The Impact of the Industrial Revolution on Society

Introduction

This paper explores three published articles that show how the Industrial Revolution started and shaped society. The Industrial Revolution began in Britain during the 18th century and later moved to other countries such as Germany, France, and the United States. This was the time when agricultural societies became more industrialized. Industrial Revolution drastically changed society because before the Industrial Revolution, people were mostly in small rural communities, and everything was handmade. Life was difficult before the industrial revolution. People had to produce their own food, clothing, furniture, and tools. When the Industrial Revolution took place, machines and factories replaced merchants. Also, transportation, communication, and banking became more advanced due to the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution changed the difference between the rich and the poor drastically.

The Industrial Revolution made the gap larger because the workers of the factory were barely making enough to support their families, and the owner of the factories was getting all the profits. Birthplace of industrialization Industrial Revolution evolved in Britain in the 18th century. Mass production factories started to take place. Industrial Revolution changed Britain’s society forever because everything had changed. British industries were small workshops, and everything was made by hand before the Industrial Revolution. Britain was dependent on India for cotton; however, after the Industrial Revolution, they could take raw cotton and make the thread themselves. Soon After, the Industrial Revolution moved beyond Britain to the United States because of a man named Samuel Slater, known as the father of American Industry. According to the article by McNeese, T. (2017).

“In 1789, 21-year-old Slater was a manager at the Cromford Mill. That same year, he read an advertisement placed by the Pennsylvania assembly in a local paper in Derby. The ad was a recruiting call for Englishmen who had the skills to build textile-producing machinery to immigrate to the States. Any such skilled individual was promised a cash reward. At that time, advanced English textile technology was kept under legal lock and key, with laws declaring it illegal for any such individual to immigrate out of Great Britain. Any such textile expert who tried could be imprisoned. Slater was intrigued and enticed by the Pennsylvania legislature’s offer. Soon, he began memorizing the mechanics of the mill where he worked, making furtive sketches and drawings at home. Arkwright’s ideas were going to America.

By September 1789, Slater was on his way to London, where he bought his passage on a ship bound for the U.S., putting down on his application for immigrating that he was a ‘farm boy” his ‘disguise’ was simple—he simply donned the clothes of a country farmer. Here was young Slater, taking an alias, smuggling himself out of his native country to gain advantages for a new life of textile-making in America.” Samuel Slater successfully brought Industry to the United States. Samuel Slater’s mill was successful and provided labor for children and in America. Americans were leaving their farm and moving to the urban areas where they would work in factories. The United States went from being an agrarian society to being an Industrialized urban society.

Innovation

During the Industrial Revolution, many things were invented, such as the telegraph, the telephone, steamboats, steamships, and Airplanes. These inventions caused the economy to increase rapidly. Communication became easier because of the invention of the electrical telegraph and the telephone. These allowed people to communicate from a long distance. The transportation industry had a significant transformation during the Industrial Revolution because the steam engine, steamboat, and steamships were invented. These allowed people to travel long distances. The horse-drawn wagon was the main transportation before the Industrial Revolution, but after, people travel more efficiently.

Quality of life during Industrialization Quality of life improved only for the middle and upper class when it came to the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution had a dark side because it brought struggles for the lower class, and the gap between the poor and the rich expanded drastically. The lower class was living in crowded, unsensitized urban communities while the rich owned big anchors of land and mansions. Also, people that owned the factories were making all the profits, while the workers were working long hours for little pay. One of Karl Marx’s capitalism theories is workers get paid little while capitalists get rich, which he calls Primitive accumulation. Life, T. S. (2014, December 19). Stated Karl Marx believed that the capitalist shrunk the wages of laborer’s much as possible in order to skim off a wide profit margin. He called this primitive accumulation. Whereas capitalists see profits as a reward for ingenuity and technological talent, Marx is far more damning.

Profit is simply theft, and what you are stealing is the talent and hard work of your workforce. Marx insisted that at its crudest, capitalism means paying a worker one price for doing something that can be sold for another, much higher price. Profit is a fancy term for exploitation.” The reason why the capitalist had gotten away with such an act was that they knew that people desperately needed a job and that they would work even though they would get paid little money. This was the same thing when it came to immigrants during the late 19th century, immigrants were desperate for work, and they would work no matter the condition and how they were paid. The book The Jungle explores how an immigrant family who moved to the united states thought that they were going to become rich but ended up living in a rat-infested building and working in unsafe factories. Children were digging through the dumb, desperate need of food, whereas the rich would throw away their unwanted food. SINCLAIR, U. (1906).

“To this place, there came every day many hundreds of wagon-loads of garbage and trash from the lake-front, where the rich people lived; and in the heaps, the children raked for food there were hunks of bread and potato peeling and apple-core and meat-bones, all of it half frozen and quite unspoiled.” Working conditions The working condition were horrible. The book The Jungle shows the character Jurgis, who was working in the meat factory, who mentions that people would sometimes fall into the vats and would often get turned into food. The meats were infested with rats, and if one of the workers got hurt, they would just get fired instantly. SINCLAIR, U. (1906). “Who worked in tank rooms full of steam, and in some of which there were open vats near the level of the floor, their peculiar trouble was that they fell into the vats; sometimes they would be overlooked for days, till all but the bones of them had gone out to the world as Durham’s Pure Leaf Lard!”

Upton Sinclair demonstrates how the factory owners didn’t care about the working conditions of the workers or how the meat that was being processed was unsensitized, but simply all they cared about was profit. SINCLAIR, U. (1906). “Water from leaky roofs would drip over it, and thousands of rats would race about it. It was too dark in these storage places to see well, but a man could run his hand over these piles of meat and sweep off handfuls of the dried dungs rats. These rats were nuisances, and the packers would put poisoned bread out for them; they would die, and then rats, bread, and meat would go into hoppers together, and the people who were working won’t even bother to lift out a rat when they saw one. Teddy Roosevelt was outraged by seeing how meat was being processed. Sinclair was summoned to the White House by Teddy Roosevelt, and on June 30, 1906, the Meat Inspection Act was passed.

Another dark side that the Industrial Revolution child labor caused was that children would usually be working in the factories instead of going to school because one working family wasn’t enough to support a family because the wages were so low. Children would often get beaten. Allen, R. C. (2017). “The Slater system did not operate exactly in the fashion of English mills, where children were often beaten and abused (Slater did whip his young orphan workers from time to time, but he also established a Sunday School for the moral training of his young employees), but instead was sanctioned by the young workers’ parents who approved of such mills and the work their offspring performed in them. Slater mills became popular in New England, as well as other parts of industrializing America.”

Works Cited

1. Buyst, E. (2018). The Causes of Growth during Belgium’s Industrial Revolution. Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 49(1), 71–92. https://weblib.ucc.edu:2217/10.1162/jinhpass:[_]a_01232
2. History.com Editors. (2009). Industrial Revolution. Retrieved from https://www.history.com/topics/industrial-revolution/industrial-revolution
3. Allen, R. C. (2017). The Industrial Revolution: A Very Short Introduction [Abstract]. Very Short Introductions. doi:10.1093/trade/9780198706786.001.0001 SINCLAIR, U. (1906).
4. The Jungle. S.l.: Upton Sinclair. McNeese, T. (2017).
5. Samuel Slater: The father of American Industry. In The Industrial Revolution. New York: Facts On File. Retrieved November 30, 2018, from online.infobase.com/Auth/Index?aid=17310&itemid=WE52&articleId=527561.
6. Life, T. S. (2014, December 19). Retrieved December 04, 2018, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSQgCy_iIcc

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