title: Industrial Revolution

text: Joseph Foljambe's "Rotherham plough" of 1730 was the first commercially successful iron plough. The threshing machine, invented by the Scottish engineer Andrew Meikle in 1784, displaced hand threshing with a flail, a laborious job that took about one-quarter of agricultural labour. It took several decades to diffuse and was the final straw for many farm labourers, who faced near starvation, leading to the 1830 agricultural rebellion of the Swing Riots.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: Machine tools and metalworking techniques developed during the Industrial Revolution eventually resulted in precision manufacturing techniques in the late 19th century for mass-producing agricultural equipment, such as reapers, binders, and combine harvesters.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: Coal mining in Britain, particularly in South Wales, started early. Before the steam engine, pits were often shallow bell pits following a seam of coal along the surface, which were abandoned as the coal was extracted. In other cases, if the geology was favourable, the coal was mined by means of an adit or drift mine driven into the side of a hill. Shaft mining was done in some areas, but the limiting factor was the problem of removing water. It could be done by hauling buckets of water up the shaft or to a sough (a tunnel driven into a hill to drain a mine). In either case, the water had to be discharged into a stream or ditch at a level where it could flow away by gravity.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: The introduction of the steam pump by Thomas Savery in 1698 and the Newcomen steam engine in 1712 greatly facilitated the removal of water and enabled shafts to be made deeper, enabling more coal to be extracted. These were developments that had begun before the Industrial Revolution, but the adoption of John Smeaton's improvements to the Newcomen engine followed by James Watt's more efficient steam engines from the 1770s reduced the fuel costs of engines, making mines more profitable. The Cornish engine, developed in the 1810s, was much more efficient than the Watt steam engine.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: Coal mining was very dangerous owing to the presence of firedamp in many coal seams. Some degree of safety was provided by the safety lamp which was invented in 1816 by Sir Humphry Davy and independently by George Stephenson. However, the lamps proved a false dawn because they became unsafe very quickly and provided a weak light. Firedamp explosions continued, often setting off coal dust explosions, so casualties grew during the entire 19th century. Conditions of work were very poor, with a high casualty rate from rock falls.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, inland transport was by navigable rivers and roads, with coastal vessels employed to move heavy goods by sea. Wagonways were used for conveying coal to rivers for further shipment, but canals had not yet been widely constructed. Animals supplied all of the motive power on land, with sails providing the motive power on the sea. The first horse railways were introduced toward the end of the 18th century, with steam locomotives being introduced in the early decades of the 19th century. Improving sailing technologies boosted average sailing speed by 50% between 1750 and 1830.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: The Industrial Revolution improved Britain's transport infrastructure with a turnpike road network, a canal and waterway network, and a railway network. Raw materials and finished products could be moved more quickly and cheaply than before. Improved transportation also allowed new ideas to spread quickly.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: Before and during the Industrial Revolution navigation on several British rivers was improved by removing obstructions, straightening curves, widening and deepening, and building navigation locks. Britain had over of navigable rivers and streams by 1750.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: Canals and waterways allowed bulk materials to be economically transported long distances inland. This was because a horse could pull a barge with a load dozens of times larger than the load that could be drawn in a cart.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: In the UK, canals began to be built in the late 18th century to link the major manufacturing centres across the country. Known for its huge commercial success, the Bridgewater Canal in North West England, which opened in 1761 and was mostly funded by The 3rd Duke of Bridgewater. From Worsley to the rapidly growing town of Manchester its construction cost £168,000 (£ ), but its advantages over land and river transport meant that within a year of its opening in 1761, the price of coal in Manchester fell by about half. This success helped inspire a period of intense canal building, known as Canal Mania. New canals were hastily built with the aim of replicating the commercial success of the Bridgewater Canal, the most notable being the Leeds and Liverpool Canal and the Thames and Severn Canal which opened in 1774 and 1789 respectively.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: By the 1820s a national network was in existence. Canal construction served as a model for the organisation and methods later used to construct the railways. They were eventually largely superseded as profitable commercial enterprises by the spread of the railways from the 1840s on. The last major canal to be built in the United Kingdom was the Manchester Ship Canal, which upon opening in 1894 was the largest ship canal in the world, and opened Manchester as a port. However, it never achieved the commercial success its sponsors had hoped for and signalled canals as a dying mode of transport in an age dominated by railways, which were quicker and often cheaper.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: Britain's canal network, together with its surviving mill buildings, is one of the most enduring features of the early Industrial Revolution to be seen in Britain.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: France was known for having an excellent system of roads at the time of the Industrial Revolution; however, most of the roads on the European Continent and in the U.K. were in bad condition and dangerously rutted.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: Much of the original British road system was poorly maintained by thousands of local parishes, but from the 1720s (and occasionally earlier) turnpike trusts were set up to charge tolls and maintain some roads. Increasing numbers of main roads were turnpiked from the 1750s to the extent that almost every main road in England and Wales was the responsibility of a turnpike trust. New engineered roads were built by John Metcalf, Thomas Telford and most notably John McAdam, with the first 'macadamised' stretch of road being Marsh Road at Ashton Gate, Bristol in 1816. The first macadamised road in the U.S. was the "Boonsborough Turnpike Road" between Hagerstown and Boonsboro, Maryland in 1823.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: The major turnpikes radiated from London and were the means by which the Royal Mail was able to reach the rest of the country. Heavy goods transport on these roads was by means of slow, broad wheeled, carts hauled by teams of horses. Lighter goods were conveyed by smaller carts or by teams of pack horse. Stagecoaches carried the rich, and the less wealthy could pay to ride on carriers carts.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: Productivity of road transport increased greatly during the Industrial Revolution and the cost of travel fell dramatically. Between 1690 and 1840 productivity almost tripled for long-distance carrying and increased four-fold in stage coaching.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: Reducing friction was one of the major reasons for the success of railroads compared to wagons. This was demonstrated on an iron plate-covered wooden tramway in 1805 at Croydon, England.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: A good horse on an ordinary turnpike road can draw two thousand pounds, or one ton. A party of gentlemen were invited to witness the experiment, that the superiority of the new road might be established by ocular demonstration. Twelve wagons were loaded with stones, till each wagon weighed three tons, and the wagons were fastened together. A horse was then attached, which drew the wagons with ease, in two hours, having stopped four times, in order to show he had the power of starting, as well as drawing his great load.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: Railways were made practical by the widespread introduction of inexpensive puddled iron after 1800, the rolling mill for making rails, and the development of the high-pressure steam engine also around 1800.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: Wagonways for moving coal in the mining areas had started in the 17th century and were often associated with canal or river systems for the further movement of coal. These were all horse-drawn or relied on gravity, with a stationary steam engine to haul the wagons back to the top of the incline. The first applications of the steam locomotive were on wagon or plate ways (as they were then often called from the cast-iron plates used). Horse-drawn public railways did not begin until the early years of the 19th century when improvements to pig and wrought iron production were lowering costs.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: Steam locomotives began being built after the introduction of high-pressure steam engines after the expiration of the Boulton and Watt patent in 1800. High-pressure engines exhausted used steam to the atmosphere, doing away with the condenser and cooling water. They were also much lighter weight and smaller in size for a given horsepower than the stationary condensing engines. A few of these early locomotives were used in mines. Steam-hauled public railways began with the Stockton and Darlington Railway in 1825.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: The rapid introduction of railways followed the 1829 Rainhill Trials, which demonstrated Robert Stephenson's successful locomotive design and the 1828 development of hot blast, which dramatically reduced the fuel consumption of making iron and increased the capacity of the blast furnace.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: On 15 September 1830, the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, the first inter-city railway in the world, was opened, and was attended by Prime Minister, the Duke of Wellington. The railway was engineered by Joseph Locke and George Stephenson, linked the rapidly expanding industrial town of Manchester with the port town of Liverpool. The opening was marred by problems, due to the primitive nature of the technology being employed, however, problems were gradually ironed out and the railway became highly successful, transporting passengers and freight. The success of the inter-city railway, particularly in the transport of freight and commodities, led to Railway Mania.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: Construction of major railways connecting the larger cities and towns began in the 1830s but only gained momentum at the very end of the first Industrial Revolution. After many of the workers had completed the railways, they did not return to their rural lifestyles but instead remained in the cities, providing additional workers for the factories.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: Other developments included more efficient water wheels, based on experiments conducted by the British engineer John Smeaton, the beginnings of a machine industry and the rediscovery of concrete (based on hydraulic lime mortar) by John Smeaton, which had been lost for 1,300 years.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: Prior to the Industrial Revolution, most of the workforce was employed in agriculture, either as self-employed farmers as landowners or tenants or as landless agricultural labourers. It was common for families in various parts of the world to spin yarn, weave cloth and make their own clothing. Households also spun and wove for market production. At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution India, China, and regions of Iraq and elsewhere in Asia and the Middle East produced most of the world's cotton cloth while Europeans produced wool and linen goods.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: In Britain by the 16th century the putting-out system, by which farmers and townspeople produced goods for a market in their homes, often described as "cottage industry", was being practised. Typical putting-out system goods included spinning and weaving. Merchant capitalists typically provided the raw materials, paid workers by the piece, and were responsible for the sale of the goods. Embezzlement of supplies by workers and poor quality were common problems. The logistical effort in procuring and distributing raw materials and picking up finished goods were also limitations of the putting-out system.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: Some early spinning and weaving machinery, such as a 40 spindle jenny for about six pounds in 1792, was affordable for cottagers. Later machinery such as spinning frames, spinning mules and power looms were expensive (especially if water-powered), giving rise to capitalist ownership of factories.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: The majority of textile factory workers during the Industrial Revolution were unmarried women and children, including many orphans. They typically worked for 12 to 14 hours per day with only Sundays off. It was common for women to take factory jobs seasonally during slack periods of farm work. Lack of adequate transportation, long hours, and poor pay made it difficult to recruit and maintain workers. Many workers, such as displaced farmers and agricultural workers, who had nothing but their labour to sell, became factory workers out of necessity. (See: British Agricultural Revolution, Threshing machine)


