Essays about Industrial Revolution (5)

   Topic: Children exploitation

During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries Great Britain became the first country to industrialize. Because of this, it was also the first country where the nature of children’s work changed so dramatically that child labor became seen as a social problem and a political issue. Children of poor and working-class families had worked for centuries before industrialization, helping around the house or assisting in the family’s enterprise when they were able. Children performed a variety of tasks that were auxiliary to their parents but critical to the family economy whereas children as young as four were employed in production factories with dangerous, and often fatal, working conditions. 

First of all, Factory owners were looking for cheap, malleable and fast-learning work forces and found them among the children of the urban workhouses. The two most common forms of child labor were labeled as Parish apprentice children and free labour children. The Parish apprentice children were some of the first children to be brought into the factory setting. These were children who had been taken in by the government and placed in orphanages.

Rich factory owners approached parish leaders with the idea of them taking in children and feeding, housing and providing for those children in exchange for the children’s work in their factories. These children were not paid a wage for the work they did; the compensation in basic needs was considered enough and in many cases just barely enough to survive on. These children were subject to unhealthy working conditions, long hours, and harsh punishment.  

The second form of child labour was the case for many of the mills that were located along waterways and many times not in the larger cities. The children were often taken to these mills from larger towns.  When the steam engine was invented and mills moved to larger towns a new option for workers came about, the children of the lower class. These people were hardly making it by and they could use any extra income possible.

The factory owners started employing these children for extremely low wages, in some case a mere penny a day. These children were given the title of  free labour children and they were hired children to work in these factories preparing and spinning cotton, flax, wool and silk. Children worked under deplorable conditions and were being exploited by the industrialists. They worked six days a week without recess for meals in hot, stuffy, poorly lit, overcrowded factories to earn as little as four shillings per week.

Summing up, the Industrial Revolution was a time that brought about major changes to the manufacturing and economic societies of the entire world. The technological advances of the time were quite extraordinary but with such advances they brought a new social order. During this revolution children were one of the groups that were affected because they were called to work in the factories. Children became the next best option for the workforce because they were young and easily taught new task while being obedient and respectful of authority. Parliament passed several child labor laws, the three laws most impacted were the Cotton Factories Regulation Act of 1819 (which set the minimum working age at 9 and maximum working hours at 12), the Regulation of Child Labor Law of 1833 (which established paid inspectors to enforce the laws) and the Ten Hours Bill of 1847 (which limited working hours to 10 for children and women).

 Topic: Technological improvement: 

inventions and Industries: cloth, coal, iron 

and  metal

The effect of new technology depends upon which group or class controls it, and for what purposes it is being used. The most important sector of English manufacturing at the time was textiles and the mid and late 1700s saw a phenomenal rate of technological innovation. Some of the most important technical advances (John Kay's "flying shuttle' developed in 1733, James Hargreaves' 'spinning jenny' in 1767) involved the automation and taking over by machines of tasks that had from immemorial time been used by craftsmen. There were two ways in which these innovations disrupted traditional ways of life of the old 'hand-loom' weavers based in the countryside. 

Firstly, the first industry to become mechanized was the textile industry. In 1771 Richard Arkwright opened a cotton-spinning mill with a machine called a water frame, which was powered by a water mill. Then, in 1779, Samuel Crompton invented a new cotton-spinning machine called a spinning mule.

Finally in 1785, Edmund Cartwright invented a loom that could be powered by a steam engine. As a result of these new inventions cotton production boomed. The new technology could produce cloth faster and more cheaply than traditional processes. Because of this, the old hand-loom weavers could not compete with the new machines, their incomes fell and thousands were plunged into poverty. By the 1820’s, the power loom had replaced hand weaving. A weaver working two power looms could produce fifteen times the cloth as the fastest hand weaver. By 1830, 500,000 people worked in the cotton business. Cotton cloth represented forty percent of Britain’s export market.

