Read PDF The Industrial Revolution

Free download. Book file PDF easily for everyone and every device. You can download and read online The Industrial Revolution file PDF Book only if you are registered here. And also you can download or read online all Book PDF file that related with The Industrial Revolution book. Happy reading The Industrial Revolution Bookeveryone. Download file Free Book PDF The Industrial Revolution at Complete PDF Library. This Book have some digital formats such us :paperbook, ebook, kindle, epub, fb2 and another formats. Here is The CompletePDF Book Library. It's free to register here to get Book file PDF The Industrial Revolution Pocket Guide.
The Industrial Revolution, now also known as the First Industrial Revolution, was the transition to new manufacturing processes in Europe and the United States, in the period from about to sometime between and
Table of contents

In the 16th century, living standards in Europe and the Americas were about the same. Indeed, Spanish observers of the time marveled at the variety and quality of goods that were offered for sale in the markets of Mexico. Smith, Ricardo and their contemporaries argued about differences in living standards, and perhaps their discussions can be taken to refer to income differences as large as a factor of two. But nothing remotely like the income differences of our current world, differences on the order of a factor of 25, existed in or at any earlier time. Such inequality is a product of the industrial revolution.

Traditional society was characterized by stable per capita income. Our own world is one of accelerating income growth. The course of the industrial revolution, our term for the transition from stable to accelerating growth, is illustrated in Figure 2, which plots total world population and production from the year up to the present. I use a logarithmic scale rather than natural units, so that a constant rate of growth would imply a straight line. One can see from the figure that the growth rates of both population and production are increasing over time. The vertical scale is millions of persons for population and billions of U.

The difference between the two curves is about constant up until , reflecting the assumption that production per person was roughly constant prior to that date.

THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION IN EUROPE

Then in the 19th century, growth in both series accelerates dramatically, and production growth accelerates more. The growth and indeed the acceleration of both population and production continue to the present. Of course, the industrial revolution did not affect all parts of the world uniformly, nor is it doing so today. Figure 3, based on per capita income data estimated as I have discussed, is one way of illustrating the origins and the diffusion of the industrial revolution.

To construct the figure, the countries or regions of the world were organized into five groups, ordered by their current per capita income levels. Group I—basically, the English-speaking countries—are those in which per capita incomes first exhibited sustained growth. Group II is Japan, isolated only because I want to highlight its remarkable economic history. Group V contains the rest of Asia and Africa. The numbers at the right of Figure 3 indicate the populations, in millions of people, for the five groups of countries.

Reading Figure 3 from left to right, we can see the emergence over the last two centuries of the inequality displayed in Figure 1. By there was something like a factor of two difference between the English-speaking countries and the poor countries of Africa and Asia. By , a difference of perhaps a factor of six had emerged. At that time, the rest of Europe was still far behind England and America, and Japanese incomes were scarcely distinguishable from incomes in the rest of Asia.

In the first half of the 20th century, the inequality present in was simply magnified.

The English-speaking countries gained relative to northern Europe, which in turn gained on the rest of Europe and Asia. The entire colonial era was a period of stagnation in the living standards of masses of people. European imperialism brought advances in technology to much of the colonized world, and these advances led to increases in production that could, as in British India, be impressive.

But the outcome of colonial economic growth was larger populations, not higher living standards.

Industrial Revolution

In the period since , the pattern of world growth has begun to change character, as well as to accelerate dramatically. What was at first thought to be the postwar recovery of continental Europe and of Japan turned out to be the European and Japanese miracles, taking these countries far beyond their prewar living standards to levels comparable to the United States. There are some miracles in my Group IV, too— Italy and Spain—that are not seen on the figure because they are averaged in with Latin America and the communist world.

The second major change in the postwar world is the beginning of per capita income growth in Africa and Asia, entirely a post-colonial phenomenon. The industrial revolution has begun to diffuse to the non-European world, and this, of course, is the main reason that postwar growth rates for the world as a whole have attained such unprecedented levels. If we use growth in per capita income as the defining characteristic of the industrial revolution, then it is clear from Figure 3 that the revolution did not begin before the late 18th century.

