Introduction for Chapter 23

23 The Revolution in Energy And Industry 1760–1850

> What were the social, cultural, and economic consequences of the Industrial Revolution? Chapter 23 examines the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution began in Great Britain around 1780 and soon began to influence continental Europe and the United States. Industrialization profoundly modified human experience. It changed patterns of work, transformed the social structure, and eventually altered the international balance of political power in favor of the most rapidly industrialized nations, especially Great Britain. What was most remarkable about the Industrial Revolution was that it inaugurated a period of sustained economic and demographic growth that has continued to the present.

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Young Factory Worker Children composed a substantial element of the workforce in early factories, where they toiled long hours in dangerous and unsanitary conditions. Until a mechanized process was invented at the end of the nineteenth century, boys working in glass-bottle factories, like the youth pictured here, stoked blazing furnaces with coal and learned to blow glass. (Detail, Interior of a Furnace, 1865, oil on canvas by Charles Housez [1822–1888]/© Boume Gallery, Reigate, Surrey, UK/The Bridgeman Art Library)

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ca. 1765 1830s
Hargreaves invents spinning jenny; Arkwright creates water frame Industrial banks promote rapid industrialization of Belgium
1769 1833
Watt patents modern steam engine Factory Act passed in England
ca. 1780–1850 1834
Industrial Revolution and accompanying population boom in Great Britain Creation of a Zollverein (customs union) among many German states
1799 1842
Combination Acts passed in England Mines Act passed in England
1805 1844
Egypt begins process of modernization Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England
1810 1850s
Strike of Manchester, England, cotton spinners Japan begins to adopt Western technologies; industrial gap widens between the West and the rest of the world
1824 1851
British Combination Acts repealed Great Exhibition held at Crystal Palace in London
1829 1860s
Stephenson’s Rocket; first important railroad Germany and the United States begin to industrialize rapidly