title: Industrial Revolution

text: The change in the social relationship of the factory worker compared to farmers and cottagers was viewed unfavourably by Karl Marx; however, he recognized the increase in productivity made possible by technology.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: Some economists, such as Robert E. Lucas, Jr., say that the real effect of the Industrial Revolution was that "for the first time in history, the living standards of the masses of ordinary people have begun to undergo sustained growth ... Nothing remotely like this economic behaviour is mentioned by the classical economists, even as a theoretical possibility." Others, however, argue that while the growth of the economy's overall productive powers was unprecedented during the Industrial Revolution, living standards for the majority of the population did not grow meaningfully until the late 19th and 20th centuries and that in many ways workers' living standards declined under early capitalism: for instance, studies have shown that real wages in Britain only increased 15% between the 1780s and 1850s, and that life expectancy in Britain did not begin to dramatically increase until the 1870s. Similarly, the average height of the population declined during the Industrial Revolution, implying that their nutritional status was also decreasing. Real wages were not keeping up with the price of food.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: During the Industrial Revolution, the life expectancy of children increased dramatically. The percentage of the children born in London who died before the age of five decreased from 74.5% in 1730–1749 to 31.8% in 1810–1829.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: The effects on living conditions of the industrial revolution have been very controversial and were hotly debated by economic and social historians from the 1950s to the 1980s. A series of 1950s essays by Henry Phelps Brown and Sheila V. Hopkins later set the academic consensus that the bulk of the population, that was at the bottom of the social ladder, suffered severe reductions in their living standards. During 1813–1913, there was a significant increase in worker wages.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: Chronic hunger and malnutrition were the norms for the majority of the population of the world including Britain and France, until the late 19th century. Until about 1750, in large part due to malnutrition, life expectancy in France was about 35 years and about 40 years in Britain. The United States population of the time was adequately fed, much taller on average, and had a life expectancy of 45–50 years although U.S. life expectancy declined by a few years by the mid 19th century. Food consumption per capita also declined during an episode known as the Antebellum Puzzle.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: Food supply in Great Britain was adversely affected by the Corn Laws (1815–1846). The Corn Laws, which imposed tariffs on imported grain, were enacted to keep prices high in order to benefit domestic producers. The Corn Laws were repealed in the early years of the Great Irish Famine.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: The initial technologies of the Industrial Revolution, such as mechanized textiles, iron and coal, did little, if anything, to lower food prices. In Britain and the Netherlands, food supply increased before the Industrial Revolution due to better agricultural practices; however, population grew too, as noted by Thomas Malthus. This condition is called the Malthusian trap, and it finally started to be overcome by transportation improvements, such as canals, improved roads and steamships. Railroads and steamships were introduced near the end of the Industrial Revolution.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: The rapid population growth in the 19th century included the new industrial and manufacturing cities, as well as service centers such as Edinburgh and London. The critical factor was financing, which was handled by building societies that dealt directly with large contracting firms. Private renting from housing landlords was the dominant tenure. P. Kemp says this was usually of advantage to tenants. People moved in so rapidly there was not enough capital to build adequate housing for everyone, so low-income newcomers squeezed into increasingly overcrowded slums. Clean water, sanitation, and public health facilities were inadequate; the death rate was high, especially infant mortality, and tuberculosis among young adults. Cholera from polluted water and typhoid were endemic. Unlike rural areas, there were no famines such as the one that devastated Ireland in the 1840s.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: A large exposé literature grew up condemning the unhealthy conditions. By far the most famous publication was by one of the founders of the Socialist movement, "The Condition of the Working Class in England" in 1844 Friedrich Engels described backstreet sections of Manchester and other mill towns, where people lived in crude shanties and shacks, some not completely enclosed, some with dirt floors. These shantytowns had narrow walkways between irregularly shaped lots and dwellings. There were no sanitary facilities. The population density was extremely high. However, not everyone lived in such poor conditions. The Industrial Revolution also created a middle class of businessmen, clerks, foremen, and engineers who lived in much better conditions.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: Conditions improved over the course of the 19th century due to new public health acts regulating things such as sewage, hygiene, and home construction. In the introduction of his 1892 edition, Engels notes that most of the conditions he wrote about in 1844 had been greatly improved. For example, the Public Health Act 1875 led to the more sanitary byelaw terraced house.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: In "The Condition of the Working Class in England" in 1844 Friedrich Engels described how untreated sewage created awful odours and turned the rivers green in industrial cities.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: In 1854 John Snow traced a cholera outbreak in Soho in London to faecal contamination of a public water well by a home cesspit. Snow's findings that cholera could be spread by contaminated water took some years to be accepted, but his work led to fundamental changes in the design of public water and waste systems.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: Pre-industrial water supply relied on gravity systems and pumping of water was done by water wheels. Pipes were typically made of wood. Steam-powered pumps and iron pipes allowed the widespread piping of water to horse watering troughs and households.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: Modern industrialization began in England and Scotland in the 18th century, where there were relatively high levels of literacy among farmers, especially in Scotland. This permitted the recruitment of literate craftsmen, skilled workers, foremen, and managers who supervised the emerging textile factories and coal mines. Much of the labour was unskilled, and especially in textile mills children as young as eight proved useful in handling chores and adding to the family income. Indeed, children were taken out of school to work alongside their parents in the factories. However, by the mid-nineteenth century, unskilled labor forces were common in Western Europe, and British industry moved upscale, needing many more engineers and skilled workers who could handle technical instructions and handle complex situations. Literacy was essential to be hired. A senior government official told Parliament in 1870:


title: Industrial Revolution

text: The invention of the paper machine and the application of steam power to the industrial processes of printing supported a massive expansion of newspaper and pamphlet publishing, which contributed to rising literacy and demands for mass political participation.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: Consumers benefited from falling prices for clothing and household articles such as cast iron cooking utensils, and in the following decades, stoves for cooking and space heating. Coffee, tea, sugar, tobacco, and chocolate became affordable to many in Europe. The consumer revolution in England from the early 1600s to roughly 1750 had seen a marked increase in the consumption and variety of luxury goods and products by individuals from different economic and social backgrounds. With improvements in transport and manufacturing technology, opportunities for buying and selling became faster and more efficient than previous. The expanding textile trade in the north of England meant the three-piece suit became affordable to the masses. Founded by Josiah Wedgwood in 1759, Wedgwood fine china and porcelain tableware was starting to become a common feature on dining tables. Rising prosperity and social mobility in the 18th century increased the number of people with disposable income for consumption, and the marketing of goods (of which Wedgwood was a pioneer) for individuals, as opposed to items for the household, started to appear, and the new status of goods as status symbols related to changes in fashion and desired for aesthetic appeal.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: New businesses in various industries appeared in towns and cities throughout Britain. Confectionery was one such industry that saw rapid expansion. According to food historian Polly Russell: "chocolate and biscuits became products for the masses, thanks to the Industrial Revolution and the consumers it created. By the mid-19th century, sweet biscuits were an affordable indulgence and business was booming. Manufacturers such as Huntley & Palmers in Reading, Carr's of Carlisle and McVitie's in Edinburgh transformed from small family-run businesses into state-of-the-art operations". In 1847 Fry's of Bristol produced the first chocolate bar. Their competitor Cadbury of Birmingham was the first to commercialize the association between confectionery and romance when they produced a heart-shaped box of chocolates for Valentine's Day in 1868. The department store became a common feature in major High Streets across Britain, with Harding, Howell & Co., opened in 1796 on Pall Mall, London, a contender for the first department store. In addition to goods being sold in the growing number of stores, street sellers were common in an increasingly urbanized country. Dr Matthew White: "Crowds swarmed in every thoroughfare. Scores of street sellers ‘cried’ merchandise from place to place, advertising the wealth of goods and services on offer. Milkmaids, orange sellers, fishwives and piemen, for example, all walked the streets offering their various wares for sale, while knife grinders and the menders of broken chairs and furniture could be found on street corners". An early soft drinks company, R. White's Lemonade, began in 1845 by selling drinks in London in a wheelbarrow.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: Increased literacy rates, industrialisation, and the invention of the railway created a new market for cheap popular literature for the masses and the ability for it to be circulated on a large scale. Penny dreadfuls were created in the 1830s to meet this demand. "The Guardian" described penny dreadfuls as "Britain's first taste of mass-produced popular culture for the young", and "the Victorian equivalent of video games". By the 1860s and 1870s more than one million boys' periodicals were sold per week. Labelled an "authorpreneur" by the "Paris Review", Charles Dickens used innovations from the revolution to sell his books, such as the powerful new printing presses, enhanced advertising revenues, and the expansion of railroads. His first novel, "The Pickwick Papers" (1836), became a publishing phenomenon, with its unprecedented success sparking numerous spin-offs and merchandise ranging from "Pickwick" cigars, playing cards, china figurines, Sam Weller puzzles, Weller boot polish and joke books. Nicholas Dames in "The Atlantic" writes, “Literature” is not a big enough category for "Pickwick". It defined its own, a new one that we have learned to call “entertainment.”


