The Industrial Revolution, which began in Britain in the second half of the 18th century, was one of the greatest transformations in human history. In less than a century craft and farm work gave way to factories and machines, human and animal power was replaced by coal and steam, and millions of people moved from the countryside to the towns. The country became the "workshop of the world", and the British model then spread to Europe, America and the rest of the planet.
Why Britain?
Historians point to a combination of factors. Britain had large deposits of coal and iron close to each other and to the sea; a network of navigable rivers and ports; an agriculture already modernised by the enclosure of common land and new techniques, producing more food with fewer hands and pushing rural workers towards the towns; capital accumulated through international and colonial trade, including the slave trade; a developed banking system; stable institutions that protected property and patents; a relatively open society in which craftsmen, engineers and entrepreneurs could grow rich; and a scientific and practical culture fostered by circles such as the Lunar Society of Birmingham.
The inventions
The revolution began in the cotton industry. John Kay's flying shuttle (1733), James Hargreaves's spinning jenny (about 1764), Richard Arkwright's water frame (1769), with which the first modern mill opened at Cromford in 1771, Samuel Crompton's mule (1779) and Edmund Cartwright's power loom (1785) multiplied the output of yarn and cloth. Meanwhile Abraham Darby at Coalbrookdale had learned to smelt iron with coke instead of charcoal (1709), and in 1779 the world's first cast-iron bridge, the Iron Bridge, was built in the same valley.
At the heart of the transformation was the steam engine. Thomas Newcomen had built one in 1712 to pump water from mines, but it was the Scot James Watt, with the separate condenser patented in 1769, who made it efficient and able to drive any machine; from 1775 he produced it in Birmingham with Matthew Boulton. Steam freed factories from dependence on watercourses and allowed them to be built in towns, close to the workforce.
Canals and railways
To carry coal and goods a dense network of canals was dug, starting with the Bridgewater Canal in Manchester (1761). Then came the railways: in 1825 the Stockton and Darlington opened, the first public steam railway, and in 1830 the Liverpool and Manchester, the first inter-city line with regular passenger trains, with locomotives by George and Robert Stephenson. Within a few decades thousands of kilometres of track crossed the country, and journey times shrank dramatically. In 1851 the Great Exhibition in London, in the iron and glass Crystal Palace, celebrated Britain's industrial supremacy before the world.
The social cost
Economic growth came at a very high human cost. Industrial towns such as Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham and Glasgow grew chaotically, with overcrowded districts lacking sewers and clean water, where cholera and typhus spread. In factories and mines people worked twelve or fourteen hours a day, and child labour was widespread. In 1851 Britain became the first country in the world where more than half the population lived in towns. Protest was not lacking: the Luddites smashed machinery between 1811 and 1816, in 1819 cavalry charged the crowd at Peterloo, and in the 1830s and 1840s the Chartist movement demanded universal male suffrage. Friedrich Engels described the condition of Manchester's workers in 1845. Gradually the first Factory Acts arrived (from 1833), along with laws on child labour and public health, and the birth of trade unions and the co-operative movement.
Places of the Industrial Revolution
The UK preserves an extraordinary industrial heritage, much of it protected by UNESCO: Ironbridge Gorge, the mills of the Derwent Valley, the model village of Saltaire near Leeds, New Lanark in Scotland, the industrial landscape of Blaenavon in Wales and the Cornish mining landscape. Also worth visiting are Manchester's Science and Industry Museum, the Black Country Living Museum near Birmingham and the open-air museum at Beamish in the North East.
See also the UK economy, the British Empire, Liverpool and Newcastle.