Industrial Revolution Flashcards
Industrial Revolution
A period of global transition of the economy towards efficient manufacturing processes that followed the Agricultural Revolution. It started in Great Britain, then went to continental Europe and the United States and began from around 1760.
Agriculture
The practice of farming, including cultivation of the soil for the growing of crops and the rearing of animals to provide food, wool, and other products.
Cottage industry
A small manufacturing business that often operates in the home of the craftsperson. This was the main system of manufacture of goods in Britain before the Industrial Revolution.
Enclosure movement
The process whereby landowners in Britain closed off previously “common” land to the use of commoners, many of whom often hand to thus migrate into the cities to find new jobs in factories as a consequence of no longer being able to live off the land.
Agricultural revolution
An unprecedented increase in food production in Britain arising from increases in labor and land productivity (thanks to new tools and innovations in growing practices) occurring between the mid-17th and late 19th centuries.
Crop rotation
The practice of growing a series of different types of crops in the same area across a sequence of growing seasons. In Britain during the agricultural revolution, this was done by growing clover and turnips on fields that had previously been left fallow, which boosted overall food production.
Selective breeding
The process by which humans use animal breeding to selectively develop particular, desirable traits, such as meat mass or milk production in the case of cattle and wool prodction in the case of sheep.
Textiles
An umbrella term that includes various fibre-based materials and their manufacture, including wool, cotton, linen, silk, hemp and newer, synthetic fibres.
Cotton
The white, fluffy substance that surrounds the seeds of a specific pant native to India and which is used in the production of a specific kind of textile.
Loom
An apparatus for making fabric by weaving yarn
Silver
In textiles (and especially cotton), this refers to the fluffy tubes of mostly unprocessed fibre following the carding process.
Yarn
In textiles, this refers to the fine, twisted and coiled lengths of fibre resulting from the spinning process.
Fabric
In textiles, this refers to the cloth produced after the weaving process where yarn is interwoven in a criss-cross pattern.
Carding, spinning, weaving
The three major processes in the manufacturing of textiles, especially cotton.
Invention
The action of creating something especially new, typically a process or device.
Innovation
The action of creating something especially new, although it is not confined to merely processes and devices and could also refer to ideas.
The spinning Jenny
A multi-spindle spinning frame, one of the key developments in the industrialisation of textile manufacturing during the early Industrial Revolution, invented in 1764-1765 by James Hargreaves.
The water frame
Invented by Richard Arkwright, it was a machine powered by water and which enabled the automatic production of spun textile, known as yarn.
Richard Arkwright
An English inventor and a leading entrepreneur during the early Industrial Revolution, he invented the water frame.
Water power
The use of falling or fast-running water to produce energy to power machines. This type of power was used extensively in Britain and America just before the emergence of steam power.
Mechanisation
The introduction of machines or automatic devices into the manufacturing process of products
Assembly line manufacturing
A production process that breaks up the manufacture of a product into steps that are completed in a pre-defined and repetitive way.
Economics
A field that studies the production, distribution, and use of goods and services.
Capital
In economics, this term refers to “those durably produced goods that are in turn used as further production” of goods and services. A typical example is the machinery used in a factory.
Capitalism
An economic system based on private ownership of the means of production, like factories, and their operation for profit.
Profit
The extra value, most often in the form of money gained, which is attained once the revenue received from a sold product exceeds the costs invloved in producing it
Free enterprise
The system of economic behaviour whereby people are allowed to start a business with the view to selling a good or service for profit.
Unskilled labour
Used to describe a type of worker with a limited skill set or minimal economic value for the work performed.
Abraham Derby
A British ironmaster and foundryman who developed a method of creating cast iron in a blast furnace using coke as fuel
Blast furnace
A site used for smelting on a large scale to produce industrial metals, generally cast iron.
