The Chief Features of the Industrial Revolution

The industrial revolution  was the substitution  of competition of the mediaeval regulations thanks a transformation of open fields system into private system. It was locating in Grate Britain during the second part of the eighteen century.

The first consequence of this dynamic process was the growth of two grate system of thought, Economic Science and Socialism. Four important English economists wrote texts about the development of Economic Science. The first was the publication of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations in which he investigated  the causes of wealth and aimed at the substitution of industrial freedom  for a system restriction. A second stage was marked by Malthus’ Essay of Population. He focused his attention not on the causes of wealth but on the causes of poverty.  A third stage is Ricardo’s Principles of Political Economy and Taxation which was about how wealth was distributed under a system of industrial freedom.  The fourth stage was marked by John Stuart Mill’s Principles of Political Economy. The problem he tried to solve in this was how wealth ought to be distributed in the population. He thought about the interplay between offer and demand.

The facts of the Industrial Revolution were mainly two:  the growth of population and the positive decline in the agricultural population.  The causes of the decrease in rural population were the destruction of the common-field system of cultivation, the enclosures and the consolidation of small farms into  large farms. However as these changes bore upon the rural population, they wrought distinct improvement from an agricultural point of view.  Enclosures brought an extension of arable cultivation and the tillage of inferior soils, the rotation of crops was generally introduced and an agricultural societies were instituted.

A direct consequences of these changes was the growth of the industry not only in Grate Britain but also in all Europe. Four great inventions altered the character of the cotton manufacture; the spinning-jenny, the water-frame, Crompton’s mule and the self acting mule. But the most important innovation in the textile industry was the steam engine and the power loom. There was also innovation in the iron industry after the invention of the smelting by pit-coat and the application of the seam-engine to blast furnaces.

The big production of manufacture and iron industries  improved trades and means of communications. A new canal system was introduced, turnpike road and new railroad were built. These improved means of communication caused an extraordinary increase in commerce and to secure a sufficient supply of goods. The results  were the frequently period of over-production and  depressions and the substitution of factory system for domestic system.

The rise in rents caused by the improvement of money investment, the enclosures system, the consolidation of farms and the high price of corn, brought lots of social changes in country life. The farmers shared in the prosperity of the landlords. They ceased to work and live with their labourers and became a distinct class.  The new class of great capitalist employers made enormous fortunes, they took little or not part personally in the work of their factories, their hundreds of workmen were individually unknown to them and as a consequences, the old relationship  between masters and men disappeared. There was also class conflict.

The effects of the Industrial Revolution prove that free competition may produce wealth without producing well being.