The Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution was the transformation of production from agriculture and hand manufacture to mechanized factory industry, beginning in Britain in the second half of the eighteenth century and spreading over the following century to continental Europe, North America and eventually much of the world. Key innovations, including the steam engine, mechanized textile spinning and weaving, and later the railway, dramatically increased the scale and speed of production and transport, drawing millions of people from the countryside into rapidly growing industrial cities. The Industrial Revolution reshaped nearly every aspect of society, creating a new industrial working class alongside a wealthy manufacturing middle class, driving explosive population growth, and giving the countries that industrialized first, above all Britain, an economic and military advantage that underpinned much of the nineteenth century's wave of colonial expansion. It also produced severe social costs in its early decades, including dangerous factory conditions, child labor and crowded, unsanitary cities, which in turn provoked the labor movements and early socialist and reform movements of the nineteenth century.