Transcription
Historians would suggest that the presence of lots of coal deposits was really significant to British industrialization because that coal meant that you could uh power the machines um much more effectively than humans could ever have done previously.
Certainly in terms of British history, the industrial revolution is one of those really big topics that historians have thought about for many many years. Is in fact even by the late 19th century historians were starting to ask the question, what caused the industrial revolution? Why did it happen in Britain? So there's a lot to unpack here, and I think that's a really good place for us to start and for us to think about in this particular class. As historians started to ask, you know, what was going on in Britain? Why did we have this thing called the industrial revolution at some point in the late 18th, early 19th century? A lot of the attention focused initially on technology because it was noticed there were a really quick succession of many groundbreaking technologies that took tasks that had traditionally been done uh by hand, often by women, by by their fingers. The spinning, for example, you think about the the traditional spinning wheel. It was quite labor intensive, laborious, women's work. It becomes revolutionized. It becomes industrialized. There's this massive succession of technology and soon instead of your yarn onto one bobbin at a time, you've got machines that are spinning onto hundreds of bobbins at a time. So instead of having hundreds of women, you've now got kind of one person operating the machine. So a lot of the question was like, what was going on? Why was this technology being invented?
Another good example of really groundbreaking um technology is the steam engine. Of course, a succession of different innovations and different bits of technology come together to make this amazing technology, the steam engine, which means you can now power machines much more effectively than humans or horses had previously ever been able to do. Because there seemed to be this really dramatic change in technology, a lot of the answers were like, well, what was going on? Why was this technology being created?
In the arguments tended to suggest that there was something rather special about British people, that the scientific culture in Britain was more advanced. Um, some historians would also point to things like cultural values. So perhaps there was something about Protestantism or something about um the religious values of Britain that predisposed them to invention and entrepreneurship and to change. And these arguments had a long run all through the 20th century. And they really kind of come down to suggesting there was something rather special and unique, and implied in a lot of these arguments, there was something slightly superior about the British, that they were predisposed to making this technology.
So, as you can imagine, historians are uh less enthusiastic about these arguments that suggest there's something special about particular races of people and that's what predisposes them to do things differently. And historians don't really find these arguments particularly compelling. I think it certainly is the case that this technology was invented and that it's really significant. But also, as I was suggesting last week, industrial revolution is about much more than just new technologies. You're also working with new materials and you're getting those materials from different parts of the globe. So, the technology is also clearly a really important part of the story, but it's only a a part of the story because unless you've got raw materials to process, there's no need to have any technology. There's no point in having technology. So, we probably want to think about what's going on in a in a more wide-looking way than these traditional arguments that thought if we could just understand why Britain were inventing these machines, we could get to the bottom of what's going on. That's probably too restrictive now and doesn't really shed an awful lot of light.
As arguments about technology started to fall out of favor, historians started to ask questions about, well, what was it then? What was going on? What does explain why Britain industrialized if it's not because of some technological superiority? And a lot of the interest focused upon coal and on natural resources. So historians would suggest, and I think there's a you're not entirely wrong, that the presence of lots of coal deposits was really significant to British industrialization because that coal meant that you could uh power the machines um much more effectively than humans could ever have done previously. And without the coal, you know, again, there would have been no point in the um invention. There would have been no value in the technology. Those big spinning machines, those big spinning factories, for example, could never have been uh powered by humans or by horses. So, it was only because we have this locally available coal that we could industrialize.
I think coal obviously really is significant, but again, I find this slightly less than convincing as an argument in why Britain industrialized when it did. After all, the coal had always been there. Um, however, for most of British history, nobody had thought, let's get the coal out and let's use it to uh to let's use it for manufacturing. Coal had been used to make fires um primarily in order to heat homes because we're a cold country and to cook food because we want to cook our food. And that was really how coal was being used. It wasn't being used for manufacturing. And before it could be used for manufacturing, you had to have lots and lots of technological change before you could take the coal and use it to power a steam engine. That was a very complex process with lots and lots of different steps. And the sheer existence of the coal is not really enough to explain why it happened in Britain where it did. And then of course, in addition to that, other parts of the world have lots of coal as well. Uh, we have coal in India, lots of good coal deposits in China as well, but these countries in the 18th century weren't particularly focused on getting the coal out of the ground and using it to power uh new machines and new factories. So I think there's something else that's going on. Coal is definitely useful, but I think you can have industrializ industrial revolutions without coal. And again, it's rather mistaking the experience of Britain and trying to turn it into a universal story. What you need when you industrialize is you're going to need more power, but you can get that power in lots and lots of different ways. In Britain, we happen to get it from coal because coal is what we had and we started first.
There's been a lot of attention on what happened in Britain, but it didn't have to be coal. And in fact, even over on parts of Europe, many parts of Europe don't have a lot of coal. Switzerland is one of the early um industrializers in Europe. Switzerland doesn't have any coal deposits, but it does have these massive rivers. So what happens in Switzerland is they develop the technology of electricity um of kind of hydroelectricity, water-powered electricity, and they use that to drive forward their industrial revolution instead. So I think is a is a problem of mistaking what happened in Britain for something that's universal when in fact what you need again, it's it's useful to kind of step back and think about the the the kind of the bigger causes and the bigger explanation. The big thing that you need is some form of power, but it doesn't need to come in the form of coal. It just so happened that in Britain, that's how it did emerge.
