City and the Industrial Revolution

This essay discusses the rise of the modern city against the backdrop of the English Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Beginning with a discussion of the concept of the city, the essay continues with an overview of the premodern city, a discussion of the relationship between the "industrious revolution" and the Industrial Revolution, the development of modern cities, and the rise of capitalism and the bourgeoisie. The essay pays particular attention to Karl Marx's influential criticisms of the Industrial Revolution, and his belief that the capitalist economic system born from industrialization would soon give way to a communist system that eliminated the alienation and exploitation of the working classes. A closing section discusses the enduring relevance of the city as a research topic in sociology.

Keywords Alienation; Bourgeoisie; Capitalism; City; Communism; Industrial Revolution; Industrialization; Industrious Revolution; Marx, Karl; Proletariat

The City & the Industrial Revolution

Population, Urbanization & the Environment > The City & the Industrial Revolution

Overview

The "Industrial Revolution" is a term used to describe a period in England during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when the centuries-old practice of using human and animal labor was supplemented, and in many cases supplanted, by machines. As a result of this influx of machine power, England underwent a significant transformation in agriculture, manufacturing, and transportation that led to significant social, political, and economic changes.

The Birth of Sociology

Nisbet (1966) presented the significant changes brought about by the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution that led to the birth of sociology in an effort to better understand five "themes of industrialism," namely, "the condition of labor, the transformation of property, the industrial city, technology and the factory system" (p. 24). Karp, Stone and Yoels (1991) described the emergence of sociology after the events of the nineteenth century.

Indeed, from its earliest beginnings sociology was simultaneously a response to and critique of the emergence of a secular urban industrial order in nineteenth-century Western civilization. The rapid development of urban industrial centers throughout the nineteenth century precipitated an ongoing conversation about the nature of the social bond. Foremost in the minds of individuals writing about society during the nineteenth century is the contrast between forms of social life seen as rooted in a small agrarian or feudal order and the kinds of social relations viewed as characterizing an urban industrial order (Karp, Stone, & Yoels, 1991, p. 3).

Though there are many useful ways to understand the impact of the Industrial Revolution, this essay will look at the Industrial Revolution from the vantage point of the city. It will begin with a discussion of the preindustrial city, and then discuss the Industrial Revolution and how it gave rise to the modern cities that are now scattered across the globe. It will conclude with a discussion of city life during the Industrial Revolution in England and some of the questions that have drawn successive generations of sociologists to the city as an area of research.

Preindustrial Cities

For most of recorded history, cities have been the exception to human habitation, and not the rule, as most humans who lived before urbanization had been farmers. Although there isn't an entirely clear-cut definition of a city (see the discussion in Maunier, 1910), it is commonly distinguished from towns and other settlements by virtue of its larger population size. Cities, which initially sprung up near bodies of water or along important trade routes, have existed since shortly after the Agricultural Revolution, though many cities preceded agriculture. These early cities were key trading centers and their wealth invited attacks from regional warlords and kings. By 9000 BCE, 10,000 people were living in Catalhöyük in modern-day Turkey (Balter, 1998). Other ancient cities included Jericho (9000 BCE), Damascus (4300 BCE), Ur (about 4200 BCE) and Beirut (3000 BCE).

Sociologists have identified some common characteristics of preindustrial cities. These preindustrial cities drew food and raw materials from the countryside, making them commercial centers. This commercial role is in addition to the other religious, political and education roles of premodern cities. Typically up to one-tenth of the population in a region was located in the city, with the remainder comprised of rural settlers engaged in various economic, cultural and even military exchanges with city dwellers (Sjoberg, 1955).

Premodern cities had poor sanitation, lower buildings (in an age before the elevator), and their residents were often packed together, making cities effective vectors for the spread of disease. Members of certain trades were located close together. Typically religious institutions, such as churches or mosques, served as the focal point of the community, and not centralized shopping areas or markets. These early cities used human and animal power rather than machine power. There was little division of labor, few middlemen, and few fixed prices.

In terms of social structure, there existed what Sjoberg (1955) called a "literate elite" controlling the rest and whose "position … is legitimated by sacred writings" such as the Qur'an or the Bible (Sjoberg, 1955, p. 441). Overall the division between the have and the have-nots was quite pronounced — there was little opportunity for social mobility and a virtually nonexistent middle class. While not overlooking the possibility of revolts from within — such as the Peasants' Revolt which occurred in England in 1381 — the elites were more concerned about external threats from other clans, tribes, or, eventually nation-states. Slaves and other undesirables were called upon to do menial tasks, and outsiders were variously shunned, ghettoized or attacked.

