How The Revolution Impacted The Lives Of The People?

The individuals with talent played a major role in bringing the revolutionary changes. The rich individuals invested money in the industrial sector in the hope of profit.  Everything has its pros and cons, similarly, in most cases, the individuals did earn the profit in the form of goods, incomes, services, knowledge and productive efficiency. At the same time, there was a massive negative human cost.

This was evident in broken families, new addresses, degraded cities and appalling working conditions in factories. The number of cities in England with a population of over 50,000 grew from two in 1750 to 29 in 1850.

For the betterment of the rapidly growing urban sectors, the provision of adequate housing, sanitation or clean water was there. The difference of the residential settlements was seen, the newcomers were forced to live in overcrowded slums in the congested central areas of towns near factories, while the rich inhabitants escaped, by shifting to homes in the suburbs where the air was cleaner and the water safe to drink.

The Workers 

Amid the dangerous working conditions of the workers a survey was conducted in 1842, that reported that the average life span of the workers was lower than that of any social group in cities. The figures that came out were hilarious as it was 15 years in Birmingham, 17 in Manchester and 21 in Darby.

The death rate count of the young was more, as half of the children failed to survive beyond the age of five.

There was more increase in the population through the immigrants coming into the city than by the number of children born to families who already lived there. The Unhygienic conditions of the city were leading to the epidemics of disease that sprang from the pollution of water. like; Cholera & Typhoid or air Tuberculosis. More than 31,000 people died from an outbreak of cholera in 1832.

The municipal authorities were negligent in attending to these dangerous conditions of life and the medical knowledge to understand and cure these diseases was unknown.

What was the role of women and children in the industrial sector?

Prior to the "Industrial Revolution," women and children had poor living conditions. Children and women's working lives changed dramatically during the Industrial Revolution. Rural poor children had always worked at home or on the farm, at jobs that changed throughout the day or between seasons, under the supervision of their parents or relatives.

Women were actively involved in farm work in villages; they reared livestock, gathered firewood, and spun yarn at home on spinning wheels. Factory work, on the other hand, was a completely different experience, with long, uninterrupted hours of the same type of work, strict discipline, and harsh forms of punishment. Women's and children's earnings were required to supplement men's meagre wages.

As the use of machinery increased and fewer workers were required, employers preferred to hire women and children who would be less upset about their poor working conditions and would work for lower wages than men. They worked in the cotton textile industry in Lancashire and Yorkshire in large numbers.

Women were also the primary workers in the silk, lace, and knitting industries, as well as in Birmingham's metal industries (along with children).

With their small build and nimble fingers, machinery like the cotton spinning jenny was designed for child workers. Because they were small enough to move between tightly packed machinery, children were frequently employed in textile factories. Younger children worked as ‘trappers,' opening and closing doors as coal waggons passed through mines, or as ‘coal bearers,' carrying heavy loads of coal on their backs.

Factory managers saw child labour as crucial preparation for future factory work. According to evidence from British factory records, half of the factory workers began working when they were under the age of ten, and 28% when they were under the age of fourteen. Women may have gained financial independence and self-esteem as a result of their jobs, but this was more than offset by the humiliating working conditions they endured, the children they lost at birth or in infancy, and the squalid urban slums that industrial work forced them to live in.

Protest Movements

The early decades of industrialisation coincided with the spread of new political ideas pioneered by the French Revolution (1789-94). The movements for ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’ showed the possibilities of collective mass action, both in creating democratic institutions like the French parliamentary assemblies of the 1790s and in checking the worst hardships of war by controlling the prices of necessities like bread.

In England, political protest against the harsh working conditions in factories kept increasing, and the working population agitated to be given the right to vote.

The government reacted by repression and by new laws that denied people the right to protest.

• England had been at war with France for a long time – from 1792 to 1815.

• Trade between England and Europe was disrupted, factories were forced to shut down, unemployment grew and the price of essential items of food, like bread and meat, soared to heights beyond the level of average wages.

Parliament in 1795 passed two Combination Acts which made it illegal to ‘incite the people by speech or writing to hatred or contempt of the King, Constitution or Government’; and banned unauthorised public meetings of over 50 persons.

The term ' Old Corruption' was used to the privileges linked to the monarchy and parliament. Members of Parliament – landowners, manufacturers and professionals – were opposed to giving the working population the right to vote.

Corn Laws

The Corn-laws prevented cheaper food until prices had grown to a certain level in Britain.  As workers flooded towns and factories, they expressed their anger and frustration in numerous forms of protest. There were bread or food riots throughout the country from the 1790s onwards.

• The bread was the staple item in the diet of the poor and its price governed their standard of living.

• Stocks of bread were seized and sold at a price that was affordable and morally correct rather than at the high prices charged by profit-hungry traders. These riots continued until the 1840s.

Another cause of hardship was the process known as ‘enclosure’ – by which, from the 1770s, hundreds of small farms had been merged into the larger ones of powerful landlords.

