What was the Industrial Revolution?
The Industrial Revolution (c. 1760–1840) was the transition from agrarian, handcraft economies to machine-driven factory production, beginning in Britain. Powered by the steam engine, coal, and iron, it transformed manufacturing, transportation, and daily life, creating the modern capitalist economy and reshaping class structures worldwide.
The Industrial Revolution was the most profound economic transformation since humans first domesticated plants and animals during the Neolithic Revolution. Beginning in Britain around 1760 and spreading unevenly across Europe and North America over the following century, it replaced muscle, wind, and water power with fossil-fuel-driven machinery and reorganized production from small workshops into large factories.
The revolution began in the textile industry. Inventions like the spinning jenny, water frame, and power loom mechanized the production of cotton cloth, multiplying output while slashing costs. But the truly transformative technology was the steam engine, refined by James Watt in the 1760s and 1770s. Steam power was not tied to rivers or wind — it could be placed anywhere coal was available, enabling the concentration of production in factories and the growth of industrial cities like Manchester, Birmingham, and Leeds.
The consequences rippled through every dimension of human life. Transportation was revolutionized by steamships and railways, shrinking distances and creating national and international markets. Urbanization accelerated dramatically — by 1851, Britain became the first country in history where more people lived in cities than in the countryside. New social classes emerged: an industrial bourgeoisie that owned the factories and an industrial proletariat that labored in them, often under appalling conditions. Child labor, fourteen-hour workdays, dangerous machinery, and squalid housing defined early industrial life for millions.
The Industrial Revolution also created the modern capitalist economy — private ownership of the means of production, wage labor, market competition, and the relentless drive for efficiency and profit. It generated unprecedented wealth, but distributed it with brutal inequality. The social tensions it created would fuel reform movements, trade unions, and revolutionary ideologies — including Marxism — that would shape the next two centuries of world history.