did not run out – and could grow without fear of hitting the limits of what the land could provide. It was mechanical power from fossil fuel that drove industrialisation.
The second driving force is to do with innovation itself. Before the Industrial Revolution there had of course been important technical changes throughout human history, but these had not led to a sustained momentum of innovation, development and adaption. Yet the eighteenth-century revolution began a period of technical innovation that has lasted until the present day – the microchip is the direct descendant of the Jacquard loom, while modern dynamic feedback systems derive from Watt’s centrifugal governor. We can therefore describe industrialisation as self-sustaining production powered by external energy and developed by continual innovation; this is what the Industrial Revolution brought into being.6
One of the most exciting aspects of this analysis is that the Industrial Revolution needed technological innovation to bring it into being. Some accounts of the period imply that the innovations were less important than the general increase in prosperity that preceded and, in their view, precipitated, the Industrial Revolution. But it is clear that there were two intertwined stories in eighteenth-century Britain. The first shows a country becoming increasingly wealthy on the back of its historical wool trade, its divergence into a host of craft manufactories, and the burgeoning of international commerce through the opening up of the Atlantic and sea routes to India. Britain was exploiting its ‘organic economy’ to the full. The second story shows a coal economy helping craft manufacturing to thrive, but which had not yet made the crucial transition from thermal to mechanical energy.
In fact Britain could have gone on exploiting its organic and mineral resources without ever becoming a fully industrial economy. The transition to the production of mechanical energy was not bound to happen, and any sense of inevitability comes only with hindsight. The Industrial Revolution came about because of inventors and their innovations. So, having survived a few decades in the wings of history, the great inventors – Watt, Newcomen, Hargreaves, Arkwright, Trevithick – are once again centre stage as the great movers in this historical drama. It was a single generation of British artisans who made possible Britain’s transition to industrialisation and transformed the prospects of humanity.
Over the next few hundred pages I will explore how this momentous process unfolded, and tell of the people, inventions, industries and events that made the Industrial Revolution happen when and where it did. We will discover why there were so many crucial inventions in such a short space of time, explore the key developments that drove the revolution, and examine the immediate and lasting effects on work, life and global population.
The Industrial Revolution comprises a vast panorama of interconnected events and people; any historian of the period therefore has to choose between a straight chronological record and a thematic approach. The chronological narrative risks reducing this fascinating story to a list of individual events without providing the opportunity to understand the context within which each industry developed. So instead, this book is made up of separate sections, each covering a different aspect of industrialisation or a different industry. Each section tells its own story – often starting in the late medieval period and extending past the Industrial Revolution itself and on into the nineteenth century – while at the same time making connections to the other sections. The section on ‘Power’, for example, explores the development of the steam engine by Newcomen, Watt and Trevithick, while ‘Invention’ shows how these men came from the same social class of engineer–artisans; the section on ‘Cotton’ details the spectacular career of Richard Arkwright, while ‘Work’ shows the lasting effects of
Arkwright’s factory system. These focussed sections are bookended by a Prologue that describes Britain on the eve of industrialisation, and an Epilogue that examines the state of the country eighty years later. This structure will allow the reader to revel in the individual stories, while at the same time seeing them in the context of this world-changing process.
Innovation and technology lie at the heart of the Industrial Revolution. So, while many accounts of the period have skated over the details of atmospheric engines or spinning jennies, this book takes the opposite approach. Without a basic understanding of the process of spinning cotton, it is impossible to understand the enormous achievement that James Hargreaves’s spinning jenny or Samuel Crompton’s mule represented; without some grasp of how a hand-loom works, it is difficult to appreciate the ingenuity and the impact of the invention of the flying shuttle; and unless you know roughly how an atmospheric engine works you cannot see how James Watt’s inventions changed the world. Understanding the fundamentals of these processes gives us a far richer appreciation of our own history and allows us to share in the sheer excitement brought on by discovery and innovation. The task of the historian is not to avoid the details of technological innovation but to reveal them as the thrilling focus of human endeavour and achievement.
The Industrial Revolution is the nexus through which all of modern human history flows. In a world concerned about climate change, pollution and environmental degradation, industrialisation can seem like the villain of the piece. But everyone reading this book leads a life of well-being beyond the imagining of those who lived before 1770: it is the great watershed and there is no going back. Instead we are beginning to understand that the world and the future of humanity depends on our instincts as makers and doers, as solvers of practical problems through mental and technical ingenuity. The Industrial Revolution is more relevant than ever.
Prologue:
Iron, Steam & Money Page 1