            Secondly, Iron production also grew rapidly. In 1784, Henry Cort (1740-1800) invented a better way of making wrought iron, the puddling process. Until then men had to beat red hot iron with hammers to remove impurities while with this process the iron was melted in an extremely hot furnace and stirred of 'puddled' to remove impurities. The result was a vast increase in iron production. The introduction of steam-driven machinery brought new industries or transformed older ones. Coal was replacing wood as a fuel especially in England and northern France. New demands stimulated growth in the coal-mining industry and the pressure on fuel supplies came not only from domestic heating requirements and metallurgical trades but also from the brickmaking, brewing, dyeing, and glassmaking industries. Metalworking trades also underwent rapidly. Steel and steam together led to improvements in transportation technology too. 

            Traditional weaving had been a family business. With the new machinery created a new division of labour was implemented. This completely disrupted the old way of life. Weaving was no longer part of the activity of the family but rather certain members of the family would be employed as wagelabourers by the employer in the factory which would be some distance away. The advancement of the textile industry was a key development in Britain's industrialization. It was consequently this industry that first employed the factory system. 

The raw materials used were essentially the same ones used under the domestic system, mainly featuring wool and cotton. It was possible to make enormous amounts of fabric in less time and for less money. Yet while advancements in this industry brought huge profits, and were therefore very good for the economy.

     Topic: Division of labor and Unions

                      Industrialization occurred first in Great Britain. The effect of industrialization was to transform agricultural societies into industrial societies. Technology had made it possible the development of machines which raised worker productivity and promoted the growth of large scale industrial enterprises. Manufactured products could be turned out more quickly and cheaply than before. In the long run, standards of living were improved in much of the world. It also generated social change, which at time became unsettling, even violent. It encouraged urbanization and migration to cities; although at times city dwellers who worked in factories lived in squalid conditions. The problems of early industrial workers led to a number of calls for reform by social critics. 

         







 As consequence of industrialization, a new Factory System was implemented.  Newly developed manufacturing machines were too large and expensive and were moved to areas where large scale production could take place. This brought more workers who performed more specialized tasks than ever before. Under this system, each worker performed a single task rather than the entire job.

Factory operations allowed managers to maintain strict quality control and produce high quality goods. The factory system also led to the emergence of an owner class whose capital financed factory operations and industrial workers became wage owners who had nothing to offer but their labor.  Factory work was often repetitious and boring. As a result, many workers were unhappy.

Moreover, the pace of work and degree of discipline also 

created problems for workers. Clocks, machines and shop 

rules established work patterns. Supervision was strict; men, 

women and children worked in factories where managers 

often pressured them to speed up production and punished 

them if they did not reach production expectations.

Safety was not a matter of concern, and workers often suffered serious, even fatal accidents. Seldom were few workers able to improve their lot by going into business for themselves or obtain a job as a supervisor, but the majority saw very little social mobility.

The conditions in these new industries were often harsh, people were forced to work long hours for very low wages. The workers did not accept these conditions passively and violent protest erupted on occasion.

As result, there were a number of trade disputes during the 18th century where workers came together to resolve problems at work. The factory owners and the government were hostile towards any combination of workers to defend their rights. The Combination Acts, passed in 1799 and 1800, made any sort of strike action illegal. Striking was punishable with up to three months imprisonment or two months hard labour.

The first trade unions were established at the end of the 18^th century to defend the economic interests of the workers. At first, the trade unions were essentially mutual aid societies, but they soon began to participate in the strike struggle. Therefore, they were persecuted by the employers and governments, which tried to avoid all their requests. 

Riots

The term riot seems to imply chaos such as a group of people occupying the streets or other public space, attacking property or other people who get in their way and being prepared to do battle with police, or whoever attempts to stop them.  No other European country has so strong a tradition of rioting as Britain. The riot was well established in the eighteenth century and it was a process whereby the masses communicated their grievances. England was undergoing the transition from a rural agricultural society to becoming an urbanized industrial state. Population was rapidly moving to the towns from the countryside. The new technology was destroying a whole rural way of life. It was the combination of these two elements that lay behind rioting.

