If you attended public school in the U.S., then you have been learning about the Industrial Revolution (IR) since elementary school and how the IR involved the transformation of manufacturing handmade household goods to mass production in factories. You've learned that the steam engine was an important invention of the IR and that all sorts of inventions with weird names followed to speed up the production of cloth and make the mass scale production of cotton and wool cloth cheap: spinning jenny, water frame, spinning mule, cotton gin. Industrial production soared throughout Western Europe and the United States in the nineteenth century.
So, I went to my old standby reference guide, Mitchell's European Historical Statistics 1750-1975 (1980), and I looked up the most used figures as evidence of the industrial revolution, coal and pig iron output (in thousands of metric tons).
Between 1820 and 1900 for coal output, France 1,094 to 33,404; Germany 1,300 to 109,290; United Kingdom 17,700 to 228,794.
Between those dates for pig iron output; France from basically 0 to 2,714; Germany from 0 to 7,550; United Kingdom from 364 to 9,104.
Finally, we can also look at "indices of industrial production" based on 1913 = 100 for the United Kingdom. The only countries before 1850 with an actual positive index are France at 19.2 and the United Kingdom at 9.0 in 1815. By 1900, we have figures of France 67.9, Germany 61, Russia 63 and the United Kingdom at 80.1.
You can easily find charts and graphs of this industrial statistical information on the web. (example)
People left the agricultural countryside and migrated to cities where they found work in factories. The urban population exploded throughout western Europe, and large cities resulted. Rapid urbanization brought all sorts of social and health problems that were only slowly mitigated in the twentieth century.
The Industrial Revolution, originating largely in England in the mid-eighteenth century, spread to the continent (France, Belgium, Germany and Italy), largely moving eastward across the continent. Eventually, industrialization reached across the Atlantic Ocean to the United States in the early nineteenth century. The introduction of mechanical means of production to replace manual means, at first powered by steam and later by electricity, radically transformed societies and politics in the Western world. New social classes emerged (the middle and working classes), both of which held new political agenda. Industrialization also allowed a new consumer-oriented economy to be born.
One of the key spurs to industrialization was the building of the railroads, beginning in the 1840s after the invention of the steam locomotive. Railroads required iron (later steel), coal and other materials, and, at the same time, transported these materials to factories. This proved a great boom to industry. As more and more railroads were built, more and more industry was required to build the railroads, and as more and more industry was built, more and more railroads were needed to supply industry. Thus, a great cycle of industrial and railroad growth was put in place that fed upon itself and kept industrialization moving forward.
Some recommended online lectures and websites
- Richard Hooker, The Industrial Revolution (*.PDF)
- At Boundless World History, see the section on The Industrial Revolution (well done).
- Wikibooks: World History/Ancient Civilizations (The Industrial Revolution)
- Industrial Revolution (history.com)
- Joseph A. Montagna, The Industrial Revolution
- History of the Industrial Revolution
- Child Labour in Victorian England (There are many other videos on YouTube.)
- 5 Effects of Industrialization
- The Industrial Age (Environmental History Resources)
- For extra credit please suggest to your instructor a relevant website for this unit of the course. Send the title of the site, the URL and a brief explanation why you find the information interesting and applicable to the material being studied in this unit.