*The 1700s and 1800s did not just see political revolutions, but revolutions in agriculture and industry as well, especially in Great Britain.

*Until 1700, farming in most of Europe worked about the same way it had since the dawn of civilisation.  Some experiments with new technology, new crops, and new methods of planting had been tried here and there (especially in the Netherlands), but the Agricultural Revolution really began in 1701 when Jethro Tull invented the Seed Drill, allowing seeds to be planted evenly in rows, not wasted in broadcasting them.  Farmers also began scientific breeding, carefully selecting livestock to breed for healthier and more valuable offspring.

*As farming becomes more efficient, fewer peasants are needed, and many are forced off the lands they work.  Some go to America and some go to big cities, and a few find work in towns or in small cottage industries—the beginning of factory work.

*A factory literally means a place where things are made (to manufacture actually means to make by hand).  Many industries had originally been based in the home, and now more came to be through the new method of piece-work. 

*In piece-work, or the putting-out system, people (usually women and children) were paid to make one piece of a finished product, and those pieces were collected and taken somewhere else to be assembled.  It required less skill and lower pay than having a skilled craftsman do it.  This was the beginning of mass production.  It allowed more people to work, but at lower wages and (it was said) with less satisfaction, because they did not get to see their projects through from beginning to end.  Adam Smith described division of labour through the example of pin-making, but the invisible hand of the laissez-faire economic system he described made this more efficient and more profitable practise succeed.

*Cottage industries were threatened by technology, too.  Since 1712 the British had used steam engines to pump out flooded coal mines (and used that coal to power more engines).  In 1769, James Watt patented a new type of steam engine that could drive machinery, much as water wheels had done in the past.

*New machinery first appeared in the textile industry.  The flying shuttle (John Kay, 1733) allowed weavers to weave so quickly that spinners could not make enough thread for them to weave cloth out of.  In 1762, Richard Arkwright's Water Frame let them spin even faster through the application of water power.  In 1764, James Hargreaves's Spinning Jenny began making thread more quickly—it was basically several spinning wheels in one.  In 1779, Samuel Crompton's Spinning Mule combined the Water Frame and the Spinning Jenny into one machine.  In 1793 Eli Whitney (of America) introduced the Cotton Engine which allowed cotton to be processed more quickly so that it could be spun into thread and woven by these new machines.

*All these changes created more jobs overall and reduced the price of goods, but they also put many skilled weavers and other craftsmen out of work.  In 1811 and 1812 groups of textile workers claiming to follow General Ludd (a possibly fictitious weaver who had smashed two stocking frames in a fit of rage in the 1770s) protested throughout England, destroying machinery and even textile mills before the British Army put them down, because for all their rage and numbers, they were poorly organised.  Destroying machinery was made a capital crime in 1813, and many of the Luddites were executed or transported to penal colonies, but their name remains as a term for an enemy of new technology.

*The Luddites feared unemployment, but they also feared changes in society that came with the Industrial Revolution.  Under the old 'Moral Economy' workers had to be paid a fair wage and goods had to be sold for a fair price (which were set by law).  Workers were their own masters (or worked in small shops) and set their own schedules and worked by their own methods.  Taking a day off or drinking on the job were fully accepted, but a craftsman took pride in his work.  Under the new 'Money Economy' workers would be paid as little as they would put up with and goods could be sold for as much as the seller could get—supply and demand.  Days were ruled by the clock and highly regulated—time is money!  The individual and his skills became unimportant—each worker was but a cog in the machine, and increasingly alienated from his work and his employer.

*The agricultural revolution led to population growth, while the industrial revolution led to a change in how people could be employed.  Furthermore, between 1815 and 1846, Britain implemented the Corn Laws, putting a prohibitive tarrif on imports of all kinds of grain.  This was meant to increase profits for British farmers, and it did, but it made the price of bread much higher for working class city dwellers.  After its repeal, the price of bread dropped for city dwellers and income dropped for farmers, making farming less profitable.  As a result, people increasingly moved to big cities, many of which became highly polluted.

*It was easier to move around, too, thanks to improvements in transportation:  canals were built in large numbers and were sailed by steamboats.  Even more exciting was the railroad—the first commercially successful steam locomotive ran in 1811--but how dangerous!  A train could go up to sixteen miles per hour, an unheard of speed!  People worried if train rides were healthy for humans, and worried that in the countryside they would scare the livestock.

*Soon railroads are seen as marvels of engineering. Railway stations are built as temples of industry and engineers (a new profession) are Heroes of the Industrial Revolution—a poll by the BBC in 2002 listed Isambard Kingdom Brunel as second only to Churchill.

