The Industrial Revolution, which began in Britain in the second half of the 18th century and spread across much of Europe and North America during the 19th, represents one of the most consequential transformations in human history. Within a few generations, societies that had for millennia been organised around small-scale agriculture and craft production came to depend on factories, steam power and global networks of trade. Understanding why this change began when and where it did remains a central problem for economic historians.
A commonly cited precondition is the expansion of British agriculture in the 17th and 18th centuries. Enclosure of common land and the introduction of new crops and rotations raised productivity, which allowed a steadily smaller rural workforce to feed a steadily larger urban one. Surplus labour migrated to towns, where it could be employed in new textile mills and ironworks. At the same time, overseas trade, protected by a powerful navy, supplied raw cotton and generated markets for finished goods.
Technology was equally decisive. A series of innovations in textile manufacture, beginning with the flying shuttle and culminating in the power loom, multiplied the output of a single worker many times over. James Watt's improved steam engine, patented in 1769, provided a reliable source of power that no longer depended on rivers and freed factories to be built anywhere coal could be mined. Railways, from the 1830s onwards, linked these factories to ports and cities, compressing distances that had previously taken days to traverse.
The social consequences, however, were far from uniformly positive. Working conditions in early factories were often brutal, with long hours, dangerous machinery and widespread child labour. Cities grew faster than sanitation and housing could follow, producing epidemics of cholera and other diseases. Only gradually, through a combination of trade-union activity, government legislation and continued economic growth, did wages and living standards rise for the majority. The revolution thus brought both unprecedented material prosperity and profound social disruption - a combination that continues to characterise the spread of industrialisation elsewhere in the world.