title: Industrial Revolution

text: In 1861, Welsh entrepreneur Pryce Pryce-Jones formed the first mail order business, an idea which would change the nature of retail. Selling Welsh flannel, he created mail order catalogues, with customers able to order by mail for the first timethis following the Uniform Penny Post in 1840 and the invention of the postage stamp (Penny Black) where there was a charge of one penny for carriage and delivery between any two places in the United Kingdom irrespective of distanceand the goods were delivered throughout the UK via the newly created railway system. As the railway network expanded overseas, so did his business.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: The Industrial Revolution was the first period in history during which there was a simultaneous increase in both population and per capita income.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: According to Robert Hughes in "The Fatal Shore", the population of England and Wales, which had remained steady at six million from 1700 to 1740, rose dramatically after 1740. The population of England had more than doubled from 8.3 million in 1801 to 16.8 million in 1850 and, by 1901, had nearly doubled again to 30.5 million. Improved conditions led to the population of Britain increasing from 10 million to 40 million in the 1800s. Europe's population increased from about 100 million in 1700 to 400 million by 1900.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: The growth of the modern industry since the late 18th century led to massive urbanisation and the rise of new great cities, first in Europe and then in other regions, as new opportunities brought huge numbers of migrants from rural communities into urban areas. In 1800, only 3% of the world's population lived in cities, compared to nearly 50% today (the beginning of the 21st century). Manchester had a population of 10,000 in 1717, but by 1911 it had burgeoned to 2.3 million.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: Women's historians have debated the effect of the Industrial Revolution and capitalism generally on the status of women. Taking a pessimistic side, Alice Clark argued that when capitalism arrived in 17th-century England, it lowered the status of women as they lost much of their economic importance. Clark argues that in 16th-century England, women were engaged in many aspects of industry and agriculture. The home was a central unit of production and women played a vital role in running farms, and in some trades and landed estates. Their useful economic roles gave them a sort of equality with their husbands. However, Clark argues, as capitalism expanded in the 17th century, there was more and more division of labour with the husband taking paid labour jobs outside the home, and the wife reduced to unpaid household work. Middle- and upper-class women were confined to an idle domestic existence, supervising servants; lower-class women were forced to take poorly paid jobs. Capitalism, therefore, had a negative effect on powerful women.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: In a more positive interpretation, Ivy Pinchbeck argues that capitalism created the conditions for women's emancipation. Tilly and Scott have emphasised the continuity in the status of women, finding three stages in English history. In the pre-industrial era, production was mostly for home use and women produce much of the needs of the households. The second stage was the "family wage economy" of early industrialisation; the entire family depended on the collective wages of its members, including husband, wife, and older children. The third or modern stage is the "family consumer economy", in which the family is the site of consumption, and women are employed in large numbers in retail and clerical jobs to support rising standards of consumption.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: Ideas of thrift and hard work characterized middle-class families as the Industrial Revolution swept Europe. These values were displayed in Samuel Smiles' book "Self-Help", in which he states that the misery of the poorer classes was "voluntary and self-imposed – the results of idleness, thriftlessness, intemperance, and misconduct."


title: Industrial Revolution

text: In terms of social structure, the Industrial Revolution witnessed the triumph of a middle class of industrialists and businessmen over a landed class of nobility and gentry. Ordinary working people found increased opportunities for employment in the new mills and factories, but these were often under strict working conditions with long hours of labour dominated by a pace set by machines. As late as the year 1900, most industrial workers in the United States still worked a 10-hour day (12 hours in the steel industry), yet earned from 20% to 40% less than the minimum deemed necessary for a decent life; however, most workers in textiles, which was by far the leading industry in terms of employment, were women and children. For workers of the labouring classes, industrial life "was a stony desert, which they had to make habitable by their own efforts." Also, harsh working conditions were prevalent long before the Industrial Revolution took place. Pre-industrial society was very static and often cruel – child labour, dirty living conditions and long working hours were just as prevalent before the Industrial Revolution.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: Industrialisation led to the creation of the factory. The factory system contributed to the growth of urban areas, as large numbers of workers migrated into the cities in search of work in the factories. Nowhere was this better illustrated than the mills and associated industries of Manchester, nicknamed "Cottonopolis", and the world's first industrial city. Manchester experienced a six-times increase in its population between 1771 and 1831. Bradford grew by 50% every ten years between 1811 and 1851 and by 1851 only 50% of the population of Bradford was actually born there.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: In addition, between 1815 and 1939, 20 percent of Europe's population left home, pushed by poverty, a rapidly growing population, and the displacement of peasant farming and artisan manufacturing. They were pulled abroad by the enormous demand for labour overseas, the ready availability of land, and cheap transportation. Still, many did not find a satisfactory life in their new homes, leading 7 million of them to return to Europe. This mass migration had large demographic effects: in 1800, less than one percent of the world population consisted of overseas Europeans and their descendants; by 1930, they represented 11 percent. The Americas felt the brunt of this huge emigration, largely concentrated in the United States.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: For much of the 19th century, production was done in small mills, which were typically water-powered and built to serve local needs. Later, each factory would have its own steam engine and a chimney to give an efficient draft through its boiler.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: In other industries, the transition to factory production was not so divisive. Some industrialists themselves tried to improve factory and living conditions for their workers. One of the earliest such reformers was Robert Owen, known for his pioneering efforts in improving conditions for workers at the New Lanark mills, and often regarded as one of the key thinkers of the early socialist movement.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: By 1746 an integrated brass mill was working at Warmley near Bristol. Raw material went in at one end, was smelted into brass and was turned into pans, pins, wire, and other goods. Housing was provided for workers on site. Josiah Wedgwood and Matthew Boulton (whose Soho Manufactory was completed in 1766) were other prominent early industrialists, who employed the factory system.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: The Industrial Revolution led to a population increase but the chances of surviving childhood did not improve throughout the Industrial Revolution, although "infant" mortality rates were reduced markedly. There was still limited opportunity for education and children were expected to work. Employers could pay a child less than an adult even though their productivity was comparable; there was no need for strength to operate an industrial machine, and since the industrial system was completely new, there were no experienced adult labourers. This made child labour the labour of choice for manufacturing in the early phases of the Industrial Revolution between the 18th and 19th centuries. In England and Scotland in 1788, two-thirds of the workers in 143 water-powered cotton mills were described as children.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: Child labour existed before the Industrial Revolution but with the increase in population and education, it became more visible. Many children were forced to work in relatively bad conditions for much lower pay than their elders, 10–20% of an adult male's wage.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: Reports were written detailing some of the abuses, particularly in the coal mines and textile factories, and these helped to popularise the children's plight. The public outcry, especially among the upper and middle classes, helped stir change in the young workers' welfare.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: Politicians and the government tried to limit child labour by law but factory owners resisted; some felt that they were aiding the poor by giving their children money to buy food to avoid starvation, and others simply welcomed the cheap labour. In 1833 and 1844, the first general laws against child labour, the Factory Acts, were passed in Britain: Children younger than nine were not allowed to work, children were not permitted to work at night, and the workday of youth under the age of 18 was limited to twelve hours. Factory inspectors supervised the execution of the law, however, their scarcity made enforcement difficult. About ten years later, the employment of children and women in mining was forbidden. Although laws such as these decreased the number of child labourers, child labour remained significantly present in Europe and the United States until the 20th century.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: The Industrial Revolution concentrated labour into mills, factories, and mines, thus facilitating the organisation of "combinations" or trade unions to help advance the interests of working people. The power of a union could demand better terms by withdrawing all labour and causing a consequent cessation of production. Employers had to decide between giving in to the union demands at a cost to themselves or suffering the cost of the lost production. Skilled workers were hard to replace, and these were the first groups to successfully advance their conditions through this kind of bargaining.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: The main method the unions used to effect change was strike action. Many strikes were painful events for both sides, the unions, and the management. In Britain, the Combination Act 1799 forbade workers to form any kind of trade union until its repeal in 1824. Even after this, unions were still severely restricted. One British newspaper in 1834 described unions as "the most dangerous institutions that were ever permitted to take root, under shelter of law, in any country..."


