Largely due to its political independence, Japan was able to industrialize as early as some European countries. Subsaharan Africa was under the domination of the French and British, who orientated African economies towards the cultivation of natural resources for British and French industrial capital, rather than creating their own. Latin America, under the Spanish, was also barred from participating in the industrial revolution, as was Central Asia under Russian influence.

Smith believed that the economy should be driven by the market place with no outside interference. The idea was that people should push the economy to fill their needs while also determining what should not be in the economy. They would do this by buying the supplies they chose from the retailers they chose.

While corporations had existed in the past and had sold stock before, it had never been a widespread tool. It had also not been something available to the lower classes of society. Now, people had the chance to invest in stock with the hopes they could sell it later at a profit.

The factory system is where one central location houses the machinery of an industry and the workers come to the machinery to work it. This is the reason these places were called factories.

The Industrial Revolution originated in Great Britain in the late eighteenth century. The Industrial Revolution moved manufacturing from the home and into factories, where it became more efficient through the use of mass production and interchangeable parts. The revolution originated with textiles and food processing but soon moved to iron, steel, machine building, transportation, and communication. 

The so-called Congo Free State, under the initial personal control of King Leopold II of Belgium and later under the control of the Belgian government, was extremely profitable due to the lucrative rubber plantations and the use of forced native labor.

The Industrial Revolution contributed to the decline of slavery because it dramatically increased the profitability of businesses whilst allowing workers to be paid a tiny wage. Business owners realized that it was actually cheaper and less risky to pay workers than it was to buy and own slaves.

In the early years of the Industrial Revolution working conditions for the average individual were far worse than they had been before the revolution. Prior to the Industrial Revolution the average worker (in England) might have worked slightly less than eight hours a day tilling the fields and caring for crops and animals. In the early years of the Industrial Revolution workers were suddenly working fourteen or sixteen hour days, sometimes six or seven days a week, in horribly dangerous conditions. The relative autonomy of individuals also declined in the early years of the Industrial Revolution.

The cotton gin was invented by American inventor Eli Whitney in 1793. The machine allowed cotton to be much more efficiently separated from seeds and dramatically increased the productive capabilities of America’s cotton plantations in the south. It did, however, lead to a massive increase in the demand for slaves in the south of the United States. This is because cotton became immensely profitable in the early nineteenth century.

Labor unions emerged relatively quickly after the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. In many ways they were a continuation of guilds and peasant organizations from the pre-industrial era. However, the change they campaigned for came about very slowly. In the early years the efforts of labor unions were blocked by the government, which was almost exclusively controlled by people who benefited financially from holding unions back. The rate of change accelerated over the course of the nineteenth century and eventually labor unions were able to affect most of the changes they desired - such as child labor laws, limit on working hours, and the two-day weekend.