II.

Common Elements in the Pattern

However marked the contrasts in the timing and sequences of industrialization in different countries, all “industrial revolutions” had a number of elements in common.

A.

Power

The quest for new sources of inanimate power—steam first, electricity second—was fundamental to industrialization. Hitherto people had depended on natural power—wind, water, and human backed by animal power, and water employed in early British cotton mills continued to be used in parallel to steam until and after the beginnings of the age of electricity. Inanimate power was measured at first in units of horse power. In late 18th-century Birmingham, where the Scots engineer James Watt worked in partnership with the businessman Matthew Boulton, the latter told the visitors to his works that he was selling what all the world wanted—”power”.

The gospel of steam, proclaimed as forcefully in the 19th century as the gospel of work, rested on the conviction, not shared by all workers tied to it, that steam was a universal boon; and writing after it had been applied not only to driving machines but to locomotion (railways and ships)—considered its greatest triumph—a Yorkshire poet, Ebenezer Elliott, popular critic of agricultural protection, wrote in verses called “Storm in the Desert”:

B.

Materials

The exploitation of existing materials and the discovery of new materials, accompanied by advances in technology and in chemistry, were other key elements in the industrial revolutions. Metals, particularly iron, acquired new uses. So, too, did glass. Coal was demanded in large quantities. One chemical product, sulphuric acid, was deemed so important that the German chemist Justus Liebig suggested that the commercial prosperity of a country might be measured by its consumption. Chemical products included caustic soda, chlorine (used for bleaching), soap, dyestuffs, and paints.

C.

Mechanization

The increasing use of machines as a complement to or a substitute for human labour became almost the defining feature of the new industrial economics. It made possible what was called the division of labour, increasing productivity. In the British industrial revolution, but not the first stages of the Japanese industrial revolution, machines were associated with invention, a quality greatly praised in the last half of the 18th century. From the start, however, they were sold abroad as well as at home. For the operatives who worked them, machines were associated during these early years of industrialization not with ingenuity but with discipline. The machine set the pace. In a worker’s poem, “Hand-loom versus Power Loom”, addressed to cotton workers, was written:

These were relatively light-hearted lines. As most machines were operated by women and children, however, the sense of people being yoked to machines could become bitter, while handloom weavers, supplanted by machines, regarded themselves as victims of “progress”.

For Thomas Carlyle, writing about the industrial society of the 1830s and 1840s, when factory labour (and factory ownership) had become a matter not associated with invention but with routine, the main characteristic of that society was the presence of the machine. It affected feelings as well as ways of working. Yet not everyone complained of what was happening. In 1832 Charles Babbage, who was to invent one of the most remarkable 19th-century machines, the Analytical Engine, a mechanical precursor of the electronic computer, dwelt on the increase in productivity that machines made possible in his Economy of Manufactures (1832); and Andrew Ure in his Philosophy of Manufactures (1835) went so far as to suggest, in a pre-computer age, that “the most perfect manufacture is that which dispenses entirely with manual labour”.

After the application of steam power to machines, which at first were made individually rather than to uniform designs, the most important feature of further change affecting production was the development of machine tools, making it possible through the standardization of metal parts to reproduce machines. Standardization was pushed further in the United States, leading to mass production, known at first as the “American system”. The standardization of parts began with guns and sewing machines, and then spread to bicycles and motor cars. Henry Ford, brought up on a farm, began work as a machinist’s apprentice, and his assembly-line approach to production influenced not only Americans but also Soviet Communists, pledged to carrying through their own industrial revolution under state orders.

D.

