How coal, steam and machines transformed Britain from the 1700s, and how factories and railways spread to Belgium, Germany, the United States, Japan and Russia, changing how most of humanity lived and worked.
Stop 01 · 1709–1712
Why Britain?
In the 1700s Britain had plenty of coal and iron, a large and growing market with no internal tolls, colonies and sea trade, and a stable banking system anchored by the Bank of England. The economic historian Robert Allen has argued that high wages and cheap energy made labour-saving machines worth building, though later studies doubt that wages were especially high. In 1709 Abraham Darby, a Quaker ironmaster, began smelting iron with coke, made from coal, at Coalbrookdale in Shropshire. In 1712 Thomas Newcomen's steam engine began pumping water out of mines in the Black Country, near Dudley. In 1779 Darby's grandson cast the world's first major iron bridge over the Severn close by.
Powerloom weaving in 1835Illustrator T. Allom, Engraver J. Tingle · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
In the 1700s Britain had plenty of coal and iron, a large and growing market with no internal tolls, colonies and sea trade, and a stable banking system anchored by the Bank of England. The economic historian Robert Allen has argued that high wages and cheap energy made labour-saving machines worth building, though later studies doubt that wages were especially high. In 1709 Abraham Darby, a Quaker ironmaster, began smelting iron with coke, made from coal, at Coalbrookdale in Shropshire. In 1712 Thomas Newcomen's steam engine began pumping water out of mines in the Black Country, near Dudley. In 1779 Darby's grandson cast the world's first major iron bridge over the Severn close by.
Cotton led the way. New machines, James Hargreaves' spinning jenny of 1764, Richard Arkwright's water frame and Samuel Crompton's mule of 1779, spun thread far faster than any person. Arkwright's water-powered mill at Cromford in Derbyshire, from 1771, is often described as the first successful cotton-spinning factory; it ran day and night in two twelve-hour shifts, and most of its workers were women and children, some as young as seven. James Watt's improved steam engine, built in Birmingham with Matthew Boulton from 1776, used a fifth to a quarter of the coal of Newcomen's and could power factories anywhere, not just beside rivers. By 1800 the firm had built 496 engines. Manchester became 'Cottonopolis'.
Not everyone welcomed the machines. From November 1811 textile workers calling themselves Luddites, after a mythical 'Ned Ludd', smashed knitting frames around Nottingham, then cropping machines in the West Riding of Yorkshire in early 1812, and reached Lancashire by 1813. Parliament made frame-breaking a capital crime, mill owners shot at attackers, and after a mass trial at York in January 1813 men were hanged or transported. In 1819 yeomanry cavalry charged a crowd of about 60,000 demanding parliamentary reform at St Peter's Field in Manchester, killing an estimated 18: the Peterloo Massacre. Children were the mills' cheapest labour, and the Factory Act of 1833 banned them under nine and sent in inspectors.
BattlesMiddleton: Luddites clash with troops, 1812 · Peterloo, Manchester, 16 August 1819
On 27 September 1825 the Stockton and Darlington Railway opened, the first public railway to use steam locomotives, carrying coal from the collieries near Shildon; on the first day between 450 and 600 people crowded on to a train planned for 300. In October 1829 the Rainhill trials picked George and Robert Stephenson's Rocket for the new Liverpool and Manchester Railway. When it opened on 15 September 1830, as the first intercity line, Rocket ran down the politician William Huskisson, the first widely reported railway casualty. Within twenty years Britain had thousands of miles of track: schemes approved in 1844–1846 alone, at the height of the 'Railway Mania', added some 6,220 miles.
In 1851 Britain put its new industry on show. The Great Exhibition, championed by Queen Victoria's husband Prince Albert, filled Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace in Hyde Park, a giant glasshouse about 563 metres long, framed in cast iron and glazed almost entirely with glass from Birmingham and Smethwick. Visitors could follow cotton from raw fibre to finished cloth, see Samuel Colt's revolvers and queue for the Koh-i-Noor diamond, surrendered in 1849 by the 11-year-old Sikh maharaja Duleep Singh when the East India Company annexed the Punjab. About six million people came, a third of the population of England and Wales, and the £186,000 profit paid for the Victoria and Albert, Science and Natural History museums.
Britain tried to keep its machines and skilled workers at home, but both leaked out. Belgium, rich in coal, was the second country to industrialise, around Liège and Charleroi; the Englishman John Cockerill, whose father had built textile machines at Verviers, founded works at Seraing in 1817 that by 1825 handled every stage from raw materials to engineering. France industrialised more slowly and steadily, and the German states followed. Germany first imported railway engineering and hardware from Britain, but by 1850 it could build its own railways. The Ruhr, with almost 300 coal mines by 1850 and over three million people by 1870, became Europe's largest industrial region, drawing Polish-speaking migrants from the east. By 1900 Germany rivalled Britain.
In 1789 Samuel Slater, who had started work at ten in a Derbyshire mill, defied laws against skilled workers emigrating and sailed for New York. He rebuilt Arkwright's spinning machinery from memory for the merchant Moses Brown, and their mill at Pawtucket, Rhode Island, opened in 1793; in Britain he was called 'Slater the Traitor'. Francis Cabot Lowell memorised the design of British textile machines on a tour in 1810, and his partners built the factory town of Lowell. By the late 1800s the US was the world's largest industrial economy. In Japan, after the Meiji Restoration of 1868, the government hired more than 3,000 Westerners; the Tomioka silk mill, designed under the French engineer Paul Brunat, opened in 1872.
Russia came late. The emancipation of the serfs in 1861 freed millions of peasants who could become wage labour, and in 1869 the Welsh engineer John Hughes began building ironworks and coal mines north of the Sea of Azov, the seed of today's Donetsk. The great push came under Sergei Witte, finance minister from 1892 to 1903, who raised tariffs, put the rouble on the gold standard in 1896 and drew in foreign capital. In 1891 the future Nicholas II inaugurated the Trans-Siberian Railway at Vladivostok; finished in 1916, it runs 9,289 kilometres from Moscow, the longest railway line in the world. By 1900 manufacturing was growing faster than ever before.
Industrialisation brought cities, factories, child labour, smoke and slums, and in time higher living standards than any society had known, though historians still argue over how soon ordinary workers gained. In 1842–1844 the young German Friedrich Engels, son of a textile manufacturer, studied Manchester and Salford and wrote that city disease killed far more people than in the countryside; the book deeply impressed Karl Marx. Industry created a working class, trade unions and new political ideas, from liberalism to socialism. It also ruined hand-weaving in India, China and the Middle East, fed the spread of cotton slavery in the American South, and gave industrial nations the steamships, railways and weapons to build empires across Africa and Asia.