In 1776, John Wei Jinsheng used Watt's engine, steam blasting, and coke instead of charcoal to smelt iron, which not only blew off impurities such as sulfur in the molten iron, but also obtained a smelting method that was far more economical than charcoal. In 1784, the engineer Henry Colt invented the reverberation furnace and the method of refining and rolling.
The revolutionary significance of the invention, which can remove the carbon in the molten iron, is to use a roller to replace the hammer of wrought iron, the revolutionary significance of this invention is not only to save fuel, but more importantly, to increase the output of iron per hour by as much as 15 times. In 1823, James Nelson invented the hot air method of ironmaking, which saved both coal and time. This series of technological innovations has led to an increasing iron production. England produced 17,350 tons of iron in 1740, increased to 125079 tons in 1791, and reached 1.02 million tons in 1835. In 1995 years, it has increased by nearly 60 times.
At the end of the eighteenth century, Britain had changed from a pig iron importer to a pig iron exporter. However, the more important technological revolution is also in the steelmaking industry, because machine building is inseparable from steel. Between 1740 and 1742, Benjamin Huntsman invented the crucible steelmaking method, which produced high-quality steel. Although not very perfect and costly, this steelmaking method was adopted until the middle of the nineteenth century, when Henry Bertham invented a new steelmaking method in 1865, which enabled molten iron to be smelted directly into steel in the furnace. Not only does it save time and one-seventh of its costs, but the steel is of excellent quality, with very low silicon and carbon content.
However, this method is not suitable for iron ore with more phosphorus. By 1867, Siemens and Martin had collaborated to invent the "furnace method", which could be made of scrap iron and iron ore that was not suitable for the Bethelmet method. In 1878, the chemists Thomas and Tychrist, in view of the shortcomings of the Bersermer method, invented the "base method" which is particularly suitable for steelmaking with phosphate iron ore. This series of technological inventions led to a rapid increase in British steel production, from 150,000 tons in 1860 to 4.98 million tons in 1900, an increase of 33 times.
Technological revolutions in the power fuel and steel industries have prepared the material conditions for the development of machine building. It turned out that in the early days of the Industrial Revolution, the vast majority of machines were made by hand from high-quality wood. This kind of machine, small output, high cost, low efficiency, not wear-resistant, most of them are manufactured by the manufacturers who use the machine. Not suitable for developmental needs. At the end of the eighteenth century, England began to make some metal parts for wooden machines with steam hammers and simple lathes, and manual wooden machines began to be partially replaced. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, machines were gradually used to make machines, and machine manufacturing industry was initially established.
Since the 1930s, calenders, cutting machines, hammers, milling machines, drilling machines, rotary machines, etc. have been invented one after another, and the British machine manufacturing industry has finally been established and entered the period of machine manufacturing machines. The above-mentioned process of technological reform from the light to heavy industrial sectors is only the industrial process of the industrial revolution. Industry is closely linked to agriculture, and the technological revolution in industry will inevitably affect agriculture. In this historical period, the British enclosure movement is proceeding with unprecedented intensity. The capitalist large-scale agricultural system in agriculture quickly took up its dominant position and urgently demanded technological innovation, and the technological achievements in industry provided the conditions for the realization of this demand.
As a result, new types of seeders, lawn mowers, harvesters, threshing machines, etc. have emerged, forming a technological revolution in agriculture. The smooth progress of the Industrial Revolution led to the rapid development of capitalist commodity production in England. The growth of domestic and foreign trade, the expansion of markets, and the strengthening of international ties, an unprecedented number of commodities and raw materials that urgently need long-distance transportation, all of which have put forward new requirements for the transportation industry. However, before the industrial revolution began, transport in britain was still stuck in the old state. Horse-drawn carriages by land, sailing ships by water, were increasingly unsuitable for the situation after the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
At the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century, a number of roads were built for this purpose, but to no avail, especially the problem of coal transportation could not be solved. So people's eyes turned to the canal. Before 1755, there were almost no canals in Britain. In 1759, an 11-mile canal was dug from the Huass Mining Mine to Manchester, which was very problematic and cut the price of coal by half. Since then, there has been a boom in the excavation of canals. By 1830, Britain had a 4,665-mile canal network. However, the role of canals is limited in parts, and it is far from alleviating the technological innovation requirements for transportation in the new era.