Organization

New approaches to industrial management and marketing, going through different phases at the same time, were as important as technological changes. In the 18th century, since there was no highly organized local or national capital market that employers could fall back on for funds, and no limited liability company organization to spread risk, they had to be prepared to plough back their own profits for the acquisition of machines. These were concentrated in factories, later in what was described as “plant”. They had also to be able to supervise and manage workers, being prepared to “tame” what was now described as a “labour force”. As management was separated from ownership, it became more specialized. So too did marketing. In the 18th century there were owners whose marketing flair could be described as genius. Josiah Wedgwood, for example, who built up a flourishing pottery business with worldwide connections, was a master of publicity, as was the iron founder John Wilkinson, who helped to make Britain “iron-conscious”. His iron boat, which cynics remarked would be sure to sink, was as well known as his iron coffin. In the century that followed, new generations of entrepreneurs developed financial management and marketing skills geared to their own changing societies and cultures. It was not until the late 20th century, however, in an age of increasing scale, that the term “corporate culture” began to be used.

E.

New Thought

The use of the term “corporate culture”, like the use of the early 20th-century term “scientific management” in industry, and like Carlyle’s attack on the machine, was merely one manifestation of the changed nature of thinking and feeling associated with continuing industrial revolution. Industrialization also demanded new structures in banking, insurance, and allied services.

In the 18th century, “industry” was not thought of as a sector of the economy, as it was to be thought of everywhere in the 20th century, but as a human quality, individual and collective, contrasting with idleness. Until it became associated with machines and mills there could have been no sense of an “Industrial Revolution”. There was another necessary shift in thinking—the idea of taming or even conquering Nature. For centuries, Nature had been thought of as a source, an erratic source, not only of materials but of power—never entirely under human control. It was studied by philosophers, seeking to discover its laws, including the 17th-century English philosopher-statesman Francis Bacon, who had dreamt of taming nature through increased understanding of its mysteries. Looking back from a 19th-century vantage point, when the British industrial revolution was well advanced, the scientist Sir John Herschell—”scientist” was another new term of the early 19th century—commented that, “it seemed”, on the eve of the Industrial Revolution, “as if the genius of mankind, long pent up, had at length rushed eagerly upon Nature”. Watt himself had claimed in revolutionary fashion that “Nature can be conquered if we can but find her weak side”. Such an approach was completely opposed to Chinese and Indian views of Nature, where balance was stressed, not conquest. It was European, rather than British, however, and the adjective “Faustian“ was sometimes applied to it, an adjective derived from an old legend of power.

There were two other associations that influenced the term “industrial revolution”. The first was the political revolution in France that ran parallel to the economic one from 1789 onward through the Napoleonic Wars. The second was the “revolution” in the ancient world from hunter-gatherer subsistence to settled agriculture, later described as the “Neolithic Revolution”. Both “revolutions” were rightly deemed to have had more than local or national consequences. (For some historians, there were intermediate “industrial revolutions” in Britain, such as a 13th-century change in techniques in the textiles industry.)

The first person to use the term “industrial revolution”, Adolphe Blanqui, compared explicitly the social and political changes that happened in France in the 1780s and 1790s with the social and political changes that happened in Britain. He could compare Watt with Georges Jacques Danton. The British diffused techniques, the French ideas. It was the French historian Paul Mantoux, writing in his book The Industrial Revolution in the Eighteenth Century (1906; trans. 1928), who described it as “one of the most important moments in modern history, the consequences of which have affected the whole civilized world and are still transforming it and shaping it under our eyes”. By the time that Mantoux studied it in detail, the British Industrial Revolution seemed to have much in common with the French Revolution, different though they were in their origins. Factories and barricades were part of the same stage set. Thanks to Marx (and others), the new industrial proletariat, created by the factory system, were thought of (misleadingly) as carriers of continuing and ultimately worldwide revolution.

The parallel with the “Neolithic Revolution” focused on production, although it had implications too for historians of ways of life. While Watt was compared topically with Danton, Sir Richard Arkwright, inventor of the spinning frame, was compared across the centuries with an unknown early prehistoric man. “Arkwright”, it was urged, “well deserves to live in honoured remembrance among those ancient master-spirits who persuaded their roaming companions to exchange the precarious toils of the chase for the settled comforts of agriculture.”