The introduction of machines in the cotton industry threw thousands of handloom weavers out of work and into poverty since their labour was too slow to compete with machines. The weavers began to demand a legal minimum wage during the 1790s, which was refused by Parliament. They went on strike, they were dispersed by force.

In Lancashire, cotton weavers destroyed the power looms which they believed had destroyed their livelihood.
There was also resistance to the introduction of machines in the woollen knitting industry in Nottingham; protests also took place in Leicestershire and Derbyshire.

In Yorkshire, shearing-frames were destroyed by croppers, who had traditionally sheared sheep by hand. In the riots of 1830, farm labourers found their jobs threatened by the new threshing machines that separated the grain from the husk. 

The rioters smashed these machines. Nine of them were hanged and 450 were sent to Australia as convicts.

What was Luddism?

It was another type of protest led by the charismatic leader General Ned Ludd. The objective of the protest was to feed the demands of a minimum wage, rational labour laws for women and children, to provide job security to those who had lost their jobs because of industrialization.
and the right to form trade unions so that they could legally present these demands.

The Peterloo Massacre

During the early years of industrialisation, the working population possessed neither the vote nor legal methods to express their anger at the drastic manner in which their lives had been overturned. In August 1819, 80,000 people gathered peacefully at St Peter’s Fields in Manchester to claim democratic rights – of political organisation, of public meetings, and the freedom of the press.

They were suppressed brutally in what became known as the Peterloo Massacre and the rights they demanded were denied by the Six Acts, passed by Parliament the same year.

These extended the restrictions on political activity introduced in the two Combination Acts of 1795. But there were some gains. After Peterloo, the need to make the House of Commons more representative was recognised by liberal political groups, and the Combination Acts were repealed in 1824-25.

Reforms Through Laws

How attentive was the government to the conditions of work of women and children?

Laws were passed in 1819 prohibiting the employment of children under the age of nine in factories and limiting the hours of work of those between the ages of nine and sixteen to 12 hours a day. This law lacked the powers needed for its enforcement.

It was not until 1833, after an intense protest by workers throughout the north of England, that an Act was passed that permitted children under nine to be employed only in silk factories, limited the hours of work for older children and provided several factory inspectors to ensure that the Act was enforced.

Finally, in 1847, after more than 30 years of agitation, the Ten Hours’ Bill was passed. This limited the hours of work for women and young people and secured a 10-hour day for male workers. These Acts applied to the textile industries but not to the mining industry.

The Mines Commission of 1842, set up by the government, revealed that working conditions in mines had actually become worse since the Act of 1833 because more children had been put to work in coal mines.

The Mines and Collieries Act of 1842 banned children under ten and women from working underground. Fielder’s Factory Act laid down in 1847 that children under eighteen and women should not work more than 10 hours a day. These laws were to be enforced by factory inspectors, but this was difficult to do. 

The inspectors were poorly paid and easily bribed by factory managers, while parents lied about the real ages of their children so that they could work and contribute to family incomes.

The Debate on the ‘Industrial Revolution’

Historians used the term industrialisation to describe changes in Britain from the 1780s to the 1820s. Industrialisation was too gradual to be called a revolution. It elevated existing processes. Thus, workers were concentrated in factories and money was used more widely.

England had changed regionally, notably around the cities of London, Manchester, Birmingham, and Newcastle, rather than nationally.

The impressive growth of cotton textiles was based on new machinery, non-British raw materials, exports (especially to India), non-metallic machinery, and few links to other industries. Metal and steam power were uncommon until the late nineteenth century.

As trade with North America resumed after the War of American Independence, British imports and exports grew rapidly. This growth was noted as rapid only because it began at a low point. Observations of economic change before and after 1815-20 suggest that sustained industrialisation occurred after these dates.

The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars had disrupted the decades after 1793.

Industrialisation is associated with increased capital formation, or investment in new infrastructure and machinery, as well as increased productivity.

Both productive investment and productivity grew steadily after 1820. Until the 1840s, cotton, iron, and engineering industries produced less than half of industrial output. Technical progress was visible in other branches as well, such as agricultural processing and pottery. Historians have pointed to the fact that from the 1760s to 1815.

Britain tried to industrialise while also fighting wars in Europe, North America, and India, and it may have failed at one. From 1760, Britain was at war for 36 years. Borrowed funds were used to fight wars rather than invest. Up to 35% of the war's costs were financed by income taxes. The army took over factories and farms.

Food prices soared, leaving the poor with little money for other purchases. Napoleon's blockade policies and the British reaction to them closed the European continent to British traders.

The word ‘industrial' with ‘revolution' is too narrow. The transformation impacted society as well as the economy, giving rise to two classes: the bourgeoisie and the new class of proletarian workers in towns and rural areas.

In 1851, thousands of people flocked to London's Crystal Palace to see the British industrial achievements. At the time, half of the population lived in towns, but handicraft units outnumber factories. From the 1850s, a large proportion of the population lived in cities, mostly industrial workers – the working class.

Rural Britain's workforce had shrunk to 20%. This was a much faster rate of industrialisation than other European countries.