Industrial Revolution

 a) During the late eighteenth century, Great Britain led the way in the development of factories and railroads. In the 1830s and 1840s, industrialization began to spread throughout continental Europe, moving from west to east and north to south. Railroad construction was a leading sector of industrialization. Governments backed railroads, realizing that railroad construction with its demand for iron and coal pushed further industrial development. The steam engine that powered the railroads was also used by steamboats, mining operations, and textile factories. Although industrialization increased steadily in western Europe, its advance in eastern Europe was slow, in large part because serfdom still survived there. Serfs could not move to the towns to work in factories, and landlords with large estates had little incentive to invest in manufacturing. Over decades, factories gradually replaced the households of preindustrial artisans. Many peasants continued to alternate seasonally between manufacturing and agriculture. Workers also continued putting-out work, an option especially attractive to women. In time, even the putting-out system changed, due to the division of labor into simpler, lower-paid tasks known as piecework. Factories drew criticism for the pollution they created and for the growing income gap between owners and workers. As industrialism and its consequences grew, local and national governments collected information about workers' health, their living conditions, and their families. Government inquiries often focused on women and children and, in Great Britain, inquires led to the Factory Act of 1833, which outlawed the employment of children under age nine in textile mills and limited the hours of children under age eighteen; and the 1842 Mines Act, which prohibited the employment of women and girls underground. The continental countries eventually followed the British lead, but most did not insist on inspection; enforcement was therefore lax.
b) Urbanization and Its Consequences, pp. 835-839
Industrialization was linked with rapid urban growth. Great Britain was the leader in this case also: by 1850, half the population of England and Wales lived in towns. Urban populations soared all over Europe because of massive rural out-migration. Agricultural improvements had increased the food supply and therefore the rural population. As it grew, farm work became scarce, and people went to the cities in search of employment. As the cities grew, they dismantled their medieval walls and incorporated parks, zoos, cemeteries, and greenways. Housing, however, was neglected, and overcrowding severe. Overcrowding fostered disease as garbage and refuse littered the streets, smog and smoke obscured the atmosphere, and water was scarce and unclean. Without sewage removal, human waste collected in cesspools and ended up in the rivers that supplied drinking water. Cities with populations of fifty thousand or more had twice the death rates of rural areas. From 1830 to 1832, and again from 1847 to 1852, cholera swept through Europe. Epidemics shocked governments into concern for public health and, in Great Britain, reports on sanitary conditions among workers led to new public health laws. Middle-class persons lived in more spacious and cleaner neighborhoods, but the nearby poor were a source of anxiety. Middle-class reformers, pointing to the living conditions of the poor as a cause of moral degeneracy, collected statistics on illegitimacy and infanticide. Reformers also addressed prostitution, alcoholism, and crime. At the same time that they drew attention to public health issues, reformers unfortunately stereotyped workers as helpless and out of control.
c) Agricultural Perils and Prosperity, pp. 839-840
Burgeoning populations created rising demands for food and altered rural life. Peasants and farmers planted fallow land, chopped down forests, and drained marshes. Railroads and canals improved food distribution, but much of Europe remained isolated from markets and thus vulnerable to local famines. Most still lived on the land, and the upper classes still dominated rural society, although businessmen and peasants were sometimes able to buy land. In France, almost two million independent peasants tended their own small properties. But in England, southern Italy, Prussia, and eastern Europe, large landowners expanded their estates. The survival of independent peasant families was threatened as men often migrated seasonally to earn cash in factories while women stayed behind to tend the crops. To avoid further subdivision of their land to potential heirs, peasants practiced rudimentary forms of birth control. Unpropertied individuals in cities began marrying earlier, and they, too, practiced birth control. Rural population pressure also caused people to emigrate, often to the United States. Between 1816 and 1850, five million Europeans left their home countries and traveled overseas. Despite the challenges of rural life in Europe, political power remained in the hands of traditional elites. The biggest property owners controlled political assemblies and often personally selected clergy and local officials. The old rural order seemed most impregnable in Russia, where troops easily suppressed serfs' uprisings in 1831 and 1842.