After the beginning of the nineteenth century, the objective situation led to a booming technological reform in the transportation industry. In terms of steamship transportation. The invention of the steamship predates the railway locomotive. After 1770, many people in britain and the United States and other countries experimented with the use of steam engines to propel ships. In 1807, the American Robert Fulton was the first to build a steam-propelled steamboat that sailed on the Hudson River. In 1811, the Scotsman Bayer imitated the successful "Comet" steamer and began to drive on the inland rivers and coasts. This is a kind of wooden-hulled ship, the technical disadvantage is that the boiler is easy to cause fire, the heavy power machine is easy to wear out the bottom, and the economic disadvantage is that the cost is high, and the space occupied by the boiler, machine, reservoir, fuel, etc. is too large.
Britain was the first to build steam-propelled iron-hulled sea vessels, which, after many improvements, essentially eliminated the above shortcomings. In 1838, the British steamships South As and The Atlantic successfully crossed the Atlantic. This not only made the UK the first modern maritime country, but more importantly opened up a new era of maritime transport in the world. In terms of rail transport. The development of railway technology is manifested in two aspects: rail and locomotive. British tracks were originally made of wood and were mainly used to transport coal. After the middle of the seventeenth century, rails gradually replaced wooden rails, but the iron quality was not durable.
In 1820, after Beckenshaw's improvement, the technical innovation of the track was basically completed. Before the advent of steam locomotives, horse-drawn vehicles were still driving on wooden and railroad tracks. Since watt's invention of the steam engine, many people have developed steam locomotives. The first to perfect the locomotive was the miner's son, George Stephenson, who in 1814 made the world's first locomotive and drove it at the Killingworth Coal Mine. The locomotive had shortcomings such as steaming, and after it was improved in 1921, it was built on the railway between Stockton and Darlington, built in 1825. It was the world's first railway.
On this railway, the seven-ton locomotive, dragging a ninety-ton train, traveled 4 to 8 kilometers per hour, with the same potency as forty horse-drawn carriages, and caused Stockton's coal price to fall by half. In 1830, the Manchester-Liverpool railway opened to traffic with Stephenson's new locomotive, the Rocket. It is more perfect than previous locomotives, with an average speed of 14 kilometers per hour. Since then, the railway transport business has a solid technical foundation. New railways were constantly being built, quickly replacing the canals. In 1840, britain's important railway trunk lines had been basically completed.
In 1850, there were 6621 railways in Britain. By 1870, Britain's rail system was complete. The above is the basic process of the British Industrial Revolution, from the perspective of technological reform, this historical process began with the invention and application of the working machine, and completed the systematic invention and application of the "machine that produces the machine". Judging from the innovation of the industrial sector, it began in the light industry sector and gradually developed to the basic completion of the reform of the heavy industrial sector. Chronologically, it began in the 1860s and completed in the 1830s and 1840s, taking about 80 years.
In general, the process of this Industrial Revolution is the process of the industrialization of British capitalism. It is dominated by the mechanization of industry, alongside the mechanization of agriculture and the mechanization of transportation. The reason why it spontaneously went from light industry to heavy industry is because light industry has the objective favorable conditions of low investment, fast turnover and large profits. The existence of sufficient wage labour-power after the accumulation of a large amount of capital in light industry is a pre-existing condition - only heavy industry has the main conditions for development. Britain's path of industrialization is typical of the industrialization of capitalist countries. Although the capitalist countries that emerged later had their own characteristics in industrialization, they were always inseparable from the development path of opening up heavy industry from light industry.
