The Cause of the Industrial Revolution

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KAREN BROADBENT                4/10/04

ASSIGNMENT 1

The Cause of the Industrial Revolution

In discussing the main developments of the Industrial Revolution, we must first look at the Agricultural Revolution and the effects of enclosure as writes Peter Mathias a secondary source, “to be given identity, the concept (the Industrial Revolution) implies the onset of a fundamental change in the structure of an economy; a fundamental redeployment of resources away from agriculture” (Peter Mathias (1969,p2) The First Industrial Nation).  The agricultural revolution was the precursor to the industrial revolution and began around 1650, with parliamentary enclosure acts dominating the period 1750 – 1830.  Enclosure changed agriculture from an open field system, whereby the villagers would each farm on a strip of land to provide for their own requirements to a system of private land management of enclosed fields and individual landowners took over control of the land.  The community no longer had communal rights to the land and had to look to the large landowner for their living.  Enclosing the land brought benefits to agricultural productivity from new crop rotation and heavy manuring, but for the peasant farmers they were displaced of their land and forced to find work elsewhere.  Farming became less labour intensive and the large farms contributed to a rural labour surplus.  

The Agricultural Revolution created wealthy landowners, which in turn added to a financial situation favourable for the industrial revolution.  As M.W. Flinn a writes in Origins of the Industrial Revolution, a secondary source “there is much truth in the assertion that the increase in rents, itself mainly the product of enclosures and population pressure which drove up agricultural prices, may well have been a major factor in financing the Industrial Revolution.”  (1966, P47).  British banks had developed to handle the financial business of the landowning aristocracy, rich farmers and merchants.  Landowners and farmers who had prospered from enclosures deposited their money with the Country Banks.  The Country banks deposited money into London Banks, which were then able to loan money to Industrialists in the North and Midlands.  T.S.Ashton sees the chief contribution of the banks in providing short-term funds for industrialisation.  If we look at W.Rostow though, an economic historian, in ‘The Stages of Economic Growth’, 1960, a secondary source, he uses his theory of ‘take-off’ to explain how industrial growth and change accelerated into self-sustained growth.  In this he identifies cotton textiles as the leading sector in British ‘take-off’ and identifies the period as 1783 – 1802 using the evidence of an increase in raw cotton imports.  The growth of the British textile industry notes Rostow, went hand in hand with the developments in the plantation system of cotton production in America with slavery being very important to the plantations.  Rostow supports his theory by stating that cotton stimulated other industries by ‘forward linkages’, i.e. coal, iron, engineering and banking.

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Another factor we must take into consideration was the huge increase in population in Britain creating a labour surplus.  The population rose from 9 million in 1700 to 27.3 million in 1851 due partly to improved diet and nutrition.  There was an increased demand for goods from the growing population at home, a quote from a secondary source shows that “…The central problem of the age was how to feed and clothe and employ generations of children outnumbering by far those of an earlier time……..She (England) was delivered not by her rulers but by the wit and ...

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