In the initial years of the Industrial Revolution in England, many members of the working class were resistant to the widespread changes being wrought by the introduction of machine-driven production. Many unskilled and skilled workers alike feared for their livelihood and believed that factory conditions were much worse than the life they had previously enjoyed. The Luddites were nineteenth-century English textile workers who resisted the introduction of the factory system. Famously, they even physically attacked and destroyed machinery in many factories. The British government responded by enacting harsh laws against anybody found guilty of destroying industrial machinery and by engaging in show trials, executions, and penal deportations of those found guilty.

The movement towards industrialized and urban societies in nineteenth-century Europe led to a widespread increase in class conflict. The poor were forced by economic necessity to work long, arduous, and dangerous shifts to manufacture products that seemed only to make their living situations worse. This led, amongst other things, to the rise of Liberalism and Socialism in Europe.

The original Combination Acts were passed in Great Britain in 1799 and 1800 to prohibit workers from forming unions and to prevent workers from striking at a time when the British government was engaged in war. The Acts were repealed in 1824, but a series of debilitating strikes followed, and the British government reinstated the policy the following year. The primary goal of the acts was to prohibit the formation of unions and to limit the ability of workers to campaign collectively for better wages and treatment through coordinated strikes.

The Industrial Revolution began in Great Britain, but by 1807, a British entrepreneur named William Cockerill had created a textile-machine-manufacturing business in Belgium that helped spread the Industrial Revolution first around Belgium, then to France, and finally around the European continent. Cockerill was particularly important because at the time, Britain was engaged in a war with Napoleonic France and most of Europe was cut off from British industrial production and innovation.

The farming industry had already been revolutionized by the Agricultural Revolution in the eighteenth century, so the first industry to be revolutionized by the Industrial Revolution was the textile industry. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, textiles were extremely laborious and inefficient (by our standards) to produce and were primarily manufactured by family units called “cottage industries”; however, with the introduction of machinery, the production of textiles skyrocketed.

The Industrial Revolution, as you likely know, began in Great Britain at the dawn of the nineteenth century; however, it was relatively slow to take hold in Germany (apart from Prussia) due to the disunified nature of the German-speaking world until Prussian-led German Unification in 1871. Following unification, the German government embarked on a massive project of economic and industrial overhaul that led to the German Industrial Revolution, particularly in the production of steel, which surpassed the British production of steel by the turn of the twentieth century. Germany and the United States would be the dominant industrial powers of the early twentieth century.

All of these reasons contributed to the emergence of the Industrial Revolution first in Great Britain. At the dawn of the nineteenth century, the British Empire extended around the globe, and British society had grown rich from its banking and trading policies. Furthermore, the British government enacted favorable policies that encouraged innovation in Britain by legally protecting inventions and patents. Additionally, Britain had plentiful reserves of coal and iron that were used to fuel the Industrial Revolution. Finally, the Agricultural Revolution of the eighteenth century had greatly reduced the number of people who needed to work the fields to support the population. This led to a rise in population and a surge in the number of workers who moved to the cities in search of employment.

For much of the nineteenth century, Manchester and Liverpool were both major centers of the Industrial Revolution; however, Manchester was thirty miles inland and companies in Liverpool controlled the access to raw resources that arrived via the port. In an attempt to overcome what they viewed as excessive charges, the companies of Manchester sought to build the Manchester Ship Canal to allow goods to be transported directly to Manchester, bypassing the city of Liverpool. The canal was completed in 1894 and led almost immediately to the rise of Manchester and the decline of Liverpool as industrial and economic powerhouses.

Life for factory workers during the Industrial Revolution was grueling and extremely harsh. Many people worked six days a week, for fourteen hours a day, in cramped and unhealthy conditions for little pay. Work was dangerous, and if you were injured and unable to continue working you were given no compensation. From about 1830 onwards, the nineteenth century in Britain was defined by constant social and political reform. Working conditions were slowly improved, and political suffrage rights were expanded to more and more men.

The first great wave of industrialization in the eighteenth century focused on the production of textiles. Technological improvements such as the flying shuttle and spinning jenny greatly improved productivity in textiles. These technological improvements also led to the replacement of the artisanal putting-out system with the centralized factory system of production. This process of factories coming to replaced artisans would come to be a defining characteristic of industrialization.