It must be pointed out that the brilliant technological achievements of the British Industrial Revolution are the result of summing up the long-term labor experience and technical accumulation of the broad masses of working people (including mental workers). Some bourgeois scholars like to boast of the "genius" of inventors, which is inconsistent with historical reality. The inventors mentioned above, we not only praise their technological achievements, but also attach great importance to their outstanding contributions. But their inventions did not come from the so-called geniuses who were born, but from their accumulation of experience and technology that they were good at summing up the experience and technology of the working people. From the perspective of individual inventors, they do have superior wisdom and talent, but this is produced and enriched in the long-term diligent and diligent technical practice, and the innate inventors who were born with such an innate age have never existed in history.
The Industrial Revolution was the epitome of Britain's economic development since the sixteenth century, and it was also a turning point in the changes in British history since then. It gives rise to major changes in the capitalist mode of production, that is, the productive forces and the relations of production. Its consequences in Britain have mainly brought about profound changes in the socio-economic landscape of The United Kingdom. First, there was the tremendous development of the productive forces of British society. In the Industrial Revolution, the universal application of machines and the absolute dominance of large-scale machine industry in production have enabled the productive forces of British society to develop unprecedentedly greatly, and the productivity of labor is a thousand times that of the past.
Between 1770 and 1840, the productivity of English workers per working day increased by an average of twenty times. Soon after the industrial revolution began, the first spinning factory appeared in 1771. Later, with the establishment of large machine factories, the dominance of the factory system in British industrial production was established. Factory-concentrated new industrial cities such as Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, Bolton, Preston and others have developed rapidly. A large number of people migrated from the countryside. In 1770, manchester, the centre of the cotton textile industry, had only 10,000 people, and in 1841 it reached more than 350,000 people, as did the population of other new industrial cities.
The large machine industry under the factory system forcefully crowds out the handicraft industry of small production. In 1820, there were still 240,000 craftsmen in Britain, and by 1844 there were only 60,000 left. In 1841, factory workers accounted for 68.7% of the total number of workers in this sector in the cotton textile industry, and factory workers in the wool textile industry accounted for 50%. Factory workers in the silk industry also accounted for 40 percent; by 1871, factory workers accounted for 88 percent of the cotton textile industry and 78 percent of factory workers in the wool textile industry; factory workers in the silk industry rose to more than 50 percent; factory workers in the metallurgical industry soared to 75 percent. This process of crowding out small production was particularly violent in the late nineteenth century. Capitalist large-scale machine production finally triumphed over small-scale handicraft production in all sectors, and the capitalist mode of production gained dominance in England.
With the economic victory, the British bourgeoisie also established its political dominance. Through the parliamentary reform of 1832 and the struggle for the Electoral Act, the British bourgeoisie took power directly. Then there are the changes in class relations in British society. The Industrial Revolution is not only a revolution in the technology of production, but also a revolution that gives rise to major changes in socio-economic relations. The factory system completely changed the social status of workers. Before the Industrial Revolution, workshop workers and guild workshop workers, most of whom maintained close ties with the countryside, were likely to retain their own simple tools and become independent small producers.
As a result of the development of the factory system and the formation of the cities of the large industrial centers, the boundaries of the local guilds of handicraft industry were abolished, the connection between the workers and the countryside was severed, and they became wage slaves who could only make a living by selling their labour-power in the cities; the skilled workers, who had previously been of a high rank in the handicraft workshops, became appendages of the machines, as did the ordinary workers. They can no longer fantasize about becoming craftsmen who live as independently and self-respecting as in the Middle Ages, leaving only deep nostalgia for the past era. They became truly proletarians. The enormous industrial centers allowed them to unite into a unified industrial proletariat against the bourgeoisie.
