420 Chapter 22
between 1750 and 1850, although a General Enclosure
Act of 1801 served as a model for most others. By these
acts, the commons lands were sold in some villages and
distributed among the landowners in others. This led to
the consolidation of individual strips into single farms
and the failure of small farms where the owners had de-
pended upon the commons. The resulting farms were
larger than the sum of the strips because they incorpo-
rated the paths that had separated the strips, and they
became larger yet as uncompetitive small farms were
absorbed. By the early nineteenth century, two-thirds
of British farmland was in large estates. Enclosure raised
agricultural production as well as controversy. The ben-
efits were larger than simply that more land was put un-
der the plow and therefore more food was produced.
Enclosure of the commons meant the segregation of
herds of livestock, reducing disease transmission and
permitting selective breeding. The breeding experi-
ments conducted with sheep by Robert Bakewell, for
example, saw the average weight of sheep brought to
market rise from twenty-eight pounds in 1710 to eighty
pounds in 1795. Larger farms encouraged crop rotation
because the entire acreage did not have to be planted in
the same subsistence grain for the farm family. Consoli-
dation of the open field strips meant that farm equip-
ment did not have to be moved great distances.
Enclosure provoked opposition because of the hu-
man effects on the rural population. Marginal farmers
suffered worst. Without strips of common farmland,
many families could not survive by agriculture. Others
faced failure because they had depended upon the com-
mons to graze a pig or a few geese. As one angry poet
put it, “The law locks up the man or woman who steals
the goose from off the Common; But leaves the greater
villain loose who steals the common from the goose.”
Historians have debated the amount of suffering caused
by enclosure, and they have generally agreed that it is a
question of long-term gains for most of society versus
short-term suffering for much of society.
Handcraft, Cottage Industry,
and the Steam Engine
The agricultural revolution, the vital revolution, and the
population explosion of late eighteenth- and nine-
teenth-century Europe were all important factors in
making possible a dramatic transformation of the Euro-
pean economy known as industrialization, in which
manufactured goods began to replace agriculture as the
dominant sector of the economy. Large-scale factory
production began to replace handcraft manufacture;
machinery and inanimate power sources began to re-
place human labor. Such large-scale industrialization
did not happen suddenly or universally—factories, tra-
ditional production, and agriculture coexisted within a
country, and usually within a region. Nonetheless, in-
dustrialization was such a dramatic change that con-
temporaries and historians (especially in Britain) have
sometimes called it the industrial revolution.
The pressure of growing population demanded
(and rewarded) great increases in the production of es-
sential goods, such as the woolen and cotton textiles
needed for clothing. Such goods had long been made
by traditional handwork methods of spinning thread
and weaving cloth. This handwork production of tex-
tiles had spawned a form of manufacturing known as
cottage industry, in which entrepreneurial middlemen
engaged people to produce textiles in their homes
(hence “cottage industry”), provided them with raw ma-
terials, paid them for finished work, then transported
the goods to town for sale. This form of employment in
home spinning and weaving lasted throughout the
nineteenth century in some regions, but beginning in
the mid-eighteenth century, technological innovations
replaced human skills and power with machines. Indus-
trialization was the broad process by which machines,
operated by hundreds of people in urban factories, re-
placed the production of handcraft workers in small
shops and cottages.
The age of industrialization was opened by a single
new technology—the steam engine, which provided
the power source for the innovations that followed.
The principle of steam power was not new. It had been
known in the ancient world and had long been the sub-
ject of study and experimentation. No single person in-
vented the steam engine, although popular culture in
English-speaking countries credits James Watt, while
the French credit Denis Papin. In reality, the steam en-
gine was the culmination of the work of many people.
The first effective machines were developed in the
1770s by Watt, a maker of precision instruments for
scientists at the University of Glasgow.
The initial use of the steam engine was in mining.
Steam-powered pumps such as the Newcomen Engine
could remove water from mine shafts that passed below
the water table. This permitted much deeper mining,
which in turn facilitated vastly greater coal extraction;
the coal then could be burned to operate more steam
engines. As coal became more plentiful and less expen-
sive, and as steam engine technology proved successful,
the engine found other applications. Steam-powered
bellows at forges changed metallurgy, producing more