A History of Modern Europe - From the Renaissance to the Present

The Beginnings of the Industrial Revolution 371

houses, where skilled workers and their apprentices used stronger, more reli­
able hand-operated machinery or tools.
The factory, however, slowly became the symbol of the new' industrial
age in England. One of Arkwright’s textile mills in the early 1770s had 200
workers, and ten years later it had four times that number. An ironworks
employed more than 1,000 workers by 1770, a concentration previously
seen only in great shipyards. In 1774, Watt and Matthew Boulton (1728—
1809), a toymaker, went into business in Birmingham producing engines
and machine parts in the largest factory in the world. It was not a single
structure but rather a number of adjacent workshops, w'hich drew on the
work of about 20,000 men, women, and children in the countryside around
Birmingham.
The development of the factory at first had relatively little to do with tech­
nological imperatives. Manufacturers preferred bringing workers under one
roof so that they could more easily supervise them, imposing the discipline
of factory work on people used to having their schedule defined by the ris­
ing and setting of the sun and the passing of the seasons. When a defective
piece of pottery emerged from the kilns, the pottery manufacturer Josiah
Wedgwood (1730-1795) would storm over and stomp on it with his wooden
leg, chiding his workers. “Thou shalt not be idle” was Wedgwood’s eleventh
commandment; “Everything gives way to experiment” his favorite maxim.
His goal was to train his workers so thoroughly as “to make such machines
of the men as cannot err.” Putting workers in factories facilitated such a
goal. By the middle of the eighteenth century, factory manufacturing had
begun to alter the northern English landscape. “From the Establishment of
Manufacturers, we see Hamlets swell into Villages, and Villages into Towns,”
exclaimed a gentleman in the 1770s.

Expanding British Economy

The production of manufactured goods doubled during the last half of the

eighteenth century in Britain. Cotton made up 40 percent of British exports

by the end of the century. India’s domination of the world market for tex­

tiles ended. The production of iron followed in importance, along with wool

and worsteds, linen, silk, copper, paper, cutlery, and the booming building

trades.

Despite its relatively small size, Britain’s significant economic advan­

tages over the nations of the continent help explain why the manufactur­

ing revolution first began there. Unlike the German or Italian states,

Britain was unified politically. People living in England spoke basically the

same language. France and the Italian and German states still had internal

tariffs that made trade more costly, whereas in Britain there were no inter­

nal tariffs once the union between England and Scotland had been

achieved in 1707. Weights and measures in Britain had largely been

standardized.