As Engels said: It is only the development of capitalist production, the development of modern large-scale industry and large-scale agriculture that makes the existence of the proletariat a constant phenomenon, increases its numbers, and makes it a special class with special interests and a special historical mission. With the progress of the Industrial Revolution, the ranks of the British proletariat grew stronger and stronger. The urban population of England was about 30 per cent before the eighteenth century, 51 per cent in 1857 and 64.8 per cent in 1871, and the proletariat accounted for three quarters of the urban population after the mid-nineteenth century.
British industrial and transport workers, in the 1820s, had nearly 2 million people. The structure of the urban bourgeoisie underwent significant changes. The commercial capitalists no longer play a major role, but the industrial capitalists dominate. Finally, capitalism has triumphed completely in agriculture. The Industrial Revolution has prompted capitalism in agriculture to make great strides forward, and has further integrated the land ownership of large landlords in agriculture with the capitalist system of large agriculture. Originally, in the period of great development of the handicraft industry after the victory of the bourgeois revolution, due to the increase in the population of the cities, the sharp rise in the price of grain, and the great advantage of running large farms, a large-scale enclosure movement was provoked, and a large amount of land was rapidly concentrated in the hands of large landowners; after the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the demand for grain was even greater and more urgent, forcing England to import grain from abroad.
The class structure of the English countryside has changed. Three basic classes emerged in agriculture: large landowners, large tenant farmers, and agricultural workers. A large amount of land remained monopolized by a small number of large landowners, and the vast number of agricultural workers were employed by rented farmers. By 1851, 1.44 million people were employed in Agriculture in Britain. On the whole, the Industrial Revolution, the development of large-scale machine industry, brought about a great leap forward in the British capitalist economy. The international character of capital has been firmly established, and the world economy has since become an indivisible whole. At the same time, the industrial revolution, the development of large-scale machine industry, has greatly expanded the social character of production, greatly strengthened the capitalist system of private appropriation, and made the basic contradictions of capitalism increasingly acute. This is mainly manifested in cyclical overproduction, the inevitability of crises and the intensification and irreconcilability of class contradictions.
The completion of the Industrial Revolution and the development of large-scale machine production led to an unprecedented new upsurge in the British capitalist economy in the 1850s and 1870s. After the Industrial Revolution, the social productivity of Britain increased unprecedentedly, and the machine increased the productivity of labor by ten times or even a hundred times. In the middle of the eighteenth century, needle-making workshops produced 4,800 pins per person per day, and after the Industrial Revolution, a single worker was able to produce 600,000 pins a day.
At the beginning of the eighteenth century, iron sand ironmaking took three weeks; after Colt, Nelson, etc. invented high-temperature ironmaking technology, it took two days; after the invention of the Bethelmer Method in 1856, it took only 20 minutes. This increase in productivity led to the rapid development of the British capitalist economy. This is manifested in the following main aspects:
Industrial aspects. In the British cotton textile industry, between 1850 and 1870, the number of factories increased from 1932 to 2483, the number of workers increased from 330,000 to 450,000, the number of spindles increased from 21 million to 37.7 million, and the number of looms increased from 249,000 to 440,700. During the same period, cotton consumption increased from 588 million pounds to 1075 million pounds, and cotton yarn production increased from 529 million pounds to 1007 million pounds. The export value of cotton textiles increased from £28.26 million to £71.42 million, a 1.5-fold increase in two decades. Heavy industry developed even faster than light industry.
Between 1850 and 1870, British coal production increased from 49.8 million tonnes to 112 million tonnes, and pig iron production increased from 2.24 million tonnes to 6.1 million tonnes. During the same period, the export value of coal and coke increased from £1.3 million to £5.6 million; the export value of iron and steel increased from £5.4 million to £23.5 million; and the export value of various machines increased from £1 million to £5.3 million. In the past two decades, the value of exports has increased by more than 3 to 4 times. Between 1850 and 1870, British industry grew by an average of 3.2% per year.