Children were married young and this was seen as a passage to adulthood. Women were typically subordinate to men, focusing on raising children, who in turn often would not have the opportunity for a substantial education, if any at all, and literacy rates were low. Males were more valued and often acquired the family property if such existed. There was no open public square (Neuhaus, 1984/1986) because religion permeated all aspects of private and civic life in the premodern city.

By the time of the Industrial Revolution, the nature of the city had changed, and social, political, economic and culture structures were forever transformed:

At the very least, extensive industrialization required a rational, centralized, extra-community economic organization in which recruitment is based more upon universalisms than on particularism, a class system which stresses achievement rather than ascription, a small and flexible kinship systems, a system of mass education which emphasized universalistic rather than particularistic criteria, and mass communication (Sjoberg, 1955, p. 444).

Further Insights

Though it began in England, the Industrial Revolution eventually spread across continental Europe and North America, transforming those societies as well. Many experts rank the Industrial Revolution as one of the major milestones in human history, alongside the rise of agriculture and the development of writing. The new workers in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British cities were part of an increasingly global marketplace of goods and services. British factory workers in London, Manchester and Liverpool were making textiles, pottery and metal goods for domestic and foreign markets, fueling a global trade that led to the rise of modern capitalism in the United States (Blumin, 2006) and elsewhere around the world. As sociologists, perhaps led by the non-sociologist Karl Marx (1818–1883), have pointed out ever since, the rise of modern capitalism and the displacement of traditional patterns of economic and social life has not been an unalloyed success.

Machines, powered by steam and coal, made such mass production of goods possible. Observers were taken aback by the pace of economic change. English writer Patrick Colquhoun wrote in 1814, "It is impossible to contemplate the progress of manufactures in Great Britain within the last thirty years without wonder and astonishment. It's rapidity, particularly since the commencement of the French revolutionary war, exceeds all credibility" (as cited in Berg & Hudson, 1992, p. 26).

Revolution or Evolution?

Historians are not in agreement about several aspects of the Industrial Revolution. For example, there is no agreement as to when the Industrial Revolution actually began, and there is no agreement as to whether it's proper to call industrialization in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England a revolution or an evolution (Berg & Hudson, 1992). Some historians prefer to say that the Industrial Revolution began in the 1760s with the introduction of Watt's steam engine, and others, such as the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm (1917-), argue that while the Industrial Revolution began in the 1780s, it wasn't until the 1830s or 1840s before it became diffused throughout England (Hobsbawm, 1968).

There are also those historians who question whether the Industrial Revolution was much of a revolution at all. Citing books and articles from several of his colleagues, one historian writing in the 1990s called the Industrial Revolution "a concept on the defensive" because of questions about the degree of economic growth that industrialization really brought about in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and because of questions about how much current global industrialization can really be traced back to industrial events in early modern England (de Vries, 1994). For these critics, the Industrial Revolution explains both too much and too little.

These points notwithstanding, there remains a scholarly consensus that the change began with an "industrious revolution" in which "a broad range of households made decisions that increased both the supply of marketed commodities and labor and the demand for goods offered in the marketplace" (de Vries, 1994, p. 255). This demand-side "industrious revolution," which was driven by lower prices for commodity and manufactured goods, fed into and helped to create the British Industrial Revolution.

Rising Populations

This newer thinking about the Industrial Revolution as something of a feedback loop dovetails with well-known evidence that English cities began to grow considerably in size in the decades before the Industrial Revolution. Population density in 17th century England was already growing, perhaps faster than any country in Europe. Estimates of the population of England indicate that the population rose from about 4.1 million in 1570 to 6 million in 1700, with the population of London itself doubling between 1636 and 1674 (Merton, 1938/1970, pp. 211-212). Anticipating the work of de Vries and other later historians, Robert Merton and others made the argument that the Industrial Revolution did not lead to a population boom in cities like London, but that "the needs generated by an increasing population and associated growth of commerce and trade tended to focus inventive interest in certain fields," such as agriculture and transportation of foodstuffs and other supplies across wider areas (Merton, 1938/1970, pp. 213-216). These innovations, such as Watt's steam engine, were precisely the ones made as part of the Industrial Revolution between 1760 and 1860.