More recently, there's been a lot of interest amongst historians about the role of empire and slavery in the creation and the formation of the British Industrial Revolution. So, of course, again, it's certainly the case that Britain does have a really large empire. Um, Britain is also a slave trading nation, and all of this helps to make Britain rich and wealthy, and it also of course provides access to some of the raw materials that British manufacturers are going to end up using. So, uh, the cotton, for example, that's grown, um, a lot of that comes through, uh, Britain's asymmetrical um relationships with other parts of the world, sometimes within the context of empires, sometimes outside the context of empires, but it's certainly the case that because Britain had a powerful navy and because it had it was it had a lot of business in other parts of the world that it had these trade routes and it was able to get the the raw materials that it needed for its its factories.
For me, this is rather like when we think about coal, you need energy, but it doesn't really matter how you get that energy. Um, in the case of raw materials, you need raw materials, but I don't think it really matters how you get that raw material. So, in Britain, we were definitely assisted through having an empire and we were definitely assisted through slave trading in some parts of the world. But I don't think we should think that you always need these things in order to undergo an industrial revolution. What you need is the raw materials, and you can get those raw materials in a variety of different ways. Um, and we don't want to mistake what happened in the British case and to say, well, that's the that's the rule. You always have to have that in order to industrialize. They were very helpful in the British case, but they're not universal. And when we start to look at what's happening in other parts of the world as they industrialize, we realize what they were doing. What they all have in common is access to some form of raw materials, but those raw materials are often very different, and the way in which they got those raw materials is often very different as well.
It's worth unpacking the role of the slave trade a little bit more in all of these developments. Way back in the 1960s, the historian Eric Williams argued that British slave trading had been a key cause of the industrial revolution. And he argued that British traders and British slave traders grew very rich on the back of slave trading, and they used the profit from slave trading to invest into factories. And that's really without that money that was made available through slave trading, it's much more doubtful whether the industrial revolution would have happened when and where it did. At the time of writing in the 1960s, most historians weren't particularly convinced by these arguments, but there's been much more interest over the last couple of decades about what Eric Williams was arguing and much more consideration given to the role of slave trading in helping Britain to go rich and in helping Britain to um to launch an industrial revolution. My own view is that Britain certainly did grow very wealthy on the back of slave trading, and that's been written out of our history books in ways that um can't really be justified. There's no question we can even we can even see quite quite clearly sometimes um industrialists who had a relationship with slave trading or slave owning grew wealthy and then used that money to develop a factory. So I think the process of industrialization was quicker than easier than it would have been without slavery. What I think is much harder to answer is whether it would have happened at all. Um, my own view is I think the the the momentum of change in Britain was really enormous, and I think Britain probably was going to industrialize at some point around the late 18th century and the early 19th century. And I think it probably would have done that even if it hadn't been involved in slavery at all. I just think there were a lot of other factors going on in Britain that were driving that change forward. Nonetheless, it's absolutely uh seems fairly um undisputable to me as well that it all happened more quickly and easily than it would have done without that money entering the British economy owing to its slave trading.
So clearly, there are a lot of arguments that have been put forward to try and explain and to try and make sense of British industrialization. I don't think any of them really work on their own, and it may be a little bit of a cop-out, but I think it's probably because the process of industrialization really was very deep breaching and it really was um very complex, and what we tend to find is all of these explanations take us a little way in helping to understand why Britain industrialized. What I find when I look at Britain in the 18th century, before the kind of the classic industrial revolution period and before that myriad of inventions that start in the later 18th century, is that Britain actually was already a very, very market-oriented and commercialized society. Agriculture was commercialized. Most people are working for wages. They're not really peasants working their little plot of land. It's already a very commercial and monetized um economy in which people are looking to innovate and to change, and the industrial revolution is really a growing of all of these changes that are already there. These are already very developed and advanced traditional economies. And that also helps to explain why other parts of the world industrialize as and when they do. It moves very quickly to other parts of Europe, which is slightly different from Britain, but at the same time are actually quite sophisticated commercial economies as well, and also helps us to make sense of why industrialization doesn't spread to some parts of the world at the moment at this particular time in the 19th century because really they were much more traditional economies um where peasant manufacturer and cottage manufacture and household manufacture is much more the norm, and where there's much less money flowing around the society, and which are just basically just less much less commercialized at this time.
Clearly, there were a great many technological changes at this time, and it's worth pausing for a moment just to think about some of these. So the spinning, the spinning industry is where a lot of the technologies begin, and we think about how spinning had traditionally been done on that spinning wheel that we're all familiar with from our fairy tales, and step by step little improvements to the technology. So the spinning jenny, first of all, which is a hand-powered machine that means you can uh spin several spindles at once, and then that grows into the water frame. We have inventions such as the power loom, so that the weaving, which had traditionally been done on a hand loom, is now done by power instead. One of the most important changes is the steam engine. Engines had been around since the 17th century of various kinds, but there were so many improvements to the speed to the steam engine at this time. In particular, James Watt um manages steam engines. Traditionally had just pumped, which limited what they could do. They just had this kind of up and down motion, and James Watt manages to develop a rotary motion from the steam engine. So you can now turn machines around with belts, and then you can start to do all sorts of fantastic things. So there's so many technological changes. They've all got their own story. Put together, you've got something that's much greater than the sum of its parts.
So I'd be suggesting that the industrial revolution clearly is a very kind of wide-reaching and complex change, and it really defies simple explanation and simple arguments about what's going on. And in some ways, this is just the beginning because in addition to this great change around manufacturing, we also have this huge social shift. It starts to change ordinary people's lives in really significant ways. And that's what we're going to think about next time.