Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to Western Sieve Episode five hundred and sixteen.
Speaker 1: The Industrial Revolution. All right, so we've covered a lot
Speaker 1: of specific political events, but we are of course in
Speaker 1: a time period now where there are broad changes sweeping society,
Speaker 1: and I think it's important to stop now and to
Speaker 1: start to address probably one of those most important changes,
Speaker 1: which is the Industrial Revolution. Now, I want you to
Speaker 1: imagine Britain in the middle of the eighteenth century. Most
Speaker 1: people still live on the land, according to the rhythm
Speaker 1: of the seasons, work when does you know, we would
Speaker 1: think manufacturing on a small scale is in the home
Speaker 1: or in a very small workshop, you know, less than
Speaker 1: ten people. For sure, power still comes from human muscle
Speaker 1: or animal muscle, possibly from wind and water. And yet slowly, quietly,
Speaker 1: at first, the world starts to shift and the shift
Speaker 1: is permanent. Now, this today is the story of the
Speaker 1: Industrial Revolution. It's not a single event, but it's a
Speaker 1: long and uneven transformation that reshaped how people worked, where
Speaker 1: they lived, how wealth was created, and how power was distributed.
Speaker 1: It unfolded over decades, even centuries, and it left behind
Speaker 1: both incredible prosperity and change, and to a large extent,
Speaker 1: extraordinary suffering as we will see, all right. So why
Speaker 1: Britain is always the first question. While Britain didn't industrialize
Speaker 1: first by accident by the early seventeen hundreds, it possessed
Speaker 1: a rare combination of advantages. It had a liberal political system,
Speaker 1: shaped by the glorious Revolution that we've talked about in
Speaker 1: sixteen eighty eight, which protected private property and therefore encouraged investment.
Speaker 1: Its expanding empire supplied raw materials and markets overseas. Its
Speaker 1: rivers and coastlines made transportation relatively cheap, and beneath its
Speaker 1: soil lay vast seams of coal, dense, reliable energy that
Speaker 1: was just waiting to be unlocked. Agriculture had already begun
Speaker 1: to change. The agricultural revolution, which didn't talk about but
Speaker 1: has happened over really the last millennium, which involves things
Speaker 1: like crop rotation selective and the enclosure of common lands,
Speaker 1: dramatically increased food production. Because fewer people were now needed
Speaker 1: to farm, more food meant a growing population. More of
Speaker 1: those people were available to work in other occupations. These
Speaker 1: are the sorts of things that drove us out of
Speaker 1: the hunter gatherer societies thousands upon thousands of years ago.
Speaker 1: They're just happening now on a larger scale throughout European society,
Speaker 1: but particularly in parts of the Low Countries, France, and
Speaker 1: especially in Great Britain. These displaced rural laborers would soon
Speaker 1: become the workforce of a new industrial age. But technology,
Speaker 1: of course, here was the spark. The early breakthrough came
Speaker 1: in textiles. Spinning and weaving cloth had traditionally been done
Speaker 1: by hand in cottages, but inventors began to mechanize these tasks.
Speaker 1: The spinning jenny, the water frame, and the power loom
Speaker 1: dramatically increased output. Let's just take for one of these examples,
Speaker 1: the spinning jenny. Spinning, which is the transformation of predominantly
Speaker 1: wolks we're talking about Great Britain here was done by hand,
Speaker 1: so we're talking about the transformation of wool into cloth.
Speaker 1: Spinning was slow, it was rhythmic, and it was totally
Speaker 1: limited by what the human hand could do. A single
Speaker 1: spinner sat at a spinning wheel, drawing fibers out and
Speaker 1: twisting them into a thread, one strand at a time.
Speaker 1: It didn't matter how skilled the worker was. The pace
Speaker 1: of the production was capped by muscle and patience. The
Speaker 1: textile industry, even as demand for cloth continued to grow,
Speaker 1: was bottlenecked by the spinning wheel. But that bottleneck snapped
Speaker 1: in the seventeen sixties with the invention of the spinning
Speaker 1: jenny by James Hargreaves. Now. Legend has it that Hargreaves
Speaker 1: was watching a spinning wheel tip over in his home
Speaker 1: and he noticed that the spindle continued to turn upright.
Speaker 1: Whether this is true or not, the insight was real.