title: Industrial Revolution

text: In 1832, the Reform Act extended the vote in Britain but did not grant universal suffrage. That year six men from Tolpuddle in Dorset founded the Friendly Society of Agricultural Labourers to protest against the gradual lowering of wages in the 1830s. They refused to work for less than ten shillings a week, although by this time wages had been reduced to seven shillings a week and were due to be further reduced to six. In 1834 James Frampton, a local landowner, wrote to the Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, to complain about the union, invoking an obscure law from 1797 prohibiting people from swearing oaths to each other, which the members of the Friendly Society had done. James Brine, James Hammett, George Loveless, George's brother James Loveless, George's brother-in-law Thomas Standfield, and Thomas's son John Standfield were arrested, found guilty, and transported to Australia. They became known as the Tolpuddle Martyrs. In the 1830s and 1840s, the Chartist movement was the first large-scale organised working-class political movement that campaigned for political equality and social justice. Its "Charter" of reforms received over three million signatures but was rejected by Parliament without consideration.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: Working people also formed friendly societies and co-operative societies as mutual support groups against times of economic hardship. Enlightened industrialists, such as Robert Owen also supported these organisations to improve the conditions of the working class.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: Unions slowly overcame the legal restrictions on the right to strike. In 1842, a general strike involving cotton workers and colliers was organised through the Chartist movement which stopped production across Great Britain.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: Eventually, effective political organisation for working people was achieved through the trades unions who, after the extensions of the franchise in 1867 and 1885, began to support socialist political parties that later merged to become the British Labour Party.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: The rapid industrialisation of the English economy cost many craft workers their jobs. The movement started first with lace and hosiery workers near Nottingham and spread to other areas of the textile industry owing to early industrialisation. Many weavers also found themselves suddenly unemployed since they could no longer compete with machines which only required relatively limited (and unskilled) labour to produce more cloth than a single weaver. Many such unemployed workers, weavers, and others turned their animosity towards the machines that had taken their jobs and began destroying factories and machinery. These attackers became known as Luddites, supposedly followers of Ned Ludd, a folklore figure. The first attacks of the Luddite movement began in 1811. The Luddites rapidly gained popularity, and the British government took drastic measures, using the militia or army to protect industry. Those rioters who were caught were tried and hanged, or transported for life.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: Unrest continued in other sectors as they industrialised, such as with agricultural labourers in the 1830s when large parts of southern Britain were affected by the Captain Swing disturbances. Threshing machines were a particular target, and hayrick burning was a popular activity. However, the riots led to the first formation of trade unions, and further pressure for reform.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: The traditional centers of hand textile production such as India, parts of the Middle East, and later China could not withstand the competition from machine-made textiles, which over a period of decades destroyed the hand made textile industries and left millions of people without work, many of whom starved.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: The Industrial Revolution also generated an enormous and unprecedented economic division in the world, as measured by the share of manufacturing output.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: Cheap cotton textiles increased the demand for raw cotton; previously, it had primarily been consumed in subtropical regions where it was grown, with little raw cotton available for export. Consequently, prices of raw cotton rose. British production grew from 2 million pounds in 1700 to 5 million pounds in 1781 to 56 million in 1800. The invention of the cotton gin by American Eli Whitney in 1792 was the decisive event. It allowed green-seeded cotton to become profitable, leading to the widespread growth of the large slave plantation in the United States, Brazil, and the West Indies. In 1791 American cotton production was about 2 million pounds, soaring to 35 million by 1800, half of which was exported. America's cotton plantations were highly efficient and profitable, and able to keep up with demand. The U.S. Civil War created a "cotton famine" that led to increased production in other areas of the world, including European colonies in Africa.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: The origins of the environmental movement lay in the response to increasing levels of smoke pollution in the atmosphere during the Industrial Revolution. The emergence of great factories and the concomitant immense growth in coal consumption gave rise to an unprecedented level of air pollution in industrial centers; after 1900 the large volume of industrial chemical discharges added to the growing load of untreated human waste. The first large-scale, modern environmental laws came in the form of Britain's Alkali Acts, passed in 1863, to regulate the deleterious air pollution (gaseous hydrochloric acid) given off by the Leblanc process, used to produce soda ash. An Alkali inspector and four sub-inspectors were appointed to curb this pollution. The responsibilities of the inspectorate were gradually expanded, culminating in the Alkali Order 1958 which placed all major heavy industries that emitted smoke, grit, dust, and fumes under supervision.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: The manufactured gas industry began in British cities in 1812–1820. The technique used produced highly toxic effluent that was dumped into sewers and rivers. The gas companies were repeatedly sued in nuisance lawsuits. They usually lost and modified the worst practices. The City of London repeatedly indicted gas companies in the 1820s for polluting the Thames and poisoning its fish. Finally, Parliament wrote company charters to regulate toxicity. The industry reached the US around 1850 causing pollution and lawsuits.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: In industrial cities local experts and reformers, especially after 1890, took the lead in identifying environmental degradation and pollution, and initiating grass-roots movements to demand and achieve reforms. Typically the highest priority went to water and air pollution. The Coal Smoke Abatement Society was formed in Britain in 1898 making it one of the oldest environmental NGOs. It was founded by artist Sir William Blake Richmond, frustrated with the pall cast by coal smoke. Although there were earlier pieces of legislation, the Public Health Act 1875 required all furnaces and fireplaces to consume their own smoke. It also provided for sanctions against factories that emitted large amounts of black smoke. The provisions of this law were extended in 1926 with the Smoke Abatement Act to include other emissions, such as soot, ash, and gritty particles, and to empower local authorities to impose their own regulations.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: In his 1983 book "Nations and Nationalism", philosopher Ernest Gellner argues that the industrial revolution and economic modernization spurred the creation of nations.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: The Industrial Revolution in Continental Europe came later than in Great Britain. It started in Belgium and France, then spread to the German states by the middle of the 19th century. In many industries, this involved the application of technology developed in Britain in new places. Typically the technology was purchased from Britain or British engineers and entrepreneurs moved abroad in search of new opportunities. By 1809, part of the Ruhr Valley in Westphalia was called 'Miniature England' because of its similarities to the industrial areas of Britain. Most European governments provided state funding to the new industries. In some cases (such as iron), the different availability of resources locally meant that only some aspects of the British technology were adopted.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: The Habsburg realms which became Austria-Hungary in 1867 included 23 million inhabitants in 1800, growing to 36 million by 1870. Nationally the per capita rate of industrial growth averaged about 3% between 1818 and 1870. However, there were strong regional differences. The railway system was built in the 1850–1873 period. Before they arrived transportation was very slow and expensive. In the Alpine and Bohemian (modern-day Czech Republic) regions, proto-industrialization began by 1750 and became the center of the first phases of the industrial revolution after 1800. The textile industry was the main factor, utilizing mechanization, steam engines, and the factory system. In the Czech lands, the "first mechanical loom followed in Varnsdorf in 1801", with the first steam engines appearing in Bohemia and Moravia just a few years later. The textile production flourished particularly in Prague and Brno (German: Brünn), which was considered the 'Moravian Manchester'. The Czech lands, especially Bohemia, became the center of industrialization due to its natural and human resources. The iron industry had developed in the Alpine regions after 1750, with smaller centers in Bohemia and Moravia. Hungary—the eastern half of the Dual Monarchy, was heavily rural with little industry before 1870.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: In 1791 Prague organized the first World's Fair/List of world's fairs, Bohemia (modern-day Czech Republic). The first industrial exhibition was on the occasion of the coronation of Leopold II as a king of Bohemia, which took place in Clementinum, and therefore celebrated the considerable sophistication of manufacturing methods in the Czech lands during that time period.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: Technological change accelerated industrialization and urbanization. The GNP per capita grew roughly 1.76% per year from 1870 to 1913. That level of growth compared very favorably to that of other European nations such as Britain (1%), France (1.06%), and Germany (1.51%). However, in a comparison with Germany and Britain: the Austro-Hungarian economy as a whole still lagged considerably, as sustained modernization had begun much later.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: Belgium was the second country in which the Industrial Revolution took place and the first in continental Europe: Wallonia (French-speaking southern Belgium) took the lead. Starting in the middle of the 1820s, and especially after Belgium became an independent nation in 1830, numerous works comprising coke blast furnaces as well as puddling and rolling mills were built in the coal mining areas around Liège and Charleroi. The leader was a transplanted Englishman John Cockerill. His factories at Seraing integrated all stages of production, from engineering to the supply of raw materials, as early as 1825.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: Wallonia exemplified the radical evolution of industrial expansion. Thanks to coal (the French word "houille" was coined in Wallonia), the region geared up to become the 2nd industrial power in the world after Britain. But it is also pointed out by many researchers, with its "Sillon industriel", 'Especially in the Haine, Sambre and Meuse valleys, between the Borinage and Liège...there was a huge industrial development based on coal-mining and iron-making...'. Philippe Raxhon wrote about the period after 1830: "It was not propaganda but a reality the Walloon regions were becoming the second industrial power all over the world after Britain." "The sole industrial centre outside the collieries and blast furnaces of Walloon was the old cloth-making town of Ghent." Professor Michel De Coster stated: "The historians and the economists say that Belgium was the second industrial power of the world, in proportion to its population and its territory [...] But this rank is the one of Wallonia where the coal-mines, the blast furnaces, the iron and zinc factories, the wool industry, the glass industry, the weapons industry... were concentrated." Many of the 19th-century coal mines in Wallonia are now protected as World Heritage sites