If we use growth in total product, reflecting improvements in technology, as the defining characteristic, then Figure 2 makes it clear that the beginnings of the revolution must have been centuries earlier or, that there must have been important, earlier revolutions. What occurred around that is new, that differentiates the modern age from all previous periods, is not technological change by itself but the fact that sometime after that date fertility increases ceased to translate improvements in technology into increases in population.

That is, the industrial revolution is invariably associated with the reduction in fertility known as the demographic transition. Figure 4 provides a rough description of the demographic transitions since that have occurred and are still occurring. The figure exhibits five plotted curves, one for each country group. Each curve connects 10 points, corresponding to the time periods beginning in and ending in , as indicated at the bottom of Figure 3. Note that the periods are not of equal length. Population growth rates in average about 0.

For each group, one can see a nearly vertical increase in population growth rates with little increase in GDP per capita, corresponding to the onset of industrialization. This, of course, is precisely the response to technological advance that Malthus and Ricardo told us to expect. Then, in groups I to IV a maximum is reached, and as incomes continue to rise, population growth rates decline. In group V—most of Asia and Africa—the curve has only leveled off, but does anyone doubt that these regions will follow the path that the rest of the world has already worn?

I have brought the story of the industrial revolution up to the present. Where are we going from here? For this, we need a theory of growth, a system of equations that makes economic sense and that fits the facts I have just reviewed. There is a tremendous amount of very promising research now occurring in economics, trying to construct such a system, and in a few years we will be able to run these equations into the future and see how it will look.

Now, though, I think it is accurate to say that we have not one but two theories of production: one consistent with the main features of the world economy prior to the industrial revolution and another roughly consistent with the behavior of the advanced economies today.

What we need is an understanding of the transition.


  • Promenades of an Impressionist;
  • Main navigation.
  • Technical and Vocational Education and Training in Viet Nam: An Assessment?
  • My Mothers Gentle Unbecoming The Absentings of Alzheimers Dan Wetmore: Life from the Sidelines;

One of these successful theories is the product of Smith, Ricardo, Malthus and the other classical economists. The world they undertook to explain was the world on the eve of the industrial revolution, and it could not have occurred to them that economic theory should seek to explain sustained, exponential growth in living standards. Their theory is consistent with the following stylized view of economic history up to around Labor and resources combine to produce goods—largely food, in poor societies—that sustain life and reproduction.

Over time, providence and human ingenuity make it possible for given amounts of labor and resources to produce more goods than they could before.

The Industrial Revolution in Europe - ERIH

The resulting increases in production per person stimulate fertility and increases in population, up to the point where the original standard of living is restored. Such dynamics, operating over the centuries, account for the gradually accelerating increase in the human population and the distribution of that population over the regions of the earth in a way that is consistent with the approximate constancy of living standards everywhere.

This classical theory is not inconsistent with the enormous improvements in knowledge relevant to productivity that occurred long before the 18th century, improvements that supported huge population increases and vast wealth for owners of land and other resources. Increases in knowledge over the centuries also stimulated a large-scale accumulation of productive capital: shipbuilding, road and harbor construction, draining of swamps, and breeding and raising of animal herds for food and power. Capital accumulation, too, played a role in supporting ever larger populations.

Yet under the Malthusian theory of fertility, neither new knowledge nor the capital accumulation it makes profitable is enough to induce the sustained growth in living standards of masses of people that modern economists take as the defining characteristic of the industrial revolution. The modern theory of sustained income growth, stemming from the work of Robert Solow in the s, was designed to fit the behavior of the economies that had passed through the demographic transition. In such a context, the accumulation of physical capital is not, in itself, sufficient to account for sustained income growth.

With a fixed rate of labor force growth, the law of diminishing returns puts a limit on the income increase that capital accumulation can generate. The modern theory, based on fixed fertility, and the classical theory, based on fertility that increases with increases in income, are obviously not mutually consistent. Nor can we simply say that the modern theory fits the modern world and the classical theory the ancient world, because we can see traditional societies exhibiting Malthusian behavior in the world today.