Firstly, many working people in the textile manufacturing areas turned against what they saw as the cause of their impoverishment, the new machines. Attacks on the new industrial machinery persisted for a long period 1760s to 1840s. Machine smashing reached its top with the Luddite movement. This movement began in the early 1800s in the textile areas of the English midlands. The machine wreckers were often well organized and well led gangs sending threatening letters to employers and were protected by high levels of public support within their communities. 

Secondly, bread riots occurred throughout the eighteenth century. It was so because the entry of market and profit motive into social practices was governed by traditional norms, the grain grown should be distributed first to locals and sold at a traditional price. Bakers bought the grain and baked bread and sold it, again at a traditional price regulated by custom and law going way back into the Middle Ages. Bread was a particularly important part of the diet of working people at that time. However, new capitalist minded farmers and merchants then grew grain to make money not just to serve the needs of the locality and most people could not afford it.  

Finally, there were riots against the ruling class. Urban and rural masses were groping for a voice and interest representation in this rapid changing situation the 'crowd' or the 'mob' as a primitive form of political organization often highly focused in its activities. These riots were the product of transition. There were not enough numbers of people employed in factories to organize around the demands of labor. The riots of 1780 were an odd mixture of the backward looking and the forward: religious attacks on Catholics combined with a class movement against the rich in which the initial focus was on the destruction of Catholic chapels, and the firing and looting of prominent Catholics’ houses and businesses. 

All in all, it is easy to see such activities as attempts to preserve an old rural way of life against the march of progress. But it has to be remembered that progress was experienced by the masses less as the opening up of new opportunities than as the increase of poverty and unemployment. Furthermore, machine smashing often combined the defense of traditional forms of manufacture with a bargaining element. It is a mistake to see such activities as simply riots but they were a rather more considered primitive form of trade union consciousness at a time when attempts at worker organization were regarded as conspiracy. The trade unions gave the worker the possibility of improving their working conditions and the truthful to defend their rights.

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   New towns during the early and late 18^th

During this period of intense industrialization the landscape of the countryside was transformed. New towns were established and industrial centers became even bigger, crowded with more factories and warehouses. The rich built great country houses. A famous landscape gardener called Lancelot Brown (1715-1783) created beautiful gardens.  The leading architect of the 18th century was Robert Adam (1728-1792). He created a style called neo-classical and he designed many 18th century country houses.

Firstly, the main noticeable characteristic about towns in the earlier 18^th was that they were very small and stench. The streets were unpaved and too narrow, often six feet wide. There was no sanitary system, an open cesspool in the court served the richer inhabitants; the poor made a public convenience of every nook and cranny. All tradesmen and craftsmen used the street as their dustbin, including butchers who threw out the refuse of their shambles to decay and molders in the streets. Around London and others large towns, enterprising market gardeners were buying all that rubbish and the night soil to manure their fields and that helped the growth of cleanliness.

The houses of the poor were one or two room hovels, frequently made only of weatherboard with a pitched roof; or they were the houses of the rich, deserted because their owners were seeking more salubrious suburbs. Most cellars were inhabited, not only by people but also of their animals. Houses and cellars were overcrowded; ten into a room was common in most towns. The rooms were often without furniture and lacking even beds. Craftsmen and laborers lived in 2 or 3 rooms. The poorest people lived in just one room. On the other side, the noblemen and merchants lived in big houses with neoclassical style and they could enjoy of prodigiously furniture, food and servants.

To sum up, from the late 18th century the industrial revolution transformed Britain. Many villages or small market towns rapidly grew into industrial cities.  Most towns gained gas light and the architecture of the cities, with the construction of new housing as well as public buildings showed a revival of the neo-classical and gothic style. Some improvement Commissioners formed by Acts of Parliament had powers to pave and clean the streets. Some also arranged collections of rubbish; since most of it was organic it could be sold as fertilizer. However, despite some improvements 18th century, towns would seem dirty and crowded to us.