Industrial Revolution and pollution
The Industrial Revolution, which began in England in the mid-eighteenth century, marked a significant transformation from agrarian societies to industrial economies. This period saw the emergence of modern industry, driven by innovations such as the steam engine and advancements in manufacturing processes, which facilitated the growth of urban centers and a new working class. However, the rapid industrialization led to substantial environmental challenges, including increased air and water pollution, habitat destruction, and the depletion of natural resources.
Contextually, the revolution was fueled by England’s rich natural resources, political stability post-Napoleonic Wars, and the availability of labor due to rural displacement from the enclosure movement. This shift was mirrored in the United States, which experienced its own industrial growth by the late nineteenth century, driven by technological advancements and an influx of immigrant labor. Meanwhile, continental Europe, particularly Germany, began to industrialize later, developing significant industries in iron, textiles, and emerging technologies like electricity.
Overall, the Industrial Revolution had profound implications on class structures and environmental conditions, creating disparities in wealth and living conditions that persist in various forms today. The interplay between industrial progress and ecological impact remains a critical area of study and reflection.
Industrial Revolution and pollution
THE EVENT: Historical transformation of agricultural economies and societies into industrial economies and societies
DATES: Mid-eighteenth through late nineteenth centuries
The Industrial Revolution, beginning around the middle of the eighteenth century in England and followed by similar developments on the European continent and the United States, transformed ecologies, class structures, economies, and politics. Modern industry and new technologies thrived at the expense of agriculture and saw the formation of an urban industrial working class. Among the negative effects for the environment were increased air and water pollution, habitat destruction, and resource depletion.
Eighteenth century England was particularly suited to be the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution. The nation was blessed with important natural resources ranging from to copper, salt, stone, and water—used for both energy and transportation by river. Self-sufficiency in food left much land and labor available for manufacturing, and the English countryside possessed many experienced weavers and millers. The enclosure movement, which began in earnest under King Henry VIII during the early sixteenth century, saw peasants expelled from their lands by law or rising rents, providing cheap labor for wool manufacturing in cottage industry. The rural unemployed flocked to the large urban centers looking for work, furnishing cities such as London and Manchester with industrial labor for the next three centuries.
Industry and Labor
The political stability that came with the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 made it safe for the aristocracy, along with bankers and merchants, to invest in urban industry; it was safe also for families and even lone individuals to start up workshops with little capital, while the Bank of England guaranteed long-term loans that stabilized the national currency. English naval power secured markets for industrial exports and agricultural imports ranging from cotton—key to the manufacturing of textiles—to wheat for sale to the growing urban working class. England’s and Wales’s abundance in coal made energy available to manufacturers at low prices, and new inventions—the steam engine, the spinning machine, and the railroad—increased labor productivity while lowering the cost of capital investment, as did new methods of producing iron and steel. London became the self-proclaimed workshop of the world, simultaneously a great urban manufacturing center and national capital, exercising political and police control over the working class.
The social and physical of England changed profoundly during the Industrial Revolution. Workers toiled by the hundreds in cramped, wretched quarters dubbed “Satanic Mills” by the poet William Blake (1757-1827). In the countryside, the extension of the railroad brought the demise of the village pub and chapel. Urban workers—men, women, and children—were subject to harsh factory discipline, including work by piece rate, corporal punishment for disobedience and imprisonment, exile, and even the death penalty for forming trade unions or striking. Many guildsmen, including tailors, carpenters, and master mechanics, were displaced by both the new technologies and the influx of less skilled workers into the factories. By the end of the nineteenth century, Prime MinisterBenjamin Disraeli (1804-1881) would speak of England as two nations separated by wealth, class, and social conditions.
The United States
The United States was destined for its own industrial revolution and set to outstrip England by the end of the nineteenth century. Without a history of feudalism or a homegrown aristocracy, but with a high level of literacy and a large percentage of the labor force possessing entrepreneurial or managerial skills, the former British colonies lacked only land for expansion and an influx of labor to make the leap from agriculture to industry. The Louisiana Purchase (1803), war with Mexico (1846-1848), and the forced expulsion of the Indigenous from the Midwest to the Far West to make way for cattle, sheep, cotton, and wheat, combined with new inventions such as the mechanical harvester, fomented a revolution in agricultural productivity in a few decades.
The Civil War (1861-1865) eliminated slavery and the last vestige of noncapitalist production methods. The war also led to a relaxation of immigration laws, flooding cities such as New York and Chicago with millions of both skilled and unskilled laborers, mostly from Europe. Government investment in infrastructure, including the Erie Canal and other waterways, bridges, and roads, made the transportation of goods less expensive. The Bessemer process for making steel furnished steel plows and railroad tracks. The completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 symbolized the triumph of industry and commerce over small-scale agriculture. By 1890, when the national census declared the end of the American frontier, the United States was already the world’s foremost agricultural and industrial producer, but at the cost of the lives and lands of the Indigenous peoples and a national government hostile to labor unions and socialism.
Continental Europe
Germany led the way in the second wave of the Industrial Revolution, starting around 1870. German unification in 1871, and victory over France in the Franco-Prussian War a year earlier, with the capture of Alsace-Lorraine and its coal fields, made Germany a leading industrial contender in iron and textiles, focused primarily in the Rhine River region, and also in relatively new industries such as electrical power and chemicals. Electricity, along with the internal combustion engine, allowed Germany after 1880 to assume the lead in automobile manufacturing, while the German chemical industry supplied Europeans with everything from explosives to aspirins. At the end of the nineteenth century Germany could boast of being the most powerful industrial country on the continent. Germany’s archrival to the east, czarist Russia, developed its own cotton industry, mostly for domestic consumption, while important iron- and steelworks surged in the Donets River basin. Oil deposits in the Caspian Sea region, and the railroad construction necessary to exploit them, pumped government investment in Russian industry.
As the new century approached, only England could claim to have made a full transition from an agricultural to an industrial society in Europe. Germany was still playing catch-up to the United Kingdom, while France, Italy, and the rest of the Mediterranean and Eastern European countries had developed only small-scale industries and had overwhelmingly agrarian populations. The locus of the Industrial Revolution had shifted to the other side of the Atlantic, and American-made industrial goods began to push the British out of important trade zones from South America to Japan.
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