title: Industrial Revolution

text: Wallonia was also the birthplace of a strong Socialist party and strong trade unions in a particular sociological landscape. At the left, the "Sillon industriel", which runs from Mons in the west, to Verviers in the east (except part of North Flanders, in another period of the industrial revolution, after 1920). Even if Belgium is the second industrial country after Britain, the effect of the industrial revolution there was very different. In 'Breaking stereotypes', Muriel Neven and Isabelle Devious say:


title: Industrial Revolution

text: The industrial revolution changed a mainly rural society into an urban one, but with a strong contrast between northern and southern Belgium. During the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period, Flanders was characterised by the presence of large urban centres [...] at the beginning of the nineteenth century this region (Flanders), with an urbanisation degree of more than 30 percent, remained one of the most urbanised in the world. By comparison, this proportion reached only 17 percent in Wallonia, barely 10 percent in most West European countries, 16 percent in France, and 25 percent in Britain. Nineteenth-century industrialisation did not affect the traditional urban infrastructure, except in Ghent... Also, in Wallonia, the traditional urban network was largely unaffected by the industrialisation process, even though the proportion of city-dwellers rose from 17 to 45 percent between 1831 and 1910. Especially in the Haine, Sambre and Meuse valleys, between the Borinage and Liège, where there was a huge industrial development based on coal-mining and iron-making, urbanisation was fast. During these eighty years, the number of municipalities with more than 5,000 inhabitants increased from only 21 to more than one hundred, concentrating nearly half of the Walloon population in this region. Nevertheless, industrialisation remained quite traditional in the sense that it did not lead to the growth of modern and large urban centres, but to a conurbation of industrial villages and towns developed around a coal mine or a factory. Communication routes between these small centres only became populated later and created a much less dense urban morphology than, for instance, the area around Liège where the old town was there to direct migratory flows.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: The industrial revolution in France followed a particular course as it did not correspond to the main model followed by other countries. Notably, most French historians argue France did not go through a clear "take-off". Instead, France's economic growth and industrialisation process was slow and steady through the 18th and 19th centuries. However, some stages were identified by Maurice Lévy-Leboyer:


title: Industrial Revolution

text: Based on its leadership in chemical research in the universities and industrial laboratories, Germany, which was unified in 1871, became dominant in the world's chemical industry in the late 19th century. At first the production of dyes based on aniline was critical.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: Germany's political disunitywith three dozen statesand a pervasive conservatism made it difficult to build railways in the 1830s. However, by the 1840s, trunk lines linked the major cities; each German state was responsible for the lines within its own borders. Lacking a technological base at first, the Germans imported their engineering and hardware from Britain, but quickly learned the skills needed to operate and expand the railways. In many cities, the new railway shops were the centres of technological awareness and training, so that by 1850, Germany was self-sufficient in meeting the demands of railroad construction, and the railways were a major impetus for the growth of the new steel industry. Observers found that even as late as 1890, their engineering was inferior to Britain's. However, German unification in 1870 stimulated consolidation, nationalisation into state-owned companies, and further rapid growth. Unlike the situation in France, the goal was the support of industrialisation, and so heavy lines crisscrossed the Ruhr and other industrial districts and provided good connections to the major ports of Hamburg and Bremen. By 1880, Germany had 9,400 locomotives pulling 43,000 passengers and 30,000 tons of freight, and pulled ahead of France.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: During the period 1790–1815 Sweden experienced two parallel economic movements: an "agricultural revolution" with larger agricultural estates, new crops, and farming tools and commercialisation of farming, and a "proto industrialisation", with small industries being established in the countryside and with workers switching between agricultural work in summer and industrial production in winter. This led to economic growth benefiting large sections of the population and leading up to a "consumption revolution" starting in the 1820s. Between 1815 and 1850, the protoindustries developed into more specialised and larger industries. This period witnessed increasing regional specialisation with mining in Bergslagen, textile mills in Sjuhäradsbygden, and forestry in Norrland. Several important institutional changes took place in this period, such as free and mandatory schooling introduced in 1842 (as the first country in the world), the abolition of the national monopoly on trade in handicrafts in 1846, and a stock company law in 1848.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: From 1850 to 1890, Sweden experienced its "first" Industrial Revolution with a veritable explosion in export, dominated by crops, wood, and steel. Sweden abolished most tariffs and other barriers to free trade in the 1850s and joined the gold standard in 1873. Large infrastructural investments were made during this period, mainly in the expanding railroad network, which was financed in part by the government and in part by private enterprises. From 1890 to 1930, new industries developed with their focus on the domestic market: mechanical engineering, power utilities, papermaking and textile.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: The industrial revolution began about 1870 as Meiji period leaders decided to catch up with the West. The government built railroads, improved roads, and inaugurated a land reform program to prepare the country for further development. It inaugurated a new Western-based education system for all young people, sent thousands of students to the United States and Europe, and hired more than 3,000 Westerners to teach modern science, mathematics, technology, and foreign languages in Japan (Foreign government advisors in Meiji Japan).


