KS3 / GCSE History: The Industrial Revolution

Three hundred years ago, something new appeared above the surface of the planet, a thick oily spectre, hanging in the air, for longer than the cooking smoke from any town or city and larger than a forest fire or a volcano.

The Industrial Revolution was the biggest story to happen to mankind since we invented farming, and that dirty smear of smoke spread across north America, much of Europe, China, Japan but it first billowed into the air over a modestly sized little island, which called itself, rather immodestly, Great Britain.

The engine for all of this was – the engine.
Steam engines burned up the buried energy of millennia captured in coal and used it to create immediate power.

What a moment! Through all of history, one thing had never changed. There was a fixed limit on the amount of power that humans could use: their own muscles, a few animals, the odd windmill and waterwheel, but soon steam engines would be doing as much work in Britain as forty million people flat out.

Why did this happen in Britain? Was it because the British were uniquely clever? No.

Was it because the country seemed to be half built on coal? Not really.

It was because the British had developed a new political system which limited monarchy, gave everybody legal rights, allowed the free flow of ideas and ensured that British geniuses owned their ideas, so they could make a buck.

This new system provided the environment for new men to create new wealth, and these new men emerged in places far from London and the traditional forums of the rich and powerful.

Men like George Stephenson who in 1825 was busy connecting two towns in the north of England, Stockton and Darlington.

A man who’d been illiterate until he was eighteen, driving his own invention, an awkward looking mash-up of pipes and fire he called simply Locomotion.

Northern England had traditionally been rather on the side lines of major historical events, more likely to happen in London, but now it was home to the biggest news of the age. Locomotion had been built to carry coal but on its maiden voyage, people clambered into the coal carts.

There was even an experimental passenger carriage called 'The Experiment'.

Never before had so many people been carried so far so fast.

Now railways would start to knit together nations, first Britain, but soon the United States, Germany and the rest of Europe. Restless change, restless revolution.

Like most revolutions, the industrial revolution would have many casualties.

Men and women and children as young as eight or nine worked twelve hour days in vast factories. Many were maimed or even killed by the new machinery, and they were working by artificial light and the factory clock, not the rhythms of nature.

Protests were widespread and angry.

Every great new technology produces changes in society and politics, and these new engines didn’t just push pistons and locomotives. They pushed ahead trade unionism, town planning, political reform, new schools, democracy. Quite powerful things, steam engines.

The industrial revolution triggered the fastest social transformation in British history. People flooded from the countryside to work in urban factories. Within a century, Britain went from a country with just two cities with more than fifty thousand people, to a country with twenty-nine cities of this size. It’s very similar to what’s happening in China right now.

A world of peasant farmers becomes a world of factories, villages empty and tall angular buildings spring up.

By 1860, Britain was tied together by more than ten thousand miles of railways. Production of coal and steel and iron skyrocketed. The cities sprawled and new inventions from steamships and iron bridges to brilliantly lit streets tumbled out of these damp and smoky islands.

And it was really this energy, this restless search for raw materials, new markets and bigger profits that drove the British as they threw together the biggest Empire in the history of the world.