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British industrialism 1780 - 1850 10. 4. 10. Prior to the actual industrialization term that appeared in the 1780 in Britain one should remember that this country had to experience a lengthy process of wealth accumulation and productivity improvement. The British industrialization contributed to the drastic improvement in lifestyles of a great number of people as well as the creation of the working class that could afford to exist solely on labor, without having to own a kitchen plot to feed their families. Industrialization allowed the presence of excessive capital and large corporations that tried to benefit from the economies of scale.
In the following essay I am going to focus primarily on the class formation for men and women in Great Britain that resulted from the industrialization. I will speak about several aspects that led to what became the working class. In 1780, the British industrialism gained the name industrial revolution because of the drastic change in production, finance and technology. At the same time the capitalists of Great Britain tried to use as much of stem and later on electricity machines to employ as little people as possible and keep as much money as possible for their personal use. One should also not forget that during the years of the industrialization in Great Britain, the whole region developed differently from the other countries.
The Britain enjoyed a growing population and therefore the growing number of workers. The families would move to the regions where the salaries were the highest and where the resources were the most abundant. The Great Britain enjoyed a new working class that because of its great number started to have a strong political influence. In order to prevent the working class from exercising too much of political pressure on the rich industrialists of Great Britain, it was a usual practice to consider the laissez-faire, or no interference policy of the government common for the country.
In other words, the majority of the economists and politicians argued that liberalism and free will will ultimately contribute to the perfect allocation of productive and financial resources and the best benefit for the country and the British queen. At the same time the working class was unsatisfied with such treatment and ultimately would favor the Marxist philosophy. I should also note that Great Britain with the advent of industrialization made a tremendous economic jump forward becoming the worlds strongest economy, political and military power. Only after the WWI, when the Great Britain entered the military operations against Germany, the USA ultimately became the # 1 economy. One should not forget that it took other countries over 200 years to catch up with Great Britain. It should also be noted that with the advent of the British industrialization, the country saw the rise of the middle classes and the development of an empire on which never sleeps.
One of the most dramatic political changes included the Reform Bill of 1832, which transformed the whole governmental structure of England. This Bill, one should remember, completely overhauled the ways in which areas of England were represented in Parliament and enfranchised (gave the vote to) men who occupied a house worth at least? 10. Structuring the voting rights this way satisfied prosperous middle-class men who sought representation in government. But, at the same time, it also drove a political wedge between the middle classes and the working classes: the Bill specifically excluded all men who could not afford a house of this value. It defined the right to representation and participation in government as the possession of land and a regular income. As a result of this disenfranchisement, the early 1830 s saw a wide variety of politically radical working-class unions and organizations working for political and economic reforms, including universal manhood suffrage.
British industrialism gradually transformed the whole country of England from a nation primarily dependent on agriculture to the nation dependent primarily on industry. The British population concentrated primarily in urban areas and not just in London. In 1810, the urban population outside London totaled roughly 1 million. The population was employed at the newly created plants and therefore, contributed to the formation of the working class.
By 1830, it was 8 million. London itself underwent a similar growth spurt: its share of the nations total population had grown from 11. 5 % in 1790 to an astonishing 17. 8 % in 1840. One should also remember that in 1791, no town aside from London had more than 100, 000 inhabitants. But by 1810, there were seven cities with more than 100, 000, and by 1825, there were nearly 40. The New Poor Law passed in 1834 created a centralized system of poor relief to cope with the rising numbers of the poor and hungry crammed into city slums, but because it was under funded by the British Parliament, poorly administered, and fundamentally dehumanizing and inflexible, it was widely disliked and arguably generated more problems than it ever resolved. I should also point out the fact that restrictive legislation in Britain during the industrialization time was also increasingly influenced the female part of the working British class in this era.
During the nineteenth century, British women did not have the same legal rights to inheritance, property ownership, or education as men and were discriminated against. By 1833, marriage virtually turned legal control of a womans property permanently over to her husband. Women legally did not have the right to play an active role in commerce, government, and the church. Whereas, men, not only could do that, but were increasingly encouraged to understand themselves in terms of the job they held in the business world, women were progressively written out of the public sphere. Middle-class and upper-class women shaped the social strata of Great Britain: the premium placed by Victorian Great Britain on domesticity defined femaleness in part as the complete abstention from the work / marketplace . One should also remember that womans sphere was the private world of domesticity: she was the teacher and supervisor of her children and the primary manager of household resources.