title: Industrial Revolution

text: In 1871, a group of Japanese politicians known as the Iwakura Mission toured Europe and the United States to learn western ways. The result was a deliberate state-led industrialisation policy to enable Japan to quickly catch up. The Bank of Japan, founded in 1882, used taxes to fund model steel and textile factories. Education was expanded and Japanese students were sent to study in the west.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: Modern industry first appeared in textiles, including cotton and especially silk, which was based in home workshops in rural areas.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: During the late 18th and early 19th centuries when the UK and parts of Western Europe began to industrialise, the US was primarily an agricultural and natural resource producing and processing economy. The building of roads and canals, the introduction of steamboats and the building of railroads were important for handling agricultural and natural resource products in the large and sparsely populated country of the period.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: Important American technological contributions during the period of the Industrial Revolution were the cotton gin and the development of a system for making interchangeable parts, the latter aided by the development of the milling machine in the US. The development of machine tools and the system of interchangeable parts was the basis for the rise of the US as the world's leading industrial nation in the late 19th century.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: Oliver Evans invented an automated flour mill in the mid-1780s that used control mechanisms and conveyors so that no labour was needed from the time grain was loaded into the elevator buckets until the flour was discharged into a wagon. This is considered to be the first modern materials handling system an important advance in the progress toward mass production.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: The United States originally used horse-powered machinery for small-scale applications such as grain milling, but eventually switched to water power after textile factories began being built in the 1790s. As a result, industrialisation was concentrated in New England and the Northeastern United States, which has fast-moving rivers. The newer water-powered production lines proved more economical than horse-drawn production. In the late 19th century steam-powered manufacturing overtook water-powered manufacturing, allowing the industry to spread to the Midwest.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: Thomas Somers and the Cabot Brothers founded the Beverly Cotton Manufactory in 1787, the first cotton mill in America, the largest cotton mill of its era, and a significant milestone in the research and development of cotton mills in the future. This mill was designed to use horsepower, but the operators quickly learned that the horse-drawn platform was economically unstable, and had economic losses for years. Despite the losses, the Manufactory served as a playground of innovation, both in turning a large amount of cotton, but also developing the water-powered milling structure used in Slater's Mill.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: In 1793, Samuel Slater (1768–1835) founded the Slater Mill at Pawtucket, Rhode Island. He had learned of the new textile technologies as a boy apprentice in Derbyshire, England, and defied laws against the emigration of skilled workers by leaving for New York in 1789, hoping to make money with his knowledge. After founding Slater's Mill, he went on to own 13 textile mills. Daniel Day established a wool carding mill in the Blackstone Valley at Uxbridge, Massachusetts in 1809, the third woollen mill established in the US (The first was in Hartford, Connecticut, and the second at Watertown, Massachusetts.) The John H. Chafee Blackstone River Valley National Heritage Corridor retraces the history of "America's Hardest-Working River', the Blackstone. The Blackstone River and its tributaries, which cover more than from Worcester, Massachusetts to Providence, Rhode Island, was the birthplace of America's Industrial Revolution. At its peak over 1,100 mills operated in this valley, including Slater's mill, and with it the earliest beginnings of America's Industrial and Technological Development.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: Merchant Francis Cabot Lowell from Newburyport, Massachusetts memorised the design of textile machines on his tour of British factories in 1810. Realising that the War of 1812 had ruined his import business but that demand for domestic finished cloth was emerging in America, on his return to the United States, he set up the Boston Manufacturing Company. Lowell and his partners built America's second cotton-to-cloth textile mill at Waltham, Massachusetts, second to the Beverly Cotton Manufactory. After his death in 1817, his associates built America's first planned factory town, which they named after him. This enterprise was capitalised in a public stock offering, one of the first uses of it in the United States. Lowell, Massachusetts, using of canals and delivered by the Merrimack River, is considered by some as a major contributor to the success of the American Industrial Revolution. The short-lived utopia-like Waltham-Lowell system was formed, as a direct response to the poor working conditions in Britain. However, by 1850, especially following the Great Famine of Ireland, the system had been replaced by poor immigrant labour.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: A major U.S. contribution to industrialisation was the development of techniques to make interchangeable parts from metal. Precision metal machining techniques were developed by the U.S. Department of War to make interchangeable parts for small firearms. The development work took place at the Federal Arsenals at Springfield Armory and Harpers Ferry Armory. Techniques for precision machining using machine tools included using fixtures to hold the parts in the proper position, jigs to guide the cutting tools and precision blocks and gauges to measure the accuracy. The milling machine, a fundamental machine tool, is believed to have been invented by Eli Whitney, who was a government contractor who built firearms as part of this program. Another important invention was the Blanchard lathe, invented by Thomas Blanchard. The Blanchard lathe, or pattern tracing lathe, was actually a shaper that could produce copies of wooden gun stocks. The use of machinery and the techniques for producing standardised and interchangeable parts became known as the American system of manufacturing.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: Precision manufacturing techniques made it possible to build machines that mechanised the shoe industry and the watch industry. The industrialisation of the watch industry started in 1854 also in Waltham, Massachusetts, at the Waltham Watch Company, with the development of machine tools, gauges and assembling methods adapted to the micro precision required for watches.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: Steel is often cited as the first of several new areas for industrial mass-production, which are said to characterise a "Second Industrial Revolution", beginning around 1850, although a method for mass manufacture of steel was not invented until the 1860s, when Sir Henry Bessemer invented a new furnace which could convert molten pig iron into steel in large quantities. However, it only became widely available in the 1870s after the process was modified to produce more uniform quality. Bessemer steel was being displaced by the open hearth furnace near the end of the 19th century.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: This Second Industrial Revolution gradually grew to include chemicals, mainly the chemical industries, petroleum (refining and distribution), and, in the 20th century, the automotive industry, and was marked by a transition of technological leadership from Britain to the United States and Germany.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: The increasing availability of economical petroleum products also reduced the importance of coal and further widened the potential for industrialisation.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: A new revolution began with electricity and electrification in the electrical industries. The introduction of hydroelectric power generation in the Alps enabled the rapid industrialisation of coal-deprived northern Italy, beginning in the 1890s.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: By the 1890s, industrialisation in these areas had created the first giant industrial corporations with burgeoning global interests, as companies like U.S. Steel, General Electric, Standard Oil and Bayer AG joined the railroad and ship companies on the world's stock markets.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: The New Industrialist movement advocates for increasing domestic manufacturing while reducing emphasis on a financial-based economy that relies on real estate and trading speculative assets. New Industrialism has been described as "supply-side progressivism" or embracing the idea of "Building More Stuff". New Industrialism developed after the China Shock that resulted in lost manufacturing jobs in the U.S. after China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001. The movement strengthened after the reduction of manufacturing jobs during the Great Recession and when the U.S. was not able to manufacture enough tests or facemasks during the COVID-19 pandemic. New Industrialism calls for building enough housing to satisfy demand in order to reduce the profit in land speculation, to invest in infrastructure, and to develop advanced technology to manufacture green energy for the world. New Industrialists believe that the United States isn’t building enough productive capital and should invest more into economic growth.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: The causes of the Industrial Revolution were complicated and remain a topic for debate. Geographic factors include Britain's vast mineral resources. In addition to metal ores, Britain had the highest quality coal reserves known at the time, as well as abundant water power, highly productive agriculture, and numerous seaports and navigable waterways.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: Some historians believe the Industrial Revolution was an outgrowth of social and institutional changes brought by the end of feudalism in Britain after the English Civil War in the 17th century, although feudalism began to break down after the Black Death of the mid 14th century, followed by other epidemics, until the population reached a low in the 14th century. This created labour shortages and led to falling food prices and a peak in real wages around 1500, after which population growth began reducing wages. Inflation caused by coinage debasement after 1540 followed by precious metals supply increasing from the Americas caused land rents (often long-term leases that transferred to heirs on death) to fall in real terms.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: The Enclosure movement and the British Agricultural Revolution made food production more efficient and less labour-intensive, forcing the farmers who could no longer be self-sufficient in agriculture into cottage industry, for example weaving, and in the longer term into the cities and the newly developed factories. The colonial expansion of the 17th century with the accompanying development of international trade, creation of financial markets and accumulation of capital are also cited as factors, as is the scientific revolution of the 17th century. A change in marrying patterns to getting married later made people able to accumulate more human capital during their youth, thereby encouraging economic development.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: Until the 1980s, it was universally believed by academic historians that technological innovation was the heart of the Industrial Revolution and the key enabling technology was the invention and improvement of the steam engine. Marketing professor Ronald Fullerton suggested that innovative marketing techniques, business practices, and competition also influenced changes in the manufacturing industry.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: Lewis Mumford has proposed that the Industrial Revolution had its origins in the Early Middle Ages, much earlier than most estimates. He explains that the model for standardised mass production was the printing press and that "the archetypal model for the industrial era was the clock". He also cites the monastic emphasis on order and time-keeping, as well as the fact that medieval cities had at their centre a church with bell ringing at regular intervals as being necessary precursors to a greater synchronisation necessary for later, more physical, manifestations such as the steam engine.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: The presence of a large domestic market should also be considered an important driver of the Industrial Revolution, particularly explaining why it occurred in Britain. In other nations, such as France, markets were split up by local regions, which often imposed tolls and tariffs on goods traded among them. Internal tariffs were abolished by Henry VIII of England, they survived in Russia until 1753, 1789 in France and 1839 in Spain.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: Governments' grant of limited monopolies to inventors under a developing patent system (the Statute of Monopolies in 1623) is considered an influential factor. The effects of patents, both good and ill, on the development of industrialisation are clearly illustrated in the history of the steam engine, the key enabling technology. In return for publicly revealing the workings of an invention the patent system rewarded inventors such as James Watt by allowing them to monopolise the production of the first steam engines, thereby rewarding inventors and increasing the pace of technological development. However, monopolies bring with them their own inefficiencies which may counterbalance, or even overbalance, the beneficial effects of publicising ingenuity and rewarding inventors. Watt's monopoly prevented other inventors, such as Richard Trevithick, William Murdoch, or Jonathan Hornblower, whom Boulton and Watt sued, from introducing improved steam engines, thereby retarding the spread of steam power.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: One question of active interest to historians is why the Industrial Revolution occurred in Europe and not in other parts of the world in the 18th century, particularly China, India, and the Middle East (which pioneered in shipbuilding, textile production, water mills, and much more in the period between 750 and 1100), or at other times like in Classical Antiquity or the Middle Ages. A recent account argued that Europeans have been characterized for thousands of years by a freedom-loving culture originating from the aristocratic societies of early Indo-European invaders. Many historians, however, have challenged this explanation as being not only Eurocentric, but also ignoring historical context. In fact, before the Industrial Revolution, "there existed something of a global economic parity between the most advanced regions in the world economy." These historians have suggested a number of other factors, including education, technological changes (see Scientific Revolution in Europe), "modern" government, "modern" work attitudes, ecology, and culture.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: China was the world's most technologically advanced country for many centuries; however, China stagnated economically and technologically and was surpassed by Western Europe before the Age of Discovery, by which time China banned imports and denied entry to foreigners. China was also a totalitarian society. China also heavily taxed transported goods. Modern estimates of per capita income in Western Europe in the late 18th century are of roughly 1,500 dollars in purchasing power parity (and Britain had a per capita income of nearly 2,000 dollars) whereas China, by comparison, had only 450 dollars. India was essentially feudal, politically fragmented and not as economically advanced as Western Europe.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: Historians such as David Landes and sociologists Max Weber and Rodney Stark credit the different belief systems in Asia and Europe with dictating where the revolution occurred. The religion and beliefs of Europe were largely products of Judaeo-Christianity and Greek thought. Conversely, Chinese society was founded on men like Confucius, Mencius, Han Feizi (Legalism), Lao Tzu (Taoism), and Buddha (Buddhism), resulting in very different worldviews. Other factors include the considerable distance of China's coal deposits, though large, from its cities as well as the then unnavigable Yellow River that connects these deposits to the sea.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: Regarding India, the Marxist historian Rajani Palme Dutt said: "The capital to finance the Industrial Revolution in India instead went into financing the Industrial Revolution in Britain." In contrast to China, India was split up into many competing kingdoms after the decline of the Mughal Empire, with the major ones in its aftermath including the Marathas, Sikhs, Bengal Subah, and Kingdom of Mysore. In addition, the economy was highly dependent on two sectorsagriculture of subsistence and cotton, and there appears to have been little technical innovation. It is believed that the vast amounts of wealth were largely stored away in palace treasuries by monarchs prior to the British take over.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: Economic historian Joel Mokyr argued that political fragmentation (the presence of a large number of European states) made it possible for heterodox ideas to thrive, as entrepreneurs, innovators, ideologues and heretics could easily flee to a neighboring state in the event that the one state would try to suppress their ideas and activities. This is what set Europe apart from the technologically advanced, large unitary empires such as China and India by providing "an insurance against economic and technological stagnation". China had both a printing press and movable type, and India had similar levels of scientific and technological achievement as Europe in 1700, yet the Industrial Revolution would occur in Europe, not China or India. In Europe, political fragmentation was coupled with an "integrated market for ideas" where Europe's intellectuals used the of Latin, had a shared intellectual basis in Europe's classical heritage and the pan-European institution of the Republic of Letters.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: In addition, Europe's monarchs desperately needed revenue, pushing them into alliances with their merchant classes. Small groups of merchants were granted monopolies and tax-collecting responsibilities in exchange for payments to the state. Located in a region "at the hub of the largest and most varied network of exchange in history", Europe advanced as the leader of the Industrial Revolution. In the Americas, Europeans found a windfall of silver, timber, fish, and maize, leading historian Peter Stearns to conclude that "Europe's Industrial Revolution stemmed in great part from Europe's ability to draw disproportionately on world resources."


