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Essay on American Workers From The Colonial Period To The Civil War
The Industrial Revolution began with technological innovation New technology was only one part of the equation that transformed the Western world from an agrarian society into an industrial powerhouse. Among the many other factors which prompted the development of industrial power in England from approximately 1760 to 1860 were: rise of smaller industrial cities, the growth of the middle class, the adoption of the landlord-tenant system in agriculture, the application of new agricultural techniques (crop rotation), and consumer demand, which was prompted by the importing of exotic goods (cotton!) from India, Asia and Japan. While most European countries had pieces of the Industrial Revolution in place, it was the English who had the genius to weave those pieces into a whole manufacturing cloth, building a commercial empire in the process.
The first response of working-class families to early nineteenth-century industrialization and the migration which it often entailed was to combine resources. Households grew in size and complexity as men, women, and children began to work in factories. Middle-class contemporaries feared the changes they perceived: married women's employment outside the household; male authority undercut; stable marriage threatened; potential social and political upheaval. (More, 2000)The profits of slavery had made possible the industrial revolution in America. The profits of slavery were more likely to be invested in the landed estates and architectural follies of West Indian "nabobs"--absentee proprietors resident in Britain--than industrial plant. It was endogenous factors--technological innovation or domestic demand--that spurred on industrialization and made it commercially viable.
The depression of the 1930s destroyed for decades the old liberal doctrine that commerce was the root of progress. The post-1945 emphasis on economic planning and demand-management by the state reinforced the assumption that domestic conditions were the key to industrial "take-off." The glamour of technological creativity in the space age made it easier to think that a step-change in economic organization.......
