• what is the best way to ask a question that gets at specifics?
• is the question what got the IR started or what allowed it to keep going?
  
• or why did the industrial revolution happen first in England? 
  
• why did it happen at this particular time?
• there are many necessary conditions, but what was the key that set the industrial revolution going in a particular time and place?
• what allowed it to keep going, not run out of energy sources?
  
• Hobsbawm uses logic to evaluate possible causes
  

• economy becoming more capitalist (free market)
• feudalism was almost gone--farmers were no longer bound to the land
• decline of guild system--the guild for a particular trade could no longer control who set up a new business
• decline of the system of customary prices--the market is more free, instead of the old system where changing the price because of a shortage was seen as profiteering
• these changes were a necessary condition but not perhaps the immediate cause
  
• agricultural changes (more on this in chapter 5)
  
• enclosure =the abolishment of the old system of communal farming and its replacement with family farms.  Supposedly everyone had the same share of land as before, but the smallest farmers didn't have enough to survive as an independent farm and they went out of business and went looking for work.  Took place 16th century to about 1820.
• four field crop rotation replaced the medieval three field system--wheat, turnips, barley, clover or alfalfa (turnips and hay crops make it possible to keep more livestock over the winter)
• new scientific approaches to farming (one of the pioneer scientific investigators of agriculture was an Englishman named Jethro Tull)
• average agricultural surplus per worker doubled from about 25% to about 50%
• workers no longer needed in agriculture were available for industrial jobs (details on this argument)
• increasing population--but it didn't really start increasing until the industrial revolution began
• England had lots of coal, so as population and industry grew it didn't run out of energy
  
• the scientific revolution--but it happened 100 years earlier
• England was a Protestant country and the protestant work ethic benefited the economy (this idea was put forth by a sociologist named Max Weber in a book titled The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
  
• Many scientists and inventors were members of religious minorities
  
• most professions were closed to them because in England you had to belong to the Church of England in order to be a lawyer or hold a government job, other kinds of protestants, called dissenters, were not allowed to hold such positions or even to go to the best universities
• in England the dissenters also became the leaders of the industrial revolution
• France was Catholic--for a while it tolerated a protestant minority called the Huguenots, but then they were told they would have to convert or leave the country because the king feared they were disloyal
• but Hobsbawm points out that other Protestant countries did not industrialize rapidly
  
• a domestic market with manufacturing already established--transportation was relatively cheap
• consumer culture, people who could afford to buy things
• followed by the growing market provided by the British Empire
  
• expansion of trade, mercantile economic policy
• profits from the slave trade (prohibited by Britain in 1809)
  
• slavery was not key to the production of cotton until after invention of the cotton gin in the mid 1790s
• but slavery did provide capital for investments in transportation and new technology
• http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/abolition/industrialisation_article_01.shtml (Links to an external site.) and http://cwh.ucsc.edu/brooks/India,_Britain_and_America.html (Links to an external site.).

• exploration led to increased trade meant cash crops and regional specialization
• Europeans traded for exotic products (spices, silk, etc.) with Asians
• How to make money from the New World? Europeans had to invent a new economic system to do so
  
• the native people did not have many obvious trade products, except furs, plus the Europeans wiped out an estimated 90% of the population of Mexico (mostly by imported diseases, but also by war and harsh slavery)
• In order to enrich themselves from the Americas, Europeans chose to colonize and grow cash crops (eg. sugar, tobacco, eventually cotton) using slaves from Africa
• this system turned out to be very profitable; much of the capital for the industrial revolution came from plantations worked by slaves and the slave trade
• new popular luxuries like sugar and tea brought ordinary people, including British farmers, more into the capitalist system; wanting to make more money to buy more things
  

• most land was owned by large landowners (more on this in ch. 5)
  
• most farmers were already buying goods, not living only on what they could produce on their own land
• farmers were interested in making and spending more money--beginning to think like consumers
  
• craft production was widely scattered in small villages so many landowners stood to profit from new transportation technologies
• government policies favored manufacturing--only those who owned property could vote and the large landowners wanted to maximize profit from their estates (review the basics of the British parliamentary system)
  

• between 1770 and 1850 the economy of England changed from mostly agricultural to mostly industrial
  
• this was the result not of one key invention but of technological progress in different fields coming together in a snowball effect
  
• its center is the development of factories (which hadn't really existed before this time), but they couldn't have developed without better transportation creating larger markets and better transportation couldn't have existed without the growth of the iron industry, which couldn't have grown without steam engines
• society had a hard time adjusting to the new economic system
• this is the beginning of technology changing quickly enough that peoples lives were transformed by technology within their lifetimes, not over many generations
• charts below of the different types of wealth owned by individuals show the declining importance of land and the economic significance of slavery in the US
  

The key change is the development of factories

Factories:

• large scale production
• mass production--produce lots of the same thing quickly
  
• division of labor--workers doing different parts of the job rather than one craftsman doing the whole job
  
• multiple machines and workers in one place using some non-human power source—eg. Water power, steam engine, electricity

Industrial revolution was made possible by new technologies that led to growth of factories

• manufacturing is actually a general term for making things
• technologically, the industrial revolution is when manufacturing shifts from home work to factories
• machines (particularly steam power) were developed for other tasks like transportation

• that helped the industrial revolution get started
• Manufacturing is making things, either on a small scale or a large scale, either by mass production or by hand work one at a time.
  

• A merchant would buy wool and carry it to people who spun it into thread
• Then pick it up and carry it to people who wove it into cloth
• Then pick it up and sell the cloth
• The people who spun and wove worked in their own homes.Cheaper for merchant because you don’t have to pay for the building
• Only when new machines are invented is it worthwhile to build a factory
  

What is crucial (according to Hobsbawm?

• Domestic market--critical pre-existing condition
  
• Britain already had well-established trade and pre-industrial manufacturing (domestic market provided a good base)
• British government had policies that favored manufacturing
• Empire: the spark was overseas trade with British colonies, which increased very rapidly
• markets
• capital (particularly from the slave trade)
  
• the empire set the rules for trade
  

• economic changes came first and made opportunities for new technology
  
• market for large quantities of goods
  
• factory owners who were willing to do almost anything to make money, not worried about who would get hurt