Her role was to raise good, patriotic, Christian children and to fulfill the needs of her husband by overseeing the disciplined and organized running of his house. Females were supposed to serve the working class men, who in turn were supposed to serve the plant owners. As Pinchbeck argues, At a time when the concept of occupation was becoming the core element in masculine identity, any position for women other than in relation to men was anomalous. Working-class and poor women, of course, were often forced to work both outside and inside the home.
But few respectable women in this period held any positions other than those of governess or schoolmistress. And even these occupations were typically defined as transitional periods -- temporary stops -- on the road towards matrimony. The industrialized Britain offered only one option for intelligent and ambitious women: marriage. Women who transgressed the bounds of socially acceptable behavior by seeking other options were depicted as aberrant, dangerous, and unnatural. The nineteenth century thus saw the progressive dis empowerment and disenfranchisement of women: women in the seventeenth and eighteenth century had arguably more political freedom because their rights had not been codified in restrictive legislation. I can note that the Industrialization in Great Britain was the first historical instance of the breakthrough from an agrarian, handicraft economy to one dominated by industry and machine manufacture.
And the working class was the stronghold of the industrialization. The British economy had experienced a take-off into self-sustained growth in the period 1783 - 1802. The British take-off was a 'decisive transition' involving sharp rises in the share of the country's resources allocated to investment, and the emergence of leading sectors (cotton and iron), which exerted a powerful influence over growth as a whole. Such British experience was the prototype for all other industrialized countries in the world. Other European countries have allowed Britain's experience with industrialization yet with much less success.
The implications for the growth of output per worker, and of agriculture's contribution to the process of industrialisation have been discussed in quantitative terms. The new estimates of the growth of industrial output between 1780 and 1830 show substantially lower rates of increase in most periods yet the strong class stratification. The differences are particularly large in the classic period of the industrialization, 1780 - 1830. From 1780 to 1801 the estimate is 3. 4 % per year, and for 1801 - 31 the rate is 4. 4 % per year. The same is true for growth in the economy as a whole, including agriculture and services. It is true that growth in a few very dynamic industries was very rapid, and far outstripped the expansion of industrial output as a whole.
Thus the production of cotton textiles grew at a rate of 9. 7 % per year from 1780 to 1801, and of 5. 6 % per year from 1801 to 1831. Iron production grew at rates of 5. 1 % and 4. 6 % per year over the same periods. However, even by 1831 cotton accounted for little more than a fifth of total industrial output, and iron for less than one tenth. Much of British industry was still composed of traditional, handicraft activity. Even by 1831 only about one in ten of all workers were employed in the modern manufacturing sector of the economy, compared with almost three times as many working in other forms of industry. During the industrialization of 1780 - 1850, there are new series for the growth of the labour force; for the level of capital investment (i.
e. of spending on the construction or purchase of long-lasting productive assets such as machinery, mills, mines, warehouses, canals and ships), and about the total stock of such fixed capital built up over time. These series can be combined with the revised output estimates in order to analyze how this expansion of output was achieved. In particular, a great number of output was obtained simply by using more labour and capital, and somewhat lesser obtained by greater efficiency in the use of these resources. The latter result might, for example, be achieved by getting more output from an unchanged level of labour and capital inputs.
The name given this measure of the relationship between output and the use of all inputs combined is total factor productivity. We see that the proportion devoted to investment in human labor and thus in the class formation, did increase over time - from about 7 % at the end of the eighteenth century to over 11 % in 1831 - 60; and by that period the British economy was adding to its stock of capital assets at a rate which was extremely high by the standard of any previous period. I should also draw the readers attention to the fact that prior to about 1830, however, the growth of total real output did not exceed population and working class growth by much, and real wages were growing at only a little over 0. 5 % per year. With the idea of an industrialization in mind it is also interesting to delve a little further into...
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Research essay sample on British Industrialism 1780 1850 10 4 Part 1
