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Industrial Revolution,
term first used in the early 19th century to
describe major changes in modes of production in
Britain since the mid-18th century and their
social consequences. However, it was quickly
recognized outside as well as inside Britain
that the consequences of the introduction of
machinery, driven by steam power, would be felt
worldwide.
Agriculture ,
backed by commerce, would no longer be the main
source of wealth, and material wealth would
increase through greater productivity. More than
technology or resources were involved:
enterprise was required, as was capital. The
formation of capital depended on rates of profit
and interest. How incomes would be distributed
in future would raise difficult questions, for
the relationships between employers, who owned
the machines, and the workers, men and women
(they were sometimes called “hands”), who
operated them, would be different from the
relationships between landowners and the
agricultural workers dependent upon them. Karl
Marx, who claimed that new industrial workers,
separated from the products that they made, were
alienated, less than full human beings,
nonetheless believed in the unparalleled power
of industrial advance and treated the invention
of the steam engine as the beginning of a new
era in human history.
By the end of the 19th
century, when the term “industrial revolution”
had passed into general circulation, other
countries besides Britain, including Germany,
the United States, and post-Meiji Restoration
Japan, were already undergoing what were also
called industrial revolutions. Enterprise, as
had been forecast, continued to generate vast
new wealth. There were signs by then, however,
that in some industries Britain’s lead in
production and marketing had already been lost.
In many industrializing countries there was
evidence also of organized working-class
pressure to influence conditions of work exerted
through cooperative societies, trade unions, and
political parties.
Those socialists (a new 19th-century word) who
followed Karl Marx believed that it was
inevitable in the new economic conditions that
the “capitalist system”, which was associated
with the exploitation for profit of new
technologies, would give way in time, following
crises, to a socialist system. There were few
British industrial workers, however, who
subscribed to this view, although Marx had based
his economic analysis on the British industrial
revolution.
British experience did not serve as a model in
other countries. The state usually played a
bigger role elsewhere than it had done in
Britain, and so, too, did science. In the United
States, however, while tariff protection
supported early industry, its expansion depended
on the dynamics of capitalism. International
trade, crucial to Britain as an island, had
expanded rapidly before the Industrial
Revolution, setting the revolution within a
world frame, and during the 19th century Britain
was the most active proponent of international
free trade. In the 18th century imports of
cotton from across the oceans were the basis of
the most rapidly developing of the new British
machine industries, mechanized cotton spinning,
in the process disturbing and destroying the
older Indian handicraft cotton industry. British
mill owners depended for their profits on the
opening up of African markets for cheap cotton
goods through triangular trade between Britain,
Africa, and America, in which the movement of
slaves was part of the system. Britain
subsequently took the lead in the movement to
abolish the slave trade, but by then its
industrial lead seemed secure. As other
countries industrialized—some, particularly the
United States, with far greater resources at the
disposal of their manufacturers—competitive
trade rivalries directly or indirectly
influenced politics. So, too, did recurring
business cycles, with booms at their peaks and
depressions at their troughs.
Organization
New approaches to
industrial management and marketing, going
through different phases at the same time, were
as important as technological changes. In the
18th century, since there was no highly
organized local or national capital market that
employers could fall back on for funds, and no
limited liability company organization to spread
risk, they had to be prepared to plough back
their own profits for the acquisition of
machines. These were concentrated in factories,
later in what was described as “plant”. They had
also to be able to supervise and manage workers,
being prepared to “tame” what was now described
as a “labour force”. As management was separated
from ownership, it became more specialized. So
too did marketing. In the 18th century there
were owners whose marketing flair could be
described as genius. Josiah Wedgwood, for
example, who built up a flourishing pottery
business with worldwide connections, was a
master of publicity, as was the iron founder
John Wilkinson, who helped to make Britain
“iron-conscious”. His iron boat, which cynics
remarked would be sure to sink, was as well
known as his iron coffin. In the century that
followed, new generations of entrepreneurs
developed financial management and marketing
skills geared to their own changing societies
and cultures. It was not until the late 20th
century, however, in an age of increasing scale,
that the term “corporate culture” began to be
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