Why industrial revolution began in britain

Why did the Industrial Revolution begin in Britain? Was it because they are a particularly ingenious and industrial people or just a happenstance of history? The Industrial Revolution is widely accepted to have occurred between the s and the First World War. It was a period of time marked by massive technological, socioeconomic, and geopolitical change in the world.

Various reasons have been postulated throughout history as to why the Industrial Revolution began in Britain. But one of the most convincing is the arguments put forward by a Turkish-American economist Daron Acemoglu and British political scientist James A. Robinson in their fascinating book "Why Nations Fail". By their estimation , it is no accident that it began in Britain.

But in turn, the very fact Britain had reached a point where it was fertile ground for the revolution is part chance and part cultural development. In short, changes in history like The Fall of Rome, The Black Plague , signing of the Magna Carta , breaking with the Catholic Church , and the Glorious Revolution , had initially small, but profound cumulative effects over time.

In a sense, it can be likened to Chaos Theory where small changes in initial conditions can result in a very different result when all else is equal. Of course, the path of history is not always linear. There had been regressive points in British history before the Industrial Revolution. However, this did cement the Protestant work ethic in British culture, and more powers had been granted to the British Government from the Monarch in its aftermath.

Nations would have fewer partnerships with other nations. Nations would have a smaller market in which to sell their goods. Increase in National Income. Industrialization allows countries to make optimal use of their scarce resources. It increases the quantity and quality of goods manufactured in that company, which makes a larger contribution to gross national product GNP.

Improvement in Investment and Spending: Industrialization causes the income of people to rise, and improves their standard of living. There is a rise in income, and so rate of savings, rate of investment and rate of spending also rises automatically. This is an important event for the rapid growth of a country. What were the four natural resources needed for British Industrialization?

In , John Deere made the first commercially successful riding plow. His inventions made farm much less physically demanding. Begin typing your search term above and press enter to search.

Chief among the new techniques was the smelting of iron ore with coke a material made by heating coal instead of the traditional charcoal. An icon of the Industrial Revolution broke onto the scene in the early s, when Thomas Newcomen designed the prototype for the first modern steam engine.

Watt later collaborated with Matthew Boulton to invent a steam engine with a rotary motion, a key innovation that would allow steam power to spread across British industries, including flour, paper, and cotton mills, iron works, distilleries, waterworks and canals. Just as steam engines needed coal, steam power allowed miners to go deeper and extract more of this relatively cheap energy source.

The demand for coal skyrocketed throughout the Industrial Revolution and beyond, as it would be needed to run not only the factories used to produce manufactured goods, but also the railroads and steamships used for transporting them. In the early s, Richard Trevithick debuted a steam-powered locomotive, and in similar locomotives started transporting freight and passengers between the industrial hubs of Manchester and Liverpool. The latter part of the Industrial Revolution also saw key advances in communication methods, as people increasingly saw the need to communicate efficiently over long distances.

In , British inventors William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone patented the first commercial telegraphy system, even as Samuel Morse and other inventors worked on their own versions in the United States.

Banks and industrial financiers rose to new prominent during the period, as well as a factory system dependent on owners and managers. A stock exchange was established in London in the s; the New York Stock Exchange was founded in the early s. In , Scottish social philosopher Adam Smith , who is regarded as the founder of modern economics, published The Wealth of Nations.

In it, Smith promoted an economic system based on free enterprise, the private ownership of means of production, and lack of government interference. Though many people in Britain had begun moving to the cities from rural areas before the Industrial Revolution, this process accelerated dramatically with industrialization, as the rise of large factories turned smaller towns into major cities over the span of decades.

This rapid urbanization brought significant challenges, as overcrowded cities suffered from pollution, inadequate sanitation and a lack of clean drinking water. Meanwhile, even as industrialization increased economic output overall and improved the standard of living for the middle and upper classes, poor and working class people continued to struggle. The mechanization of labor created by technological innovation had made working in factories increasingly tedious and sometimes dangerous , and many workers were forced to work long hours for pitifully low wages.

In the decades to come, outrage over substandard working and living conditions would fuel the formation of labor unions , as well as the passage of new child labor laws and public health regulations in both Britain and the United States, all aimed at improving life for working class and poor citizens who had been negatively impacted by industrialization. The beginning of industrialization in the United States is usually pegged to the opening of a textile mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, in by the recent English immigrant Samuel Slater.

By the end of the 19th century, with the so-called Second Industrial Revolution underway, the United States would also transition from a largely agrarian society to an increasingly urbanized one, with all the attendant problems. By the early 20th century, the U. Historians continue to debate many aspects of industrialization, including its exact timeline, why it began in Britain as opposed to other parts of the world and the idea that it was actually more of a gradual evolution than a revolution.

The positives and negatives of the Industrial Revolution are complex. On one hand, unsafe working conditions were rife and pollution from coal and gas are legacies we still struggle with today. On the other, the move to cities and inventions that made clothing, communication and transportation more affordable and accessible to the masses changed the course of world history.

Regardless of these questions, the Industrial Revolution had a transformative economic, social and cultural impact, and played an integral role in laying the foundations for modern society.