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write my history essay

The Impact of the Industrial Revolution on Society

1. Introduction

Many people worked in factories where conditions were tough. Nearly everyone worked at least 12 hours a day, six or seven days a week. Some people worked in hot, crowded, dangerous places. Children often worked in cotton and iron mills. They were specially desirable workers because their small fingers could repair broken threads on spinning machines and reach into machines to clean them. Factories changed people’s lives. Workers no longer worked at their own pace. They had to work as fast as the machines. In time, people became angry about their living and working conditions. In 1833, seven years after Lord Althorp had first introduced a Reform Bill, Parliament published information showing just how bad living in big cities had become.

The Industrial Revolution improved people’s lives, stimulated economies across the world, and brought about many other changes. The Industrial Revolution changed people’s way of life in many ways. For example, when people worked in the country or made their own work, it was called the domestic system. The Industrial Revolution began a new era of production. People started using machinery to produce goods. Many more people took jobs in factory towns, and the number of cities with over 100,000 people doubled between 1800 and 1850. The demand for workers inspired people to move from rural areas to cities, and the need for labor allowed people working in factories to earn more money. The lower classes’ standard of living improved greatly in the 19th century, particularly in Great Britain.

2. The Social Effects of Industrialization

Increased production led to large supplies of goods becoming available. The general public wound up purchasing these products as fast as they could be provided. However, the age of overproduction had a net result of more and more workers being employed in the manufactures. Yet, the worker still received less than a bare existence wage for a full day’s labor.

In the two centuries following 1800, the Western world, with increasing pace, has embarked upon a transformation from relatively primitive economies to industrial economies based on mechanization. This era of transformation over the last two centuries has been an era of substantial economic growth and reallocation of labor. Countries across Europe and in the United States found that labor abandoned the large open land areas and headed into towns in pursuit of better-paid jobs associated with employment in industry. The vast growth in industry in the late 1800s led to its immense concentration in the United States and Europe. City after English city received its charter from the king, and industry settled comfortably behind walls.

The Industrial Revolution and the great economic success that accompanied it had a wide variety of victims. As we have previously discussed, the American public, through the efforts of trusts, became a victim of the great industrial success. But other casualties of modern progress were literally worked to death in the mills and factories throughout the world. The Industrial Revolution was not only detrimental to the lives of the industrial workers but to the rest of society as well.

3. Economic Changes and Urbanization

The spurt of industrial growth and change implied in these sketches helped, of course, to hasten the end of a traditional world that was hardly sudden in coming. The need for even the simplest raw materials with which to manufacture machines and food with which to feed and sustain the labor force caused changes that reached far beyond the employment area. Today without competition from products of later technological revolutions, and equipped with the inventory of its techniques of that period, we are able to watch the stage of those exciting, middle years of the industrial revolution when science and invention were rapidly altering in a most fundamental way the pattern of Western life.

As late as 1760, every phase of cotton, woolen, or linen manufacture was carried on in the small, rural shop. Among the wool-workers, for instance, the producer of wool from the raw to the finished state was generally the farmer himself and the pre-industrial wool-manufacturer and dealer sold wool to the village worker. Machines played little role. Knowledge, skill, and the simple tools of the period (in this case a spindle and loom) sufficed to transform the raw wool into cloth. In the next century, flowers akin to the one painted by Constable would be choking the rivers of the Midlands. The little master craftsman—and most of the workers in wool and cotton manufacture were men of this type—would be replaced by the factory hand subject to the will of his employer.

4. Technological Advancements and Their Influence

Effective transport was always a crutch that supported the life of any society. The Industrial Revolution would introduce new ways of transporting goods and people from place to place. Canals, early railways, and improved roads would lower transport costs. The national markets for raw materials and manufactured goods would increase with a 150% growth in population between 1750 and 1850. Economies of scale would increase. New mass markets would obtain. Wages would increase as the extra purchasing power that was unleashed, as the larger population found employment in the new factories and industries. Traditional agriculture, handicrafts, and domestic industry would decline as workers continually migrated to where the industries were located, and as machines replaced workers in the factories, at lower wage costs. The selfishness of the merchants and entrepreneurs would lead to a coarser mix in society, but in the long run, the general standard of living would be raised to a higher plane.

The world was about to change; machines were about to enter the fabric of society in such an important manner that, henceforth, any society would have to cope with the notion of progress. A momentum had built up and would snowball through the ages as more and more scientific discoveries were made and exploited to create even more advanced ways of making ever more commodities. Whole new industries would spring up; integrated industries in which each activity was dependent upon another. Capitalization would increase with each new development, and entrepreneurs would search further afield to find newer, cheaper or better raw materials. The mass of the people would either have to adapt and move with the times or be left by the wayside.

5. Conclusion

In conclusion, the Industrial Revolution represents the clear exclamation point in the world where it solves the standard of living and establishes economic growth. The Industrial Revolution in Western Europe provided for a quality of life unimaginable in previous eras. Its long-term effects were not uniformly favorable to the population. There is no doubt, however, that a radical potential for inventions existed in the minds of industrialized people who could exploit that potential. And, despite the evident human consequences of rapidly implemented technological innovations, the Industrial Revolution unquestionably did lead to enormous increases in the material well-being of the Western world.

In conclusion, the Industrial Revolution was a time of great change in the world. It was the time when the world’s economy would begin its long journey to the world’s economy of today. It also changed the world to a more urban society and the world was no longer ruled by farming and agricultural things. It was a time when cities were growing and people who worked in factories had to rise at unprincipled hours to work in miserable conditions. Although it was difficult to rise up, put your stockings and shoes on, and go to work at 12:00 a.m., this was a time of history that will in time be seen as some of the best times of the economy without the social and physical implications that it did have.