Industrial Revolution in America

The “industrial revolution” is a term coined in the nineteenth century to describe the rapid rise of the modern factory system and the related economic, social, and cultural effects. It is a phrase that to some extent began to fall out of favor in the latter part of the twentieth century as the factory no longer seemed quite so central to western society and as historical research began to question whether the rise of the factory system was quite as revolutionary and rapid as it once seemed. Nevertheless, it remains a useful concept for understanding the great changes of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The concept is probably most applicable to lateeighteenth-century England, where the rapidity of the onset of industrialization, particularly in the textile and metal industries, was very much remarked upon by contemporaries. The crux of this revolution was in the transformation from handicraft work performed at home or in an artisan’s shop to factory work, performed by wage laborers and characterized by a highly developed division of labor and reliance upon automated machinery, such as the spinning jenny of James Hargreaves (d. 1778), the water frame (an automated spinning machine) of Richard Arkwright (1732–1792), and the power loom of Edmund Cartwright (1743–1823). Initially, this machinery was most frequently powered by hand or water, but as the century progressed, the steam engine of James Watt (1736–1819) became increasingly important. While undoubtedly innovative, these developments built upon a long history of textile manufacture in England reaching back at least to the Norman Conquest of the eleventh century.