Posted on 04/05/2024 4:26:37 AM PDT by Cronos
The Industrial Revolution started more than 100 years earlier than previously thought, new research suggests, with Britons already shifting from agricultural work to manufacturing in the 1600s.
Seventeenth century Britain can be understood as the start of the Industrial Revolution, laying down the foundations for a shift from an agricultural and crafts-based society to a manufacturing-dominated economy, in which networks of home-based artisans worked with merchants, functioning similarly to factories.
The period saw a steep decline in agricultural peasantry and a surge in people who manufactured goods, such as local artisans like blacksmiths, shoemakers and wheelwrights, alongside a burgeoning network of home-based weavers producing cloth for wholesale, according to University of Cambridge research.
Textbooks typically mark the Industrial Revolution as beginning around 1760, when mills and steam engines proliferated and technologies such as the spinning jenny were created, yet according to the most detailed occupational history of a nation ever created – built from more than 160m records and spanning over three centuries – the UK was emerging as the world’s first industrial powerhouse during the reign of the Stuarts.
...“Our database shows that a groundswell of enterprise and productivity transformed the economy in the 17th century, laying the foundations for the world’s first industrial economy. Britain was already a nation of makers by the year 1700.”
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
This means that the share of the British labour force working in manufacturing rather than agriculture was three times that of France by 1700, Shaw-Taylor calculated. “The English economy of the time was more liberal, with fewer tariffs and restrictions, unlike on the continent,” he noted.
Consider the source...
Interesting because the climate alarmists typically date “the industrial age” as starting around 1850, which just happens to be when the earth began to warm after the little ice age. No reason at all ever given for their using this time frame. I always went with the introduction of steam power in the 1700s but now maybe earlier still, giving the lie again to the scammers.
This isn’t a really new idea. Enclosure had a lot to do with it. Agricultural workers lost access to common land and became less viable. Other work became necessary.
I would’ve focussed on patent law as the first catalyst and cornerstone to the industrial revolution. It’s all the foundling smaller things that made the big event possible.
Industrial revolution began when the WHEEL was invented thousands of years ago. Human mobility and productivity sky rocketed using wheels.
As a history major in college a half century ago, I attended a lecture by J. H. Plumb, a prominent British historian of that era. Short, bald-headed, and trim, Plumb contended in a lucid and entertaining manner that urban manufacturing culture in Britain began in the 17th Century when popular literature and schoolbooks began to promote the virtues of thrift, good habits, and diligence in the workplace. Plumb also discussed the economic evidence for the importance of manufacturing and the trade in goods. I am pleased to see Plumb’s thesis vindicated.
Prof. Plumb’s ( :)! ) thesis is quite correct, but noted by observers even in the 18th century. The wool industry was one of the first to arise in the British Isles, followed closely by the first trade restrictions. This harmed Northern Irish wool producers, who responded by importing French Huguenots who brought flax cultivation and developed the new Irish linen industry, farmed out to women throughout the area on a piecework basis. The vagaries of markets and Parliaments of course quickly brought about the first industrial economic downturns, leading to the first of several waves of emigrations from N. Ireland to the American colonies. Thus the Scots-Irish in America.
**Industrial revolution began when the WHEEL was invented thousands of years ago. Human mobility and productivity sky rocketed using wheels.**
But those wheels needed animal or human engines to turn them for thousands of years. It wasn’t until steam power was effectively harnessed that biological engines began to be replaced. And the enormous increase, of steel production in the mid 1800s, was the key to that powerful change.
Steel was the heart of the industrial revolution, and is still is the most required ingredient for modern economies.
You are making me pine for my days as a history major in college and to wish that I had time to read books as much as I once did.
I thought enclosure in England started in the late Middle ages - around the 13th century
It came into service in 1722.
No doubt the capabilities of building them to a common standard, and the theories behind doing so would have preceded their adoption by some time, so yes, I would agree, based on that alone, one could reasonably assert the "industrial revolution," had its roots in the late 1600s.
From Wikipedia:
Before the 17th century enclosures were generally by informal agreement. When they first introduced enclosure by Act of Parliament the informal method continued too. The first enclosure by Act of Parliament was in 1604 and was for Radipole, Dorset. This was followed by many more parliamentary Acts and by the 1750s the parliamentary system became the more usual method.
There were a lot of factors. New crops from the New World, new technology, etc. Large landowners were able to maximize their incomes by depriving commoners access to what had traditionally been common lands. That led to fewer agricultural opportunities for peasants and subsequent growth in non-agricultural work.
Although the number of agricultural workers declined, food production increased, populations increased, and this greatly facilitated the subsequent Industrial Revolution as both production and consumption grew.
Good information. Thank you!
Thanks Cronos.
From ChatGPT:
Elizabeth I played a crucial role in fully ending serfdom when she freed the last remaining serfs in 1574/i>
They started to learn to code.
The machines created to weave used what was the first use of punch cards.
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