The Industrial Revolution
Steam power, cotton mills, coal and railways make England the world's first industrial nation, creating vast new cities, a working class and new kinds of protest.
- The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective — Robert C. Allen, Cambridge University Press (2009)
- The Making of the English Working Class — E. P. Thompson, Victor Gollancz (1963)
- The English and Their History — Robert Tombs, Allen Lane (2014)
From the mid-eighteenth century England became the first country in the world to industrialise. Machines driven by water and then steam transformed cotton spinning, coal powered iron-making and engines, and by the mid-nineteenth century railways linked factory towns that had grown from villages into great cities.
- The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective — Robert C. Allen, Cambridge University Press (2009)
- The English and Their History — Robert Tombs, Allen Lane (2014)
Why England?
Historians still debate why it happened here first. Robert Allen argues that England’s combination of high wages and cheap coal made labour-saving machines unusually worth inventing. Others stress secure property rights after 1688, a large market, scientific culture, overseas trade, and the cotton and capital that came from empire and slavery. Most now see several causes working together.
- The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective — Robert C. Allen, Cambridge University Press (2009)
- Black and British: A Forgotten History — David Olusoga, Macmillan (2016)
Cities and a working class
Manchester, nicknamed “Cottonopolis”, grew from a modest town into a world city; Birmingham, Leeds, Sheffield and Newcastle became centres of metalworking, wool and coal. By 1851 more people in Britain lived in towns than in the countryside, a first for any large country. Conditions were often terrible: cholera, overcrowded courts, and children working in mills and mines. Friedrich Engels wrote his Condition of the Working Class in England from Manchester in 1845.
- The English and Their History — Robert Tombs, Allen Lane (2014)
- The Making of the English Working Class — E. P. Thompson, Victor Gollancz (1963)
Protest and reform
Workers fought back. Luddites smashed machines; at “Peterloo” in Manchester in 1819 cavalry charged a peaceful crowd demanding reform, killing at least fifteen people. The Chartists of the 1830s and 1840s demanded votes for all men. E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class argued that out of these struggles a class consciousness was born. Gradually came Factory Acts, trade unions, the extension of the vote, public health reforms and free schooling.
- The Making of the English Working Class — E. P. Thompson, Victor Gollancz (1963)
- The English and Their History — Robert Tombs, Allen Lane (2014)
Legacy
Industrial England gave the world the railway, the factory system and organised football; the Football League, founded in 1888, was dominated by northern and Midland clubs. It also created the regional identities that still matter: northern pride in plain speaking and hard work, and the sense among many in the North that the wealth they made went south. When heavy industry declined from the 1960s onward, those same places bore the cost.
- The Game of Our Lives: The Meaning and Making of English Football — David Goldblatt, Viking (2014)
- The English and Their History — Robert Tombs, Allen Lane (2014)
England led the world into the modern age, with inventions from the steam engine to the railway that eventually lifted billions out of poverty, and many English people are proud of that.
- The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective — Robert C. Allen, Cambridge University Press (2009)
- The English and Their History — Robert Tombs, Allen Lane (2014)
For those who worked in the mills and mines, industrialisation meant long hours, child labour, slums and early death, and every gain, from the vote to the ten-hour day, had to be fought for.
- The Making of the English Working Class — E. P. Thompson, Victor Gollancz (1963)
Why it matters today
The Industrial Revolution made the England people recognise today: the great northern and Midland cities, the terraced streets, football clubs, brass bands, chapels and trade unions. Its decline in the twentieth century left the scars of the North–South divide, and the sense of a lost industrial greatness still runs through English politics.