Increases since in total production in Africa, for example, have been almost entirely absorbed by increases in population, with negligible increases in income per capita. Understanding the progress of the industrial revolution as it continues today necessarily entails understanding why it is that Malthusian dynamics have ceased to hold in much of the contemporary world.

Country after country has gone through a demographic transition, involving increases in the rate of population growth followed by decreases, as income continues to rise. Some of the wealthiest countries—Japan and parts of Europe—are just about maintaining their populations at current levels. People in these wealthy economies are better able to afford large families than people in poor economies, yet they choose not to do so. If these two inconsistent theories are to be reconciled, with each other and with the facts of the demographic transition, a second factor needs to work to decrease fertility as income grows, operating alongside the Malthusian force that works to increase it.

The second industrial revolution – 1870

Gary Becker proposed long ago that this second factor be identified with the quality of children: As family income rises, spending on children increases, as assumed in Malthusian theory, but these increases can take the form of a greater number of children or of a larger allocation of parental time and other resources to each child. In any society with established property rights, a class of landowners will be subject to different population dynamics due to the effect their fertility has on inheritances and the quality of lives their children enjoy.

Such families can accumulate vast wealth and enjoy living standards far above subsistence. For the histories of what we call civilization, this deviation from a pure Malthusian subsistence model is everything. For the history of living standards of masses of people, however, it is but a minor qualification. Similarly, in any society of any complexity, some individuals can, by virtue of talent and education, formal or informal, acquire skills that yield high income, and as the Bachs and the Mozarts can testify, such exceptions can run in families.

For most societies, though, income increases due to what a modern economist calls human capital are exceptional and often derivative, economically, from landowner wealth. If there is no property to pass on, an additional child does not dilute the inheritance of siblings. All parents do this to some degree, but the incentives to do so obviously depend on the return to human capital offered by the society the parents live in. Where this return is low, adding the quality dimension to the fertility decision may be only a minor twist on Malthusian dynamics.

But these additional features do offer the possibility of non-Malthusian dynamics, and the possibility has promise because the process of industrialization seems to involve a dramatic increase in the returns to human capital. People are moving out of traditional agriculture, where the necessary adult skills can be acquired through on-the-job child labor.

New kinds of capital goods require workers with the training to operate and to improve upon them. In such a world a parent can do many things with time and resources that will give a child advantages in a changing economy, and the fewer children a parent has, the more such advantages can be given to each child.


  • The BBW?
  • Cover to Covers (Cover to Cover Series Book 1);
  • The Industrial Revolution | National Geographic Society.
  • THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION IN EUROPE.
  • Mad Mind Magic Hand.
  • Stunning Mosaics: Book D225?

Such external effects , as economists call them, are the subject matter of intellectual and artistic history and should be the main subject of industrial and commercial history as well. These pervasive external effects introduce a kind of feedback into human capital theory: Something that increases the return on human capital will stimulate greater accumulation, in turn stimulating higher returns, stimulating still greater accumulation and so on.

On this general view of economic growth, then, what began in England in the 18th century and continues to diffuse throughout the world today is something like the following. Technological advances occurred that increased the wages of those with the skills needed to make economic use of these advances. These wage effects stimulated others to accumulate skills and stimulated many families to decide against having a large number of unskilled children and in favor of having fewer children, with more time and resources invested in each.

The presence of a higher-skilled workforce increased still further the return to acquiring skills, keeping the process going. Someone has to dig potatoes, after all. It might, and I imagine that many incipient industrial revolutions died prematurely due to such diminishing returns. But international trade undoubtedly helped England attain critical mass by letting English workers specialize in skill-demanding production while potatoes were imported from somewhere else. Whatever the importance of human capital accumulation in the original industrial revolution, there is no doubt that rapid improvement in skills is characteristic of its diffusion in the modern world economy.

Nancy Stokey estimates that the major stimulus of the North American Free Trade Agreement to economic growth in Mexico will be not the inflow of physical capital though that is considerable , but the increased accumulation of human capital that will be stimulated by the higher rate of return the new physical capital will induce.