Engels exclaimed of the unprecedented rise in British industrial production during this period: "The astonishing results obtained in the past with steam and machines are insignificant compared with the enormous output of the twenty years from 1850 to 1870." "Not only is it unprecedented compared to the past twenty years, but it is also called a momentary one-time one-time step in the international community." From 1850 to 1870, it was also a period of rapid industrial development in the United States, Germany and other countries, but by 1870, British industrial production still ranked first in the world.
Agriculture. In 1855, Britain's wheat yield per hectare reached 1840 kg, twice as high as in France; in 1870 it increased to 2020 kg. The one-sided development of the British capitalist economy laid the root cause of the decline of British agriculture(especially valley properties).
Transportation. In the 1840s, railway construction became a hot spot for investment by the British industrial bourgeoisie. On the basis of the technological revolution, the construction of railways proceeded rapidly. Between 1850 and 1870, British railways increased from 6621 miles to 15357 miles, making it the country with the largest length and density of railways at that time. By 1870, the All England Rail Transport Network had been built. During this period, the British shipbuilding industry also developed rapidly.
In the middle of the nineteenth century, the sharp growth of domestic shipping, especially ocean shipping, accelerated the development of steamship manufacturing. From 1850 to 1870, the tonnage of British ships increased from 187,000 tons to 11.11 million tons, an increase of more than five times. It was the largest maritime country at that time. In 1870 , although the British had only a quarter of the tonnage of a sailboat. But the wheel manufacturing industry has taken advantage and is accelerating the process of squeezing out the sailing industry.
In terms of foreign trade. After the Industrial Revolution, with the development of industry and transport, Britain's foreign trade continued to expand. This is because the large-scale production of machines under the factory system has continuously reduced the value of commodities and enhanced the ability to compete with foreign countries. For example, a pound of cotton yarn, worth 35 shillings in 1788 and only 3 shillings in 1833, enabled British goods to crowd out the goods of other countries on the world market and expand their own sales. The abolition of the grain ordinance in 1846 and the introduction of a free trade policy further developed foreign trade after the fifties.
In 1850, the total world trade was 14.5 billion marks, Britain and its colonies accounted for 5.24 billion marks, and France, Germany and the United States accounted for only 4.9 billion marks. In 1870, the total circulation of goods in the world was 37.5 billion marks, the United Kingdom accounted for 14 billion marks, and France, Germany and the United States accounted for only 12 billion marks. Between 1850 and 1870, Britain's foreign trade increased twice. Among the export commodities, cotton fabrics, wool fabrics, coal, machinery, metals and metal products are the main items.
Among the imported goods, cotton and various industrial raw materials and grains are mainly from the colonies and other countries. However, from the 1850s onwards, Britain's foreign trade began to change from over-over-entry to over-over-the-top. In 1870, Britain's trade deficit reached £90 million. For the deficit, Britain made up for it with "intangible output" (profits from capital exports, interest on foreign loans, freight earned by merchant ships abroad, etc.). In the second half of the nineteenth century, because capital exports exceeded commodity exports, Britain's balance of payments was still in surplus. Therefore, although the trade deficit is large, there is no difficulty in making up for it.
In terms of the financial industry. With the development of industry, commerce, transportation and occupying a dominant position in the world, it has created conditions for the development of British financial undertakings. As early as the middle of the nineteenth century, Britain's banking industry had a fairly strong foundation. At the end of the eighteenth century, there were 350 banks in England, and in 1841 there were 3321 wholly-owned and partnership banks and 115 joint-stock banks in England and Wales. By 1865, there were 250 joint-stock banks alone, and there were professional banks, investment bank numbers, current numbers and bill brokers engaged in various businesses.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, London had become the financial centre of the world. Government bonds and corporate securities from all over the world are sent to the London Stock Exchange for sale. The Bank of England gained the status of a central bank under the Banking Concessions Act of 1844 and controlled the issuance and regulation of credit throughout The Uk.