The population growth wasn't initially limited to cities, but eventually cities began to draw population away from the countryside. This was happening all over Europe by the middle of the nineteenth century. Even as late as 1815, when many historians argue that the Industrial Revolution was well underway, only seven percent of Europe's population lived in cities (Schroever, 2008). Between 1800 and 1900, however, the number of cities with a population over 100,000 increased from 23 to 135 (Schroever, 2008). From 1801 to 1851, the population of England and Wales nearly doubled from 8.66 to 16.84 million ("The Industrial Economy," n.d.). Goodfiend and McDermott (1995) remarked, "The period from 1700 to 1820 was marked by a doubling of both population and per capita product growth compared to the preceding 200 years, although per capita growth was still very poor by today's standards" (Goodfiend & McDermott, 1995, p. 116).

Lured by the promise of a better life, workers from all over Europe swarmed to British cities, particularly London, which surpassed one million in population in the nineteenth century, easily making it the largest city in Europe. By 1830 an astounding demographic revolution had taken place, as only a quarter of the population of England and Wales was living off the land in rural areas. The rest lived in towns and cities. In 1800, half of the population was engaged in agriculture, but advances in farming techniques and equipment soon meant that more food could be produced with less manpower, thus freeing the workforce to be employed in towns and cities.

City Life During the Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution changed both city and country life. Farming became more machine-based and large-scale as the demands of a growing population called for more food. A decline in infant mortality and a rise in life expectancy, coupled with the wider availability of food, led to a rise in population across Europe in the nineteenth century, and in England much of this new population was gathered in the country's great industrial cities.

Two Views of the Industrialized City

Even as the Industrial Revolution was taking place, it was given two divergent interpretations around which future sociological discussions of industrialization and modernization have revolved. From across the English Channel in France in the middle of the eighteenth century, the polemicist Voltaire (1694–1778) saw the cities of the English Industrial Revolution, particularly London, as the epitome of progress and enlightenment, where the confining prejudices of the premodern world were happily swept aside. He wrote of London:

Rival of Athens, London, blest indeed

That with thy tyrants had the wit to chase

The prejudices civil factions breed.

Men speak their thoughts and worth can win its place…

In London, who has talent, he is great (as cited in Williams, 1973, p. 144)

Others were not so sanguine about what the Industrial Revolution had wrought. From the perspective of the rising English middle class, the blessings of industrialization seemed inseparable from several curses that cast a shadow over city life:

The 'insolent rabble,' 'the insolence of the mob,' the 'idle, profligate and debauched' workmen are commonplaces of middle-class observation. The thieving-shops, the stews and the rookeries, the fetid cellars and the dangerous tenaments, formed a large part of the visitor's or middle-class observer's sense of this 'rival of Athens' (Williams, 1973, p. 144).

The Birth of New Communities

In larger cities such as London and Manchester, great masses of factory workers were put together in hastily constructed tenement apartments designed to hold far fewer people. Property was at a premium, and in an age before the discovery of the germ theory of disease and the perfection of modern sanitation practices, these tenements became hotbeds of sickness and death. Their close quarters also bred crime.

Ironically, the great human congestion in industrialized London was the unintended consequence of laws passed as early as 1580 by the city government to attempt to limit the growth of the city and thus limit the possibility of such plagues. New construction was banned, and the poor — thought to spread both illness and immorality — were explicitly banned from settling in the city. These plans were soon trampled altogether by the great surge of workers coming to London seeking work and the London landlords who were quite happy to accommodate them (Williams, 1973, p. 145). These slums existed alongside mansions and middle-class neighborhoods built in London's sprawling suburbs and designed to keep those with some money at a safe distance from those who had none.

The urban trend of the English Industrial Revolution bred communities of convenience and shared interests, rather than communities of kin. Great numbers of people from across England left traditional community and family ties in search of tangible things like employment, as well as intangible things such as hope, a fresh start, or even freedom from the parochialism of country life. Many eventually became part of a new, burgeoning middle class that found like-minded souls in voluntary associations, coffee houses and the Royal Exchange, a forerunner to today's shopping malls. There were also London's playhouses and museums. As the writer Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) noted in the late eighteenth century, London was a city that never slept: "When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford" (as quoted in Boswell, 1887, p. 178).

New Sources of Power

The new power brokers in the newly industrialized England were not the royals or the nobles who predominated in the premodern period, but the bankers and other members of the merchant, or capitalist, class. These were upwardly mobile members of the middle class, collectively known as the bourgeoisie. While some writers, like the eighteenth century political philosopher Adam Smith (1723–1790), saw this group as the driving force behind a capitalist miracle that dramatically improved the quality of life for millions, others, notably Karl Marx, saw the bourgeoisie as building their wealth and status on the backs of the working class, whom Marx called the proletariat.

Marx, who did most of the research for Das Kapital (1871) at the British Library in the 1850s, took many of his examples from life in English cities during the Industrial Revolution. He argued that the numerically superior proletariat would rise up, overthrow the bourgeoisie and set up a beneficent dictatorship in which private property would be abolished and communism would thrive. This communist revolution, he predicted, would sweep the industrialized world, beginning with England.

