Western Civilization - History Of European Society

Industrialization and the Social and Economic Structure of Europe 423

The woolen industry, which had older traditions,
resisted the innovations that transformed the cotton in-
dustry and mechanized more slowly. Most wool re-
mained handloomed in 1840. Cotton, however, was a
new industry without such resistance to change. It even
attracted innovation, such as patents to make cotton
velvet, to create ribbed cloth for stockings, or to print
patterns on cotton cloth. Consequently, cottons sur-
passed woolens as Britain’s foremost export in 1803; by
1830 cotton—a plant not native to the British isles—
accounted for more than 50 percent of Britain’s foreign
trade income and more than half of the world’s cotton
cloth came from Britain.

The Railroad Age

The new economy required improved transportation.

Food had to be transported to factory towns in far

greater quantities. Iron, coal, machinery, raw wool, and

cotton had to be brought together. Manufactured

goods had to be distributed. People had to be moved in

large numbers. The railroad solved these problems, but

the first steam locomotive was not built until 1804, and

the first public railway—the Stockton-to-Darlington

Railway—did not open until 1825. Railroads were the

culmination of industrialization in Britain, not a cause

of it.

Transportation in Britain had improved signifi-

cantly in the century before 1825. The trip between

London and Edinburgh that took twelve days in 1734

required four days in 1762 and forty hours on the eve

of the railroad age. The chief developments in eigh-

teenth-century transportation involved canal, road,

turnpike, and bridge building. Britain had two thousand

kilometers of canals in 1700 and sixty-five hundred

kilometers in 1830. Transportation on rivers and these

canals was the most efficient means of moving great

weights, such as shipments of iron and coal. The devel-

opment of canals serving Manchester cut the cost of

coal to factory owners by 50 percent in the late eigh-

teenth century, so the textile boom there owed more to

waterways than to railways. Canals and rivers, however,

had one major drawback: They sometimes froze in the

winter, ending the distribution of goods.

Many technical advances made the British trans-

portation system the best in Europe. An ironmaster

named Abraham Darby III, whose family had built the

world’s largest blast furnaces and foundry, constructed

the world’s first iron bridge, a 295-foot-long “wonder of

the age” that amazed gawking tourists and changed

transportation. Similarly, a Scottish engineer named

John MacAdam improved roads—subsequently called

macadamized roads—by cambering them for drainage

and paving them with crushed stones. (The black-

topped road treatment known as macadam was named

in his honor, but it was not yet in use.) The improve-

ment in highway transportation was so dramatic that

the coach companies began to remove the qualification

“God Willing” from their time schedules.

The railroad was the culmination of these trends

and was so successful that it ended the age of canals

and coaching. Railroads began with an old idea bor-

rowed from the coal mines. Since the seventeenth cen-

tury, collieries had used wooden rails to guide

horse-drawn coal wagons; by the 1760s many mines

were switching to cast iron rails. Richard Trevithick, an

SCOTLAND

London

BradfordLeeds

Liverpool

Manchester

Bristol

Birmingham

Glasgow

Sheffield

Iron

Hardware

Iron

Tin and

copper mining

Machinery

Consumer goods

Iron

Machinery

Pottery

Cotton and woolen textiles

Machinery

Iron

North

Sea

0 50 100 Miles

0 50 100 150 Kilometer

Exposed coalfields

Industrial areas

Principal railroads

Towns with over 20,000

people are shown:

50,000

400,000

2,400,000

Cities with over 100,000

people are labeled.

MAP 22.2

The Industrial Revolution in Britain