Industrial Revolution: origins, innovations, and global impact

The term Industrial Revolution originally came into use as an analogy to the French Revolution. The changes in the forms of industrial production, especially in Great Britain, appeared to be of similar epochal significance to the political changes in France. The term was used in this sense, for example, in a report in the newspaper Le Moniteur Universel in 1827, and likewise by Adolphe Jérôme Blanqui in 1837. However, Blanqui's short formula, "No sooner had the brain of the two men of genius Watt and Arkwright sprouted than the Industrial Revolution took possession of England", is considered incompatible with the current state of economic history research: "The view of the Industrial Revolution as a heroic story of great inventors is in urgent need of revision", wrote Pierenkemper in 1996.

The term industrial revolution was first used as a process and epochal term in 1839 by the Belgian economist and publicist Natalis Briavoinne in his two-volume work De l'Industrie en Belgique ("On Industry in Belgium"). Outside the Francophone-speaking world, the first mentions are found in 1843 in Wilhelm Schulz's The Movement of Production and in 1845 in Friedrich Engels's The Condition of the Working Class in England. Engels also compared the political revolution in France with industrial development in Britain. For him, the industrial revolution was an epochal turning point: "The industrial revolution has the same significance for England as the political revolution had for France and the philosophical revolution for Germany".

While the term was limited here to the industrial development originating in England, Schulz had already applied it to earlier epochs. In this, he was followed above all by the Anglo-Saxon tradition, e.g. John Stuart Mill, who used the term in 1848 to describe any rapid technological and social change. Arnold Toynbee (1852-1883) made the term generally widespread, and was therefore long credited with coining the term. In the 20th century, the understanding of the term in the sense of "age of industrialization" became more prominent.

Historians commonly use the term industrial revolution to refer to what happened on the British mainland between about 1750 and 1850, while otherwise the term industrialization is used when an economy has a steady per capita growth in real output of more than 1.5 percent over several decades.

It has proved rather doubtful to try to determine specific individual causes of the Industrial Revolution. Quite a few of these also existed elsewhere, for example in the Netherlands, in northern France or in central Japan, so that the reverse question has also been asked as to why such an upheaval did not occur in one of these regions.

For the United Kingdom, a set of conditions can be identified within which individual factors were specifically significant. These include:

• a preceding period of peace that lasted many decades;
• a single economic territory without customs barriers in an insular situation;
• large-scale, relatively productive agriculture with a surplus of labour;
• a geography favourable to traffic and transport and rich, easily exploitable coal deposits;
• the colonial possessions and extensive colonial trade (partly as barter trade) that provided for the import of raw materials and sales markets;
• the developed precision mechanics and toolmaking;
• a partially widespread entrepreneurial mentality, especially in some religious milieus.

Of particular importance for the continuous industrial upswing was, on the one hand, the domestic demand for upmarket goods, which was based on relatively broad circles, and, on the other hand, the already advanced overseas trade, especially with North America, as well as the formation of a technical culture based on a stream of innovation flanked by British patent law. Although there were also a large number of energetic inventors in France, they mainly presented their innovations to other scholars, while the English innovations often flowed directly into industrial production.

Even on the eve of the Industrial Revolution, the standard of living in Western Europe was widespread and well above subsistence level, and was considerable in comparison with other regions of the world. This relative wealth was particularly pronounced in Britain, "a product of 'primitive' accumulation that had already lasted at least two hundred years." According to Buchheim, the pre-industrial productivity advances of the British economy in the eighteenth century were for the first time so great that, despite a growing population, there remained a surplus of "free" resources that could be used to initiate a new kind of sustained growth process. This opened up a way out of the Malthusian poverty trap in the long run. The mild climate in England favoured the process; there were fewer famines (often caused by cold waves, heat waves and other climatic extremes) than in other parts of Europe.