Revolution from a variety of aspects.

Everything on the board I put on our website,

so don't worry about copying it down.

It's all pretty obvious.

Doing the Industrial Revolution across the century is no easy

task, but we will do it and do the reading.

Let me just say that the way people look at what used to be

called Industrial Revolution, and I guess some people still

call it that, has changed dramatically.

Through the 1950s and into the 1960s,

the idea of the Industrial Revolution was that it was the

work of some genius inventors who created machines used

primarily in the textile industry--but also in

mining--that eliminated blocks to assembly line production.

Then everybody was crowded into factories and the new brave

world opened up.

In fact, one of the most interesting books and great

classics that is still in print was written by an economic

historian at Harvard who's still around called David Landes.

It's a good book called The Unbound Prometheus,

which was basically that.

Some of the inventions that I briefly describe in your

reading, the spinning jenny, etc., refer to that.

That kind of analysis led one to concentrate on England,

where the Industrial Revolution began,

and to view industrialization as being a situation of winners

and losers (by not going as fast).

In your reading I give you some pretty obvious examples of

reasons for the Industrial Revolution first coming to

England: the location of resources,

particularly coal; a country in which nowhere is

more than seventy-five miles away from the sea;

precocious canals and roads; banking systems;

fluidity between classes and a very large and increasingly

larger proletariat; agricultural revolution, etc.

With that kind of analysis, those places that didn't

industrialize as fast, for example,

France, one thought they were

"retarded"; a word that was used,

unfortunately, at that time.

Then one tried to see why not.

That analysis has been rejected greatly over the past years,

because the Industrial Revolution is measured by more

than simply large factories with industrial workers and the

number of machines.

This is the point of the beginning of this.

The more that we look at the Industrial Revolution,

the more we see that the Industrial Revolution was first

and foremost an intensification of forms of production,

of kinds of production that were already there.

Thus, we spend more time looking at the intensification

of artisanal production, craft production,

domestic industry--which we've already mentioned,

that is, people, mostly women but also men and

children, too, working in the countryside.

The rapid rise of industrial production was very much tied to

traditional forms of production.

In Paris, for example, in 1870, the average unit of

production had only slightly more than seven people in it.

So, if you only look for big factories and lots of machines,

you'll be missing the boat on the Industrial Revolution.

To be sure, when we think of the Industrial

Revolution we think of Manchester,

which grew from a very small town into this enormous city

full of what Engels called "the satanic mills"

of industrial production.

Or you think of smoky Sheffield, also in Northern

England.

Or you think of Birmingham in the midlands.

If you think of France you'll think of Lille and its two

burgeoning towns around it, Tourcoing and Roubaix.

Or you think of Saint Etienne, which was kind of France's

Manchester.

In Germany you think of the Rhineland and the Ruhr.

In Italy you think of Turin and Milan.

In Russia, you think of the Moscow and St.

Petersburg region.

In Spain, Barcelona.

Indeed, those are classic cases of industrial concentration,

where you do have really significant mechanization over a

very long period of time.

You do have large towns with smoky factories full of workers.

But again, and we've underestimated--in fact,

the second edition has more about this than the first,

which you're reading--the degree of industrial production

in the late Russian empire.

Yet, to be sure, when I say that the Industrial

Revolution is first and foremost an intensification of forms of

industries that already existed, if you were a parachutist and

you're somehow floating down over Europe from,

say, the middle of the eighteenth century through the

middle of the nineteenth century,

what you would see is that there were still all sorts of

industry, a rapid increase of industrial

production that is out in the countryside,

that's not in factories.

It's done in a very traditional way.

Or rural handicrafts, people producing all sorts of

things still at home.

There's a marvelous book written by a scholar called

Maxine Berg, who teaches at Warwick in England.

The book is called The Age of Manufacture.

She reexamined the Industrial Revolution and discovered that,

for example, the town of Birmingham,

which produced all sorts of toys,

big toy manufacturers, that even though you had a lot

of factories, you still had a lot of the toys

being finished or even produced by women working in the

hinterland, that is, the arrière pays,

or the environs of Birmingham.

If you take smoky Sheffield, a grim kind of place in the

nineteenth century, where they produced knives and

cutlery.

You still had a lot of these products being finished by

people out in the countryside.

If you take the North of France,

if you think of a town like Reims,

famous for champagne, it was a big industrial center

but it wasn't the center of mechanized production until

after about 1850.