title: Industrial Revolution

text: Modern capitalism originated in the Italian city-states around the end of the first millennium. The city-states were prosperous cities that were independent from feudal lords. They were largely republics whose governments were typically composed of merchants, manufacturers, members of guilds, bankers and financiers. The Italian city-states built a network of branch banks in leading western European cities and introduced double entry bookkeeping. Italian commerce was supported by schools that taught numeracy in financial calculations through abacus schools.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: Great Britain provided the legal and cultural foundations that enabled entrepreneurs to pioneer the Industrial Revolution. Key factors fostering this environment were:


title: Industrial Revolution

text: There were two main values that drove the Industrial Revolution in Britain. These values were self-interest and an entrepreneurial spirit. Because of these interests, many industrial advances were made that resulted in a huge increase in personal wealth and a consumer revolution. These advancements also greatly benefitted British society as a whole. Countries around the world started to recognise the changes and advancements in Britain and use them as an example to begin their own Industrial Revolutions.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: A debate sparked by Trinidadian politician and historian Eric Williams in his work "Capitalism and Slavery" (1944) concerned the role of slavery in financing the Industrial Revolution. Williams argued that European capital amassed from slavery was vital in the early years of the revolution, contending that the rise of industrial capitalism was the driving force behind abolitionism instead of humanitarian motivations. These arguments led to significant historiographical debates among historians, with American historian Seymour Drescher critiquing Williams' arguments in "Econocide" (1977).


title: Industrial Revolution

text: Instead, the greater liberalisation of trade from a large merchant base may have allowed Britain to produce and use emerging scientific and technological developments more effectively than countries with stronger monarchies, particularly China and Russia. Britain emerged from the Napoleonic Wars as the only European nation not ravaged by financial plunder and economic collapse, and having the only merchant fleet of any useful size (European merchant fleets were destroyed during the war by the Royal Navy). Britain's extensive exporting cottage industries also ensured markets were already available for many early forms of manufactured goods. The conflict resulted in most British warfare being conducted overseas, reducing the devastating effects of territorial conquest that affected much of Europe. This was further aided by Britain's geographical positionan island separated from the rest of mainland Europe.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: Another theory is that Britain was able to succeed in the Industrial Revolution due to the availability of key resources it possessed. It had a dense population for its small geographical size. Enclosure of common land and the related agricultural revolution made a supply of this labour readily available. There was also a local coincidence of natural resources in the North of England, the English Midlands, South Wales and the Scottish Lowlands. Local supplies of coal, iron, lead, copper, tin, limestone and water power resulted in excellent conditions for the development and expansion of industry. Also, the damp, mild weather conditions of the North West of England provided ideal conditions for the spinning of cotton, providing a natural starting point for the birth of the textiles industry.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: The stable political situation in Britain from around 1689 following the Glorious Revolution, and British society's greater receptiveness to change (compared with other European countries) can also be said to be factors favouring the Industrial Revolution. Peasant resistance to industrialisation was largely eliminated by the Enclosure movement, and the landed upper classes developed commercial interests that made them pioneers in removing obstacles to the growth of capitalism. (This point is also made in Hilaire Belloc's "The Servile State".)


title: Industrial Revolution

text: The French philosopher Voltaire wrote about capitalism and religious tolerance in his book on English society, "Letters on the English" (1733), noting why England at that time was more prosperous in comparison to the country's less religiously tolerant European neighbours. "Take a view of the Royal Exchange in London, a place more venerable than many courts of justice, where the representatives of all nations meet for the benefit of mankind. There the Jew, the Mahometan [Muslim], and the Christian transact together, as though they all professed the same religion, and give the name of infidel to none but bankrupts. There the Presbyterian confides in the Anabaptist, and the Churchman depends on the Quaker's word. If one religion only were allowed in England, the Government would very possibly become arbitrary; if there were but two, the people would cut one another's throats; but as there are such a multitude, they all live happy and in peace."


title: Industrial Revolution

text: Britain's population grew 280% 1550–1820, while the rest of Western Europe grew 50–80%. Seventy percent of European urbanisation happened in Britain 1750–1800. By 1800, only the Netherlands was more urbanised than Britain. This was only possible because coal, coke, imported cotton, brick and slate had replaced wood, charcoal, flax, peat and thatch. The latter compete with land grown to feed people while mined materials do not. Yet more land would be freed when chemical fertilisers replaced manure and horse's work was mechanised. A workhorse needs for fodder while even early steam engines produced four times more mechanical energy.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: In 1700, five-sixths of the coal mined worldwide was in Britain, while the Netherlands had none; so despite having Europe's best transport, lowest taxes, and most urbanised, well-paid, and literate population, it failed to industrialise. In the 18th century, it was the only European country whose cities and population shrank. Without coal, Britain would have run out of suitable river sites for mills by the 1830s. Based on science and experimentation from the continent, the steam engine was developed specifically for pumping water out of mines, many of which in Britain had been mined to below the water table. Although extremely inefficient they were economical because they used unsaleable coal. Iron rails were developed to transport coal, which was a major economic sector in Britain.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: Economic historian Robert Allen has argued that high wages, cheap capital and very cheap energy in Britain made it the ideal place for the industrial revolution to occur. These factors made it vastly more profitable to invest in research and development, and to put technology to use in Britain than other societies. However, two 2018 studies in "The Economic History Review" showed that wages were not particularly high in the British spinning sector or the construction sector, casting doubt on Allen's explanation. A 2022 study in the "Journal of Political Economy" by Morgan Kelly, Joel Mokyr, and Cormac O Grada found that industrialization happened in areas with low wages and high mechanical skills, whereas literacy, banks and proximity to coal had little explanatory power.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: Knowledge of innovation was spread by several means. Workers who were trained in the technique might move to another employer or might be poached. A common method was for someone to make a study tour, gathering information where he could. During the whole of the Industrial Revolution and for the century before, all European countries and America engaged in study-touring; some nations, like Sweden and France, even trained civil servants or technicians to undertake it as a matter of state policy. In other countries, notably Britain and America, this practice was carried out by individual manufacturers eager to improve their own methods. Study tours were common then, as now, as was the keeping of travel diaries. Records made by industrialists and technicians of the period are an incomparable source of information about their methods.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: Another means for the spread of innovation was by the network of informal philosophical societies, like the Lunar Society of Birmingham, in which members met to discuss 'natural philosophy' ("i.e." science) and often its application to manufacturing. The Lunar Society flourished from 1765 to 1809, and it has been said of them, "They were, if you like, the revolutionary committee of that most far reaching of all the eighteenth-century revolutions, the Industrial Revolution". Other such societies published volumes of proceedings and transactions. For example, the London-based Royal Society of Arts published an illustrated volume of new inventions, as well as papers about them in its annual "Transactions".


