Unit 5 - The Industrial Revolution Flashcards
How did the Industrial Revolution transform the countries it touched?
It transformed economies and created distinctive industrial societies with new working environments, social classes, values, conflict, protests, and patterns of migration
What effects did the Industrial Revolution have on places like Latin America?
It had profound effects on regions like Latin America that did not industrialize but increasingly supplied the insatiable demands of industrialized economies for raw materials and markets
In what way did the Industrial Revolution mark a response to an energy crisis?
The Industrial Revolution was a twofold revolution–drawing on new sources of energy and new technologies–that combined to transform economic and social life on the planet
What energy was used during the Industrial Revolution?
- It came to rely on fossil fuels such as coal, oil, and natural gas, which supplemented and largely replaced the earlier energy sources of wind, water, wood, and the muscle power of people and animals that had long sustained humankind
- Guano was used as a potent fertilizer and enabled highly productive input-intensive farming practices
Explain the significance of technology during the Industrial Revolution.
- A variety of innovations transformed cotton textile production
- The coal-fired steam engine provided a limitless source of power that could be used to drive any number of machines as well as locomotives and oceangoing ships
- Agriculture was impacted as mechanical reapers, chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and refrigeration transformed this industry
- These new sources of energy and new technologies gave rise to an enormously increased output of goods and services
- Innovations in farm machinery, irrigation pumps, and especially railroads and steamships that brought fertilizer from distant lands and transported crops grown in remote, often landlocked regions to world markets, allowed for the enormous expansion of tilled lands
How did the Industrial Revolution affect humankind?
- It increased the capacity of human societies to produce wealth, to extend life expectancies, and to increase human numbers (world pop. doubled between 1800 and 1900)
- It improved the material conditions of life
- Allowed humankind to reengineer ever-larger parts of the planet that in the past had only lightly populated and exploited
-New agricultural lands, alongside new pasturelands, fed a growing population that was also living longer thanks to advances in public health and medicine
Explain the pollution and environmental degradation that took place in this time period.
- The extraction of raw materials–coal,iron ore, and petroleum–altered landscapes and polluted local groundwater
- Factory waste and human sewage generated by industrial towns emptied into rivers, turning them into poisonous cesspools
- Smoke from coal-fired industries and domestic use polluted the air in urban areas and sharply increased the incidence of respiratory illness
-The growing use of fossil fuels began a gradual increase in greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere, impacting climate change
List the overall economic and social changes that took place in Great Britain.
- Multiple technological innovations and factory-based production vastly increased output of cotton (52 million pounds to 588 million pounds)
- Railroads became more prominent
- Most of this dramatic increase in production occurred in mining, manufacturing, and services
- Agriculture, which was the dominant economic sector in every civilization, shrank in relative importance
- Emerging beliefs that people should have the liberty to do with their wealth and their lives as they please
- New set of ideas (classical liberalism) provided the ideological underpinnings of industrial capitalism
Explain the changes in British society due to the Industrial Revolution, particularly in terms of the Aristocracy.
- As a class, the British aristocracy declined as the Industrial Revolution unfolded, as well as large landowners in every industrial society
- As urban wealth became more important, landed aristocrats had to make way for businessmen, manufacturers, and bankers, newly enriched by the Industrial Revolution
What characterized the British middle class?
- Contained extremely wealthy factory and mine owners, bankers, and merchants
- Benefited the most from industrialization
- Smaller businessman, doctors, lawyers, engineers, teachers, journalists, scientists, and other professionals required in any industrial society were far more numerous among the middle class
- Ideas of thrift and hard work, a rigid morality, respectability, and cleanliness characterized the middle-class culture
- Politically, they were liberals, favoring constitutional and limited government, private property, free trade, and social reform within limits
Lower middle class: - Included people employed in the growing service sector as clerks, salespeople, bank tellers, hotel staff, secretaries, telephone operators, police officers, etc.
How did gender roles and family dynamics change during this time period, especially for middle class women?
- Women in middle-class families were increasingly cast as homemakers, wives, and mothers, charged with created an emotional haven for their men and a refuge from a capitalist world
- They were expected to be the moral centers of family life, the educators of respectability, and the managers of household consumption as shopping
- By the late 19th century, some middle-class women began to enter the teaching, clerical, and nursing professions, and in the second half of the 20th century, many more flooded into the labor force
How did the Industrial Revolution affect the lower classes, known as the laboring classes?
- 70% of Britain’s 19th century population were manual workers in the mines, ports, factories, construction sites, workshops, and farms of an industrializing Britain. Their conditions changed over time, but laboring classes suffered the most and benefited least from the Industrial Revolution
- Average life expectancy dropped to 39.5 years
What types of political reform moves rose from the conditions of the laboring classes?
