The Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution, beginning in late-eighteenth-century Britain, transformed how goods were produced and, with that, how people lived. It had two connected sides. On the technical side, new machines (such as the Spinning Jenny) and new sources of power (successive versions of the steam engine) made it possible to manufacture goods on a scale never seen before, using raw materials drawn from, and selling finished goods to, markets across the world. On the organisational side, industry required entirely new ways of organising labour and markets -- the factory system, wage labour, and eventually large industrial cities. These changes reshaped social life just as much as they reshaped production. Workers uprooted from the countryside crowded into cities to find factory work, often labouring long hours in hazardous, low-paid conditions; men, women and children worked side by side under these pressures. Towns and cities became the dominant form of settlement, but they housed people very unequally -- the wealthy and the working poor lived in the same urban space, the latter frequently in slums. Because the state increasingly had to manage the health, sanitation, crime and general welfare of these dense new urban populations, it began generating large amounts of statistical and administrative information about social life. This growing, empirically-grounded bod …