Conclusion

The Enduring Importance of Cities

The rise of industrial capitalism in England and throughout the developed world helped give birth to the field of sociology, and sociologists ever since have continued to delve deeper into the cultural dynamics of cities. The insights of sociologists have been incorporated into entirely new interdisciplinary fields of research, such as urban studies. Sociologists following in the tradition of Robert E. Park (1864–1944) have seen cities as important laboratories for all manner of social experiments, ranging from public housing to various environmental initiatives (Gross, 2006). Many of the social reforms that today are taken for granted — such as social welfare programs, building codes and sanitation laws — were instituted in the nineteenth century in large part to address the deficiencies of urban life in congested cities.

Taking a broader view, sociologists have been interested in understanding the dynamics of urban life and how those dynamics differ from those of suburban and rural life. The concepts of dominant cultures and subcultures in cities have provided fruitful material for sociological research (Fischer, 1975). Recent sociology textbooks have also begun to stress the global dimensions of urbanism, noting that the Industrial Revolution has had wide-ranging repercussions for the developing world, especially given the rise of global capitalism in our own time (Ferrante-Wallace, 2005). These efforts build on the insight of earlier sociologists that the urban mindset is not confined to cities, but rather is "a way of life" or lens through which one sees the world and derives value from it (Wirth, 1938).

In recent years sociologists and others have noticed the ubiquity of speedy communication methods and the Internet, and they are beginning to question whether the city can retain its historic importance as a cultural, political and economic center as these new technologies are making the world more decentralized (Friedman, 2006). Cities certainly adjusted to the suburbanism of the twentieth century, but how cities will reinvent themselves in light of an ever-more interconnected world remains to be seen.

Terms & Concepts

Alienation: The separation of an individual from his or her culture and community by putting that individual within a new and foreign social context. This often occurred during the Industrial Revolution when individuals left the countryside to move to the city.

Bourgeoisie: A term used to describe the middle class, particularly those engaged in business and finance. Marx argued that the Bourgeoisie built their wealth and social standing with the blood and sweat of the poor.

Capitalism: A social and economic system involving private property and the pricing of goods and services through market forces such as supply and demand. Typically there is minimal amount of government involvement in the economy.

City: A defined area in which a large population lives and works. Cities have existed since the time of the Agricultural Revolution, passing from a premodern stage to a modern stage in England during the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Communism: A social and economic system in which there is no private property and the means of production are owned by all citizens.

Industrial Revolution: A term used to describe a period in England during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when the centuries-old practice of using human and animal labor was supplemented, and in many cases supplanted, by machines. Other nations have also experienced an Industrial Revolution.

Industrialization: The process by which a nation's economy becomes based on the output of large-scale industries rather than agriculture and other means.

Industrious Revolution: A term coined by de Vries (1995) in which the demands by English citizens for commodities and finished goods at the beginning of the eighteenth century led to inventions that in turn fueled the Industrial Revolution.

Karl Marx: A Prussian philosopher, writer and social theorist who argued, among other things, that the Industrial Revolution in England was based on the exploitation of the working class, or proletariat, by the bourgeoisie. He advocated common ownership of the means of production (communism) and the dictatorship of the proletariat as a means to address such social ills.

Proletariat: A term used by Marx and others to describe the poor, working classes in England and other capitalistic, industrialized economies.

Bibliography

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Suggested Reading

De Long, J. B., & Shleifer, A. (1993). Princes and merchants: European city growth before the industrial revolution. Journal of Law and Economics, 36, 671-702.

Dhanagare, D. N. (2012). From ideal type to metaphor: Rethinking the concept of 'revolution'. Sociological Bulletin, 61, 53-88. Retrieved October 31, 2013, from EBSCO online database SocINDEX with Full Text http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=79684191

Foster, J. (1977). Class struggle and the industrial revolution: Early industrial capitalism in three English towns. New York: Taylor & Francis.

Hoppit, J. (2011). The nation, the state, and the first Industrial Revolution. Journal of British Studies, 50, 307-331. Retrieved October 31, 2013, from EBSCO online database SocINDEX with Full Text http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=60577891

Kirtley, B., & Kirtley, P. (2011). City of spindles: The lessons of Lowell, Massachusetts. National Social Science Journal, 37, 67-72. Retrieved October 31, 2013, from EBSCO online database SocINDEX with Full Text http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=65481626

Kotkin, J. (2005). The city: A global history. New York: Modern Library.