- By 1815, about 1 million workers, mostly artisans, created a variety of “friendly societies”. With dues contributed by members, these working-class self-help groups provided insurance against sickness, a decent funeral, and an opportunity for social life
- Skilled artisans who had been displaced by machine-produced goods and forbidden to organize in legal unions sometimes wrecked the offending machinery and burned the mills that took their jobs
How did the ideas of Karl Marx affect the industrial world?
He concluded that industrial capitalism was an inherently unstable system, doomed to collapse in a revolutionary upheaval that would give birth to an classless socialist society, thus ending forever the ancient conflict between rich and poor
What factors led to the movement away from revolutionary ideas like Marx’s in the second half of the nineteenth century?
- Improving material conditions during the second half of the 19th century helped move the working-class movement away from a revolutionary posture
- Wages rose under pressure from unions, cheap imported food improved working-class diets, infant mortality rates fell, etc
- Marx didn’t foresee the development of this intermediate social group, nor had he imagined that workers could better their standard of living within a capitalist framework
What factors facilitated the migration of Europeans during the Industrial Revolution?
- 20% of Europe’s population (50-55 million people) left home for the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and elsewhere
- They were pushed by poverty, a rapidly growing population, and the displacement of peasant farming and artisan manufacturing
- They were also pulled abroad by the enormous demand for labor overseas, the ready availability of land in some places, and the relatively cheap transportation of railroads and steamships
What was the global impact of this migration?
- It temporarily increased Europe’s share of the world’s population and scattering Europeans around the world
- In 1800, less than 1 percent of the total world population consisted of overseas Europeans and their descendents, but by 1930, they represented 11 percent
- Outposts of European civilization in the South Pacific overwhelmed their native populations through conquest, acquisition of their lands, and disease
- Smaller numbers of Europeans made their way to South Africa, Kenya, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Algeria, and elsewhere, where they injected a sharp racial divide into those colonized territories
What impact did this European migration have on the Americas?
- Latin America received about 20% of the European migratory stream, mostly from Italy, Spain, and Portugal, with Argentina and Brazil accounting for some 80% of those immigrants
- Considered “white”, they enhanced the social weight of the European element in those countries and enjoyed economic advantages over the multiracial, Indian, and African populations
Describe the immigrant experience in the United States.
- It was far larger and more diverse than elsewhere
- Had around 32 million newcomers arriving from all over Europe between 1820 and 1930
- The United States offered affordable land to many and industrial jobs to many more, neither of which were widely available in Latin America
- The newcomers were seen as distinctly inferior, even “un-American” and blamed for crime, labor unrest, and socialist ideas
- The immigration contributed much to the westward expansion of the United States, to the establishment of a European-derived culture in a vast area of North America, and to the displacement of the native peoples of the region
What factors contributed to the facilitation of Europeanization of Siberia?
- The availability of land, the prospect of greater freedom from tsarist restrictions and from the exploitation of aristocratic landowners, and the construction of the trans-Siberian railroad facilitated the continued Europeanization of Siberia
- Similar to the United States, the Russian government encouraged and aided the Europeanization, hoping to forestall Chinese pressures in the region and relieve growing population pressures in the more densely settled western lands of the empire
Identify the similar outcomes industrialization had across the globe.
- New technologies and sources of energy generated vast increases in production and spawned an unprecedented urbanization
- Class structures changes as aristocrats, artisans, and peasants declined as classes, while the middle class and a factory working class grew in numbers and social prominence
- Working-class frustration and anger gave rise to trade unions and socialist movements, injecting a new element of social conflict into industrial societies
- Working women usually received lower wages than their male counterparts, had difficulty joining unions, and were accused of taking jobs from men
- Middle-class women generally withdrew from paid labor altogether, and their working-class counterparts sought to do so after marriage
Identify the differences among how the Industrial Revolution unfolded across different areas.
There were differences in the pace and timing of industrialization, the size and shape of major industries, the role of the state, the political expression of social conflict, and other factors
EXAMPLES:
- French Industrialization occurred more slowly and less disruptively than did that of Britain
- Germany focused initially on heavy industry–iron, steel, and coal – rather than the textile industry with which Britain had begun
What accounted for the growth of American industrialization?
- The country’s huge size, the ready availability of natural resources, its expanding domestic market, and its relative political stability made the US the world’s leading industrial power by 1914
- About ⅓ of the capital investment that financed its remarkable growth came from British, French, and German capitalists (closely linked to Europe)
What role did the US Government play in industrialization?
- Tax breaks, huge grants of public land to railroad companies, law enabling the easy formation of corporations, and the absence of much overt regulation of industry all fostered the rise of very large business enterprises
- It played an important role, though less directly than in Germany or Japan