The Industrial Revolution

Essential Questions

• In what ways were living conditions already improving in Europe in the two centuries before the Industrial Revolution itself got under way? 

• What factors made England the home of the first phase of the Industrial Revolution, as opposed to other parts of Europe? 

• Why were the key inventions and technical developments of the early Industrial Revolution so heavily centered on the textile industry?

Essential Questions (continued)

• Why was the development of the steam engine of such central importance to the birth of the Industrial Revolution? 

• Why were conditions in the earliest factories in industrial England so bad?  

• How successful were efforts in the 1800s to reform factory conditions and improve the position of workers and other poor people during the Industrial Revolution?

Prelude: The Population Explosion

• Famine • War• Disease • Stricter quarantine

measures • The elimination of the

black rat

The hand of a person infected with smallpox

Further Reasons for Population Growth

• Advances in medicine, such as inoculation against smallpox

• Improvements in sanitation promoted better public health

• An increase in the food supply meant fewer famines and epidemics, especially as transportation improved

The enclosure division of the town of Thetford, England, around 1760

The Enclosure Movement

In the second half of the 17th century, the English gentry (landowners) passed the Enclosure Acts, prohibiting peasants’ access to common lands.

Innovations: The Threshing Machine

The Seed Drill

Jethro Tull (1674–1741)

Inventor of the seed drill

Townshend’s Four-Field System

Charles “Turnip” Townshend Crop rotation example