INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION.

Some idle thoughts and questions to which I need to find answers via the internet.

1. In my mind the Industrial Revolution in Britain is associated with poverty. Lots of factory workers living in squalor in cities. But, on the face of it, you would have thought that the standard of living would good. After all now you’ve got machines doing all the hard work that was previously done by hand: spinning and weaving. Resulting in very cheap fabrics and clothing.

2. Industrialisation is about machine labour which consists of a massive reduction of human labour. So why were there so many humans in industrial towns? You would have thought that the typical industrial town would be one where there were quite a lot of machines but just a few humans operating them. If we make a machine that does the work of hundreds of humans but then it requires hundreds of people to operate it. Where’s the efficiency in that? So I suppose it must have been the case that they had machines that required hundreds of humans to operate but which did the work of thousands (if not tens of thousands) of humans.

3. The machines increased the output of textiles. The output was greater than it was before the machines. But surely it should have only been as much as it was before. It’s not as if there was a greater demand for textiles. Did it get really cold or something?

4. Why did the machines, together with the people operating them, need to be gathered together in cities the way they were? OK so we’ve got machines to do the work that humans used to do. Namely spinning and weaving.

And then it looks like they put all those machines and all the operators in one place. (For example with cotton production in Manchester.) Why could the workers not just have stayed where they were and have the machines brought to them? I understand that the raw material was available in one place. Namely the port where it disembarked. And so it would have been an expenditure to distribute that raw material while leaving the workers where they are. But if, as happened, you concentrate the workers to where the raw material is, then you have the expenditure of having to distribute (transport) sustenance (food) to the workers from the countryside. If the workers had stayed put this cost would have been avoided.

5. How did the Industrial Revolution happen? The obvious answer seems to be that some clever people made machines that mechanised production. But this answer is too obvious to be genuinely enlightening. Which isn’t to say it’s wrong. But there are other things we need to say. Why did the machines get accepted and used and by who? Who wanted the increase in production rates that these machines made possible and why did they want this? Who paid money to make the machines? Where did the labour come from to operate the machines?

[November 2019]