The industrial revolution
Enter the Machines, with all their blessings and curses. Great Britain was the birth place of the Industrial Revolution because the economic and political conditions were ideal. They had the....
- Minds - gifted men with ideas and vision
- Manpower - workers leaving the rural areas to come to the cities for jobs
- Managers - leadership to manage factories and shops
- Materials - coal, iron ore and other natural resources
- Money - capital made on wars and trade ventures available for investment
- Markets - a large colonial empire and established trade agreements
- Modes of transportation - roads, rail and shipping facilities
The consumer may have benefited from industrialization, but in most cases the worker did not. More goods were available and usually at lower prices but at what cost to the worker. Factory conditions deteriorated making them unsafe and unhealthy with low pay and long hours. Government usually favored the factory owners, therefore reform and protective legislation was a long time in coming.
Freed of the bonds of patronage and crowded by the invention of the camera, the artist had to redefine his role in a rapidly changing society. Stepping outside the establishment gave him the freedom to comment, protest or simply portray his impressions. Art was dynamic, experimental and often times rebellious. The Romantic artists perused beauty in nature and the splendors of past ages. Realists attempted the truthful portrayal of the real world, objective and unprejudiced. Impressionists were more interested in perception while Post-Impressionist artists gave personal significance to their subject matter
The Industrial Revolution brought with it an increase in population and
urbanization, as well as new social classes. The increase in population was nothing short
of dramatic. England and Germany showed a growth rate of something more than one percent
annually; at this rate the population would double in about seventy years. In the United
States the increase was more than three percent, which might have been disastrous had it
not been for a practically empty continent and fabulous natural resources. Only the
population of France tended to remain static after the eighteenth century. The general
population increase was aided by a greater supply of food made available by the
Agricultural Revolution, and by the growth of medical science and public health measures
which decreased the death rate and added to the population base.
Until the Industrial Revolution, most of the world's population was rural. However, by
mid-nineteenth century, half of the English people lived in cities, and by the end of the
century, the same was true of other European countries. Between 1800 and 1950 most large
European cities exhibited spectacular growth. At the beginning of the nineteenth century
there were scarcely two dozen cities in Europe with a population of 100,000, but by 1900
there were more than 150 cities of this size. The rise of great cities can be accounted
for in various ways:
First, industrialization called for the concentration of a work force; and indeed, the
factories themselves were often located where coal or some other essential material was
available, as the Ruhr in Germany and Lille in northern France.
Second, the necessity for marketing finished goods created great urban centers where there
was access to water or railways. Such was the case with Liverpool, Hamburg, Marseilles,
and New York.
And third, there was a natural tendency for established political centers such as London,
Paris, and Berlin to become centers fort he banking and marketing functions of the new
industrialism.
Rapid growth of the cities was not an unmixed blessing. The factory towns of England
tended to become rookeries of jerry-built tenements, while the mining towns became long
monotonous rows of company-built cottages, furnishing minimal shelter and little more. The
bad living conditions in the towns can be traced to lack of good brick, the absence of
building codes, and the lack of machinery for public sanitation. But, it must be added,
they were also due to the factory owners' tendency to regard laborers as commodities and
not as a group of human beings.
In addition to a new factory-owning bourgeoisie, the Industrial Revolution created a new
working class. The new class of industrial workers included all the men, women, and
children laboring in the textile mills, pottery works, and mines. Often skilled artisans
found themselves degraded to routine process laborers as machines began to mass produce
the products formerly made by hand. Generally speaking, wages were low, hours were long,
and working conditions unpleasant and dangerous. The industrial workers had helped to pass
the Reform Bill of 1832, but they had not been enfranchised by it.