*The UK was so successful because it had a number of advantages:  it was small, so it was easy to build canals, turnpikes, and railroads across it; it had abundant natural resources, particularly coal and iron; as an island nation it already had a large navy and merchant fleet and was reasonably safe from invasion; as the home of the Agricultural Revolution it had a surplus of people needed jobs (and thus willing to take them at low wages). 

*Furthermore, as a constitutional monarchy, it enjoyed the rule of law, so there were no arbitrary seizures of property.  It had a well-established middle class (that mixed with the nobility—trade and industry were not looked down on in England the same way they were on the Continent) that could invest in new industries.  Limited liability corporations meant that investors could not be liable for any sum larger than their investment, so people could feel safer investing in new enterprises.  This was also possible because the UK had a stable form of paper money and loans were guaranteed by law, so people could borrow money for investment.  The land, factories, and machinery that these businessmen bought and owned were considered capital, and so these investors were also called capitalists.

*By the middle of the 1800s, the UK was the workshop, merchant, and banker of the world (and also its protector, because peace was good for business), and it celebrated in 1851 with a world exhibition in the Crystal Palace (built of iron and glass, two things that could now be made cheaply and well).  It had a million exhibits, six million visitors in six months, and celebrated that the UK bought half the world's manufactured goods and that one third of all manufactured goods were made in the UK.

*Soon, though, Belgium, Northern France, Northern Germany, and the United States would begin to catch up, enjoying the benefits of backwardness—they could borrow ideas from the UK without wasting time making mistakes along the way.  This was particularly important for the USA, as America did not have the surplus of labour that the UK did, and needed mechanisation to take the place of skilled and unskilled workers.

*The life of the average factory worker was generally unpleasant (although there were some exceptions in some factories run by philanthropists or eccentrics, but most of these did not manage to keep this up in the long run).  There were no safety laws, minimum wage laws, insurance, or other benefits.  The working day might range from 10-16 hours a day, up to six days a week.  Unskilled men were paid the lowest wage they could live on, and women and children were paid less.  In some cases they were not even paid in cash, but in company scrip—paper money or tokens that could only be spent in company-owned stores which did not have to have low prices in order to compete with other businesses.

*All this was justified by Adam Smith’s ideas of laissez-fair economics, guided by an invisible hand that would ultimately provide the fairest and best economy for all. 

*It was also explained less optimistically by what was called the Iron Law of Wages (sometimes attributed to David Ricardo), which said that wages would typically stay at the subsistence level—less and workers would starve (and be bad workers), but competition among workers to work somewhere would allow employers to keep wages low (at least as long as there was a surplus of labour). 

*David Ricardo even said that although the creation of new industries and the specialisation of different countries in their best industries could temporarily raise wages, in the long run, high wages meant lower profits, and thus were counter-productive for everyone (except maybe the workers, although even they would suffer from inflation as prices rose to match wages).

*Thomas Malthus had an even bleaker view:  he said that war, disease, and famine were natural, and the only things that kept the population from growing too large.  Peace, prosperity, and improved health care would lead to a large population, low wages, suffering among the poor, and ultimately a ‘Malthusian catastrophe,’ worldwide starvation to get things back in balance.  Fortunately, Malthus was wrong:  the agricultural revolution that went with the industrial revolution let food supplies increase along with the population.

*The working class, many of whom had once been semi-independent farmers or skilled craftsmen (or at least their fathers or grandfathers had been), and they wanted to be treated with respect.  This led to the rise of socialism.

*Socialism was the idea that everyone ought to work together for the benefit of society, even the working class and farmers.  In some ways this was based on Mediæval ideas of the moral economy and the fair price, in which all members of Christendom supported one another, and the Mediæval concept of village commons, on which everyone could farm or graze livestock.  Indeed, many early socialists (and even some that came later) were devout Christians who felt a moral duty to help their fellow men.

*Socialism was based on co-operation, on everyone working for the benefit of the whole, and on the government taking care of its people.  In its simplest form, socialism involved the government creating and enforcing laws for fair treatment of workers (a five-day work week, a 10 or even 8-hour work day, retirement benefits, safety laws, paid sick days, voting for all men), many socialists thought the government should provide assistance for its citizens, and the most radical believed the people (or the government on behalf of the people) ought to control the means of production.  In this form socialism was called communism, because everything was to be held communally.