What you had is you had all these people out in the

countryside, mostly women, who are doing spinning and

weaving and carding and that kind of thing.

Or around Nancy in the east of France.

By 1875 you still had something like 75,000 women who were

embroiderers working in the countryside.

Rural industry intensifies.

Finally, at the end--not at the end, but it depends on where you

are--you have this implosion of work into factories.

So, by the end of the century the kind of traditional view

that one would have of the Industrial Revolution has really

arrived, where factory production and

above all, in the textile industry.

The textile industry is the leading edge of the Industrial

Revolution.

You have women who used to work at home that are now working in

factories as what the British call textile operatives.

Or Switzerland, you think of Switzerland as

being the famous mercenaries in the early modern period or the

very wealthy bankers in our own day.

But if you think of a town like Zurich, on the lake,

there was all sorts of industry in the uplands of Zurich,

up into the hills and even into the mountains around Zurich,

of handicraft production.

Or Austria, in the Austria-Hungarian empire,

there's hundreds of thousands of people working in the textile

industry.

The details aren't as important as the fact that,

to be sure, the mines that you read about in Germinal,

which is a great, great read, and the factories that I will

describe in a while are described by Engels--and I

couldn't do better than that--are a reality and they

become the industrial experience.

When you think of Detroit, Michigan, in the 1930s,

or Flint, Michigan, in the 1930s,

or you think about now the rust belt of Connecticut of

Torrington and these places that were once booming industrial

towns.

That's the kind of classic model.

The American model really is closer to what people used to

think the Industrial Revolution meant in the case of Europe.

But that's not a subject for now.

A couple points--by the way, I don't think I'll ever get to

my notes, but it doesn't really matter.

First of all, and this is another reason why

the Industrial Revolution starts in England.

You can't have an industrial revolution without an

agricultural revolution.

What the Agricultural Revolution does is increases the

amount of food produced that's going to feed your burgeoning

proletariat, your labor force.

This is a place, all of Europe increases in

population.

The French population is unique; it stops growing in 1846 and

1847.

In simply stops, skids to a halt.

But everywhere else, the population grows.

There are regional differences in France, as there are regional

differences everywhere.

But the Industrial Revolution depends on the Agricultural

Revolution for an increase in food supply.

This makes possible the increase in urban population,

thus also increasing the demand for food.

Also, the Agricultural Revolution particularly,

but not just in the case of England, increases capital

formation.

You've got this sort of surplus of money, bucks,

pounds, fric, cash that can be invested in

industry.

This is precisely what happens.

That's why the Agricultural Revolution is absolutely

important.

These three things, Industrial Revolution,

Agricultural Revolution, and the growth of cities,

are very much tied together.

Let me give you an example, which you certainly don't have

to remember.

Think of Manchester.

I describe the statistics in there, that the growth of

Manchester is a prodigious, scary thing.

I'll talk more about how rural and urban elites are frightened

by the growth of cities, particularly in Germany,

but in France, England, and in the United States, later.

What the growth of Manchester does is it really changes the

countryside around and helps bring the Agricultural

Revolution.

What do I mean by that?

You find the same thing around Paris, around Berlin,

or around Warsaw, almost any big city that I can

think of.

In response to this urban growth,

this big octopus of people and money,

of rich people and poor people, I'll talk about some of the

rich people next time on Wednesday.

You've got an expanded demand for food.

In that ring immediately around a city like Manchester,

you've got a dramatic expansion of people doing what they call

truck farming.

They're specializing in crops for the urban market--fruit,

vegetables, things like that.

They specialize because there are people there that are going

to pay for and eat what they produce.

Take the example of Paris, which I'll come back and talk

about with great relish someday.

The suburbs of Paris, a place called Montreuil,

which is kind of a grim part of eastern Paris.

It used to be famous for its cherries, and fruits,

and that kind of thing that they were producing for the

urban market.

Or wine, if you can imagine wine being produced,

what a horrible idea, in the region of Paris.

It's Asnières, on the Seine.

They used to produce wine for Paris's vast market.

Then the next big ring around Manchester, you've got the big

fish eating the little fish.

They are more productive.

As this commercial agriculture develops and more productive

production--that's a terrible sentence,

there's a greater productivity in response to this urban

demand.

On the far, distant places you have people specializing in the

production of cattle, that is, milk and meat for the

market.

Of course, the other thing which goes without saying is