title: Industrial Revolution

text: There were publications describing technology. Encyclopaedias such as Harris's "Lexicon Technicum" (1704) and Abraham Rees's "Cyclopaedia" (1802–1819) contain much of value. "Cyclopaedia" contains an enormous amount of information about the science and technology of the first half of the Industrial Revolution, very well illustrated by fine engravings. Foreign printed sources such as the "Descriptions des Arts et Métiers" and Diderot's "Encyclopédie" explained foreign methods with fine engraved plates.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: Periodical publications about manufacturing and technology began to appear in the last decade of the 18th century, and many regularly included notice of the latest patents. Foreign periodicals, such as the "Annales des Mines", published accounts of travels made by French engineers who observed British methods on study tours.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: Another theory is that the British advance was due to the presence of an entrepreneurial class which believed in progress, technology and hard work. The existence of this class is often linked to the Protestant work ethic (see Max Weber) and the particular status of the Baptists and the dissenting Protestant sects, such as the Quakers and Presbyterians that had flourished with the English Civil War. Reinforcement of confidence in the rule of law, which followed establishment of the prototype of constitutional monarchy in Britain in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and the emergence of a stable financial market there based on the management of the national debt by the Bank of England, contributed to the capacity for, and interest in, private financial investment in industrial ventures.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: Dissenters found themselves barred or discouraged from almost all public offices, as well as education at England's only two universities at the time (although dissenters were still free to study at Scotland's four universities). When the restoration of the monarchy took place and membership in the official Anglican Church became mandatory due to the Test Act, they thereupon became active in banking, manufacturing and education. The Unitarians, in particular, were very involved in education, by running Dissenting Academies, where, in contrast to the universities of Oxford and Cambridge and schools such as Eton and Harrow, much attention was given to mathematics and the sciences – areas of scholarship vital to the development of manufacturing technologies.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: Historians sometimes consider this social factor to be extremely important, along with the nature of the national economies involved. While members of these sects were excluded from certain circles of the government, they were considered fellow Protestants, to a limited extent, by many in the middle class, such as traditional financiers or other businessmen. Given this relative tolerance and the supply of capital, the natural outlet for the more enterprising members of these sects would be to seek new opportunities in the technologies created in the wake of the scientific revolution of the 17th century.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: The industrial revolution has been criticised for causing ecological collapse, mental illness, pollution and detrimental social systems. It has also been criticised for valuing profits and corporate growth over life and wellbeing. Multiple movements have arisen which reject aspects of the industrial revolution, such as the Amish or primitivists.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: Humanists and individualists criticise the Industrial revolution for mistreating women and children and turning men into work machines that lacked autonomy. Critics of the Industrial revolution promoted a more interventionist state and formed new organizations to promote human rights.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: Primitivism argues that the Industrial Revolution have created an un-natural frame of society and the world in which humans need to adapt to an un-natural urban landscape in which humans are perpetual cogs without personal autonomy.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: Certain primitivists argue for a return to pre-industrial society, while others argue that technology such as modern medicine, and agriculture are all positive for humanity assuming they controlled and serve humanity and have no effect on the natural environment.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: The Industrial Revolution has been criticised for leading to immense ecological and habitat destruction, certain studies state that over 95% of species have gone extinct since humanity became the dominant species on earth. It has also led to immense decrease in the biodiversity of life on earth. The Industrial revolution has been stated as is inherently unsustainable and will lead to eventual collapse of society, mass hunger, starvation, and resource scarcity.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: The Anthropocene is a proposed epoch or mass extinction coming from humanity (Anthro is the Greek root for humanity). Since the start of the Industrial revolution humanity has permanently changed the earth, such as immense decrease in biodiversity, and mass extinction caused by the Industrial revolution. The effects include permanent changes to the earth's atmosphere and soil, forests, the mass destruction of the Industrial revolution has led to catastrophic impacts on the earth. Most organisms are unable to adapt leading to mass extinction with the remaining undergoing evolutionary rescue, as a result of the Industrial revolution.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: Permanent changes in the distribution of organisms from human influence will become identifiable in the geologic record. Researchers have documented the movement of many species into regions formerly too cold for them, often at rates faster than initially expected. This has occurred in part as a result of changing climate, but also in response to farming and fishing, and to the accidental introduction of non-native species to new areas through global travel. The ecosystem of the entire Black Sea may have changed during the last 2000 years as a result of nutrient and silica input from eroding deforested lands along the Danube River.


title: Industrial Revolution

text: During the Industrial Revolution, an intellectual and artistic hostility towards the new industrialisation developed, associated with the Romantic movement. Romanticism revered the traditionalism of rural life and recoiled against the upheavals caused by industrialization, urbanization and the wretchedness of the working classes. Its major exponents in English included the artist and poet William Blake and poets William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley. The movement stressed the importance of "nature" in art and language, in contrast to "monstrous" machines and factories; the "Dark satanic mills" of Blake's poem "And did those feet in ancient time". Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" reflected concerns that scientific progress might be two-edged. French Romanticism likewise was highly critical of industry.


title: Fiji

text: Fiji ( , ,; , ; Fiji Hindi: फ़िजी, "Fijī"), officially the Republic of Fiji, is an island country in Melanesia, part of Oceania in the South Pacific Ocean. It lies about north-northeast of New Zealand. Fiji consists of an archipelago of more than 330 islands—of which about 110 are permanently inhabited—and more than 500 islets, amounting to a total land area of about . The most outlying island group is Ono-i-Lau. About 87% of the total population of live on the two major islands, Viti Levu and Vanua Levu. About three-quarters of Fijians live on Viti Levu's coasts: either in the capital city of Suva; or in smaller urban centres such as Nadi—where tourism is the major local industry; or in Lautoka, where the sugar-cane industry is dominant. The interior of Viti Levu is sparsely inhabited because of its terrain.


title: Fiji

text: The majority of Fiji's islands were formed by volcanic activity starting around 150 million years ago. Some geothermal activity still occurs today on the islands of Vanua Levu and Taveuni. The geothermal systems on Viti Levu are non-volcanic in origin and have low-temperature surface discharges (of between roughly ).


title: Fiji

text: Humans have lived in Fiji since the second millennium BCE—first Austronesians and later Melanesians, with some Polynesian influences. Europeans first visited Fiji in the 17th century. In 1874, after a brief period in which Fiji was an independent kingdom, the British established the Colony of Fiji. Fiji operated as a Crown colony until 1970, when it gained independence and became known as the Dominion of Fiji. In 1987, following a series of coups d'état, the military government that had taken power declared it a republic. In a 2006 coup, Commodore Frank Bainimarama seized power. In 2009, the Fijian High Court ruled that the military leadership was unlawful. At that point, President Ratu Josefa Iloilo, whom the military had retained as the nominal head of state, formally abrogated the 1997 Constitution and re-appointed Bainimarama as interim prime minister. Later in 2009, Ratu Epeli Nailatikau succeeded Iloilo as president. On 17 September 2014, after years of delays, a democratic election took place. Bainimarama's FijiFirst party won 59.2% of the vote, and international observers deemed the election credible.


title: Fiji

text: Fiji has one of the most developed economies in the Pacific through its abundant forest, mineral, and fish resources. The currency is the Fijian dollar, with the main sources of foreign exchange being the tourist industry, remittances from Fijians working abroad, bottled water exports, and sugar cane. The Ministry of Local Government and Urban Development supervises Fiji's local government, which takes the form of city and town councils.


title: Fiji

text: The name of Fiji's main island, Viti Levu, served as the origin of the name "Fiji", though the common English pronunciation is based on that of Fiji's island neighbours in Tonga. An official account of the emergence of the name states:


title: Fiji

text: Fijians first impressed themselves on European consciousness through the writings of the members of the expeditions of Cook who met them in Tonga. They were described as formidable warriors and ferocious cannibals, builders of the finest vessels in the Pacific, but not great sailors. They inspired awe amongst the Tongans, and all their Manufactures, especially bark cloth and clubs, were highly valued and much in demand. They called their home Viti, but the Tongans called it Fisi, and it was by this foreign pronunciation, Fiji, first promulgated by Captain James Cook, that these islands are now known.


title: Fiji

text: "Feejee", the Anglicised spelling of the Tongan pronunciation, occurred in accounts and other writings by missionaries and other travellers visiting Fiji until the late-19th century.


title: Fiji

text: Pottery art from Fijian towns shows that Fiji was settled by Austronesian peoples by at least 3500 to 1000 BC, with Melanesians following around a thousand years later, although there are still many open questions about the specific dates and patterns of human migration into Fiji and many other Pacific islands.


title: Fiji

text: It is believed that either the Lapita people or the ancestors of the Polynesians settled the islands first, but not much is known of what became of them after the Melanesians arrived; the old culture may have had some influence on the new one, and archaeological evidence shows that some of the migrants moved on to Samoa, Tonga and even Hawai'i.


title: Fiji

text: Archeological evidence also shows signs of human settlement on Moturiki Island beginning at least by 600 BC and possibly as far back as 900 BC.


title: Fiji

text: Although some aspects of Fijian culture are similar to the Melanesian culture of the western Pacific, Fijian culture has a stronger connection to the older Polynesian cultures. The evidence is clear that there was trade between Fiji and neighbouring archipelagos long before Europeans made contact with Fiji. For example: The remains of ancient canoes made from native Fijian trees have been found in Tonga; the language of Fiji's Lau Islands contains Tongan words; and ancient pots that had been made in Fiji have been found in Samoa and even as far away as the Marquesas Islands.


title: Fiji

text: In the 10th century, the Tu'i Tonga Empire was established in Tonga, and Fiji came within its sphere of influence. The Tongan influence brought Polynesian customs and language into Fiji. That empire began to decline in the 13th century.