*The most famous communist thinker was Karl Marx of Germany, who was assisted by Friedrich Engels (a factory owner).  He laid out his philosophy most fully in Das Kapital (published in 1867), but his first famous work was The Communist Manifesto (published in 1848. 

*The Communist Manifesto was meant to be a handbook for communist revolution, because Marx believed that to create a perfect communist state in which the workers owned the means of production, a bloody revolution would be required to overthrow the old order.  Because sharing is hard, Marx then said that the revolution would need to create a temporary, but harsh, dictatorship to redistribute property and make sure that everyone enjoyed the benefits of the liberty, equality, and brotherhood that followed.  Furthermore, new communist states should work together to spread communism around the world, as it was an internationalist idea based on the brotherhood of man that superseded nationalism.  That aspect of it failed, as most new communists remained more loyal to their nation than to the International Communist Movement.  Furthermore, the workers’ paradises promised by the Communist Movement never materialised, as the dictatorial governments meant to usher in that utopian age never gave up their powers as they were supposed to, always holding on to it under the excuse that reactionary governments around them endangered them or that their own people still were not ready yet.

*Communism was opposed by every major government and most wealthy people (and even most middle class and some working class people, whom Marxists said suffered from ‘false consciousness’).  Furthermore, Marxist Communism was decidedly atheistic, describing religion as the opiate of the masses.  However, many working men around the world supported the movement, petitioning their governments, forming communist parties (where possible), holding conventions, rioting, and marching under the Red Flag of Communism.

*Not everything was so bleak.  The Industrial Revolution and the spirit of discovery and invention that went with it did produce many new scientific breakthroughs and create new medicines, new advances in sanitation, and new comforts and conveniences.

*Small pox killed millions of people throughout history, but in the 1700s variolation (or inoculation) with a small dose of smallpox (which only had a .5-2% mortality rate, compared with 20-30% for full-blown smallpox) became moderately common in Europe and America.  In 1796, Edward Jenner of England began vaccination with cowpox instead, which had a much higher survival rate (and could not pass on smallpox to others in the process).  Later an even safer method (Vaccina virus) was found.  Many countries made smallpox vaccination mandatory, and in 1980 the World Health Organisation declared smallpox to be eradicated, although samples are kept at the CDC in Atlanta and the VECTOR institute in Russia (where it is guarded by a regiment of troops).

*In the mid-1800s, Ignaz Semmelweis of Budapest, Austria-Hungary, began advocating cleanliness and sterility in hospital wards, which led to a decrease in hospital deaths, especially among new mothers.  His ideas took a long time to spread, however, because germ theory was poorly understood and many doctors were unwilling to believe that something as simple as regular hand-washing could lead to such a drastic reduction in the death rate.

*In the late 1800s, Louis Pasteur of France studied germ theory and developed (or at least publicised) many more vaccines, including some against rabies, cholera, and anthrax.  He is also famous for developing pasteurisation, a process of heating liquids to destroy harmful bacteria in them.

*Pasteur’s work influenced Joseph Lister to attempt to find ways to clean wounds.  He experimented with different chemicals and found that carbolic acid (well-diluted with water) could clean wounds of infection (antisepsis) and keep instruments sterile (asepsis) so that wounds did not become infected in the first place.  His ideas were published in the late 1860s (just too late to save thousands of lives in the American Civil War), and went on to revolutionise health care.  A brand of mouthwash was named in his honour.

*The Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions not only changed how people earned a living, they changed world demographics.

*There are currently about 6.8 billion people in the world.  For most of human history, there were fewer than one billion people on Earth, but the world population has exploded in the past two hundred years.  The world reached 1 billion in 1802, 2 billion in 1927, 3 billion in 1961, 4 billion in 1974, 5 billion in 1987, 6 billion in 1999, and it is thought that by 2050, there may be 9 or 10 billion people on the Earth.

*This rapid growth is due largely to an incredible decrease in death rates.  A region’s death rate is the number of people per thousand who die every year (on average).  The birth rate is the number per thousand who are born every year.  If the birth rate exceeds the death rate by a significant margin, the rate of natural increase will grow.

*There has been a trend in population growth in most countries as they have become industrialised and developed.  Historically, most places had high birth rates and high death rates, and thus fairly steady population levels.  Eventually, improvements in medicine and living conditions (germs were finally understood in the 1870s) reduce the death rate, but the birth rate does not initially decrease, which leads to an increase in the population—sometimes an explosion.  Eventually, the birth rate decreases to match the new death rate, and the population becomes steady again.    This process happened in the United States and most of Europe in the 19th and 20th Centuries, and is happening in the rest of the world now.