Industrial Revolution
▶ Explore on the mapThe Industrial Revolution was the shift, beginning in Britain in the eighteenth century, from an economy based on agriculture and handicraft to one driven by machines, factories and fossil fuel. Wool and then cotton spinning were reorganised: the spinning jenny, the water frame and Crompton's mule multiplied output, and Edmund Cartwright's power loom mechanised weaving. James Watt's separate condenser made the steam engine efficient enough to pump water from deep mines and then to drive mills, while Abraham Darby's coke-smelted iron and Henry Cort's puddling process supplied cheap metal for machines, bridges and rails. Coal output soared, canals and then railways moved goods, and the population shifted into towns such as Manchester, Glasgow and Leeds, where wages, housing and child labour shocked observers like Friedrich Engels. Factory discipline reorganised time itself around the clock rather than the seasons. After 1830 the railway mania spread the system abroad, and Belgium, France, the United States and Germany industrialised in turn, each adapting the British pattern. The revolution raised living standards over the long run while creating new poverty and pollution, and it ended the assumption that population must always outstrip food. Child labour in the mills was regulated only slowly, by acts of Parliament from 1833.