Speaker 1: What if one worker could actually spin many threads at
Speaker 1: the same time. The spinning jenny answered that question decisively.
Speaker 1: Instead of one spindle, which again is what's turning the
Speaker 1: wool into cloth, it had eight, then sixteen, and then
Speaker 1: eventually more. They were all mounted vertically on a frame
Speaker 1: and turned by a single wheel. Now, with a single
Speaker 1: motion of a hand, a spinner could produce multiple threads simultaneously.
Speaker 1: The immediate effect was staggering. Yarn production absolutely exploded overnight.
Speaker 1: What had once taken several workers an entire day could
Speaker 1: now be done by one person in a fraction of
Speaker 1: the time. This shift didn't just make spinning faster, of course,
Speaker 1: it fundamentally rebalanced the textile industry. Weaving, which had previously
Speaker 1: raised ahead of spinning, finally found itself no longer waiting
Speaker 1: for yarn to be produced into cloth. Cloth production accelerated,
Speaker 1: prices fell, and textiles became much more widely available than
Speaker 1: they had been before. But the spinning jenny did something
Speaker 1: more profound than just increasing output, because it changed how
Speaker 1: work itself was organized. This is part of the important
Speaker 1: parts of the industrial revolution. Although early jennies were small
Speaker 1: enough to be used in homes, their logic favored scale.
Speaker 1: Multiple jennies under one roof, powered by coordinated labor, produced
Speaker 1: far more efficiently than scattered household spinners throughout the countryside.
Speaker 1: This pushed textile production out of cottages and into workshops
Speaker 1: and eventually we're not there yet, but eventually into factories. Now,
Speaker 1: there of course, were social consequences for this. We'll talk
Speaker 1: about those in a bit now. The spinning jenny didn't
Speaker 1: create factories and didn't create the factory movement. That's going
Speaker 1: to be a combination of factors. As I mentioned, there's
Speaker 1: a number of inventions going on here. There's the water loom,
Speaker 1: there's the power frame. All of this comes down to
Speaker 1: one final change, and that is that cloth could now
Speaker 1: be produced faster, cheaper, and in larger quantities than ever
Speaker 1: before in human history. Now, as I mentioned, these machines
Speaker 1: required centralized power sources, and that meant factories. But of course,
Speaker 1: at the height of all of this transformation was the
Speaker 1: steam engine. The steam engine was u pun intended, the
Speaker 1: engine that drove the entire industrial revolution. It is by
Speaker 1: far and away the most important invention of the eighteenth century.
Speaker 1: It's going to drive the railroad expansion, it's going to
Speaker 1: drive mining, it's going to drive textiles, it's going to
Speaker 1: drive the factory movement. Everything comes back to the steam engine.
Speaker 1: So where did it come from. Well, in the early
Speaker 1: eighteenth century, Britain was digging deeper and deeper into the ground.
Speaker 1: Coal mines pushed deeper each year, chasing the fuel that
Speaker 1: warmed homes and fed ever steadily growing iron furnaces. But
Speaker 1: the deeper miners went, they had a problem the more
Speaker 1: that the water rushed in. Because of course the deeper
Speaker 1: you go, the closer that you get to the water table.
Speaker 1: Flooding suddenly became the great enemy, the great impediment of
Speaker 1: industrial ambition. Horses strained it, pumps Men literally just hauled
Speaker 1: buckets out of mines and endless shifts, and it didn't
Speaker 1: matter because the water it's still won. The industrial revolution,
Speaker 1: still really in its embryonic stage, was in danger of
Speaker 1: drowning before it even started. The answer then came not
Speaker 1: from a grand vision of industry, but desperation. In seventeen twelve,
Speaker 1: Thomas Newcombing, a blacksmith and ironmonger, produced a machine that
Speaker 1: looked ungainly and worked inefficiently, but it solved a critical problem.
Speaker 1: His atmospheric steam engine used steam to create a vacuum,
Speaker 1: allowing atmospheric pressure to drive a piston downward. The result
Speaker 1: was a crude but effective mechanical pump that could lift
Speaker 1: vast amount of water out of these deep mines. Newcomb's
Speaker 1: engine wasn't elegant, It devoured coal, and it wasted heat
Speaker 1: with every s michael. It could not power machinery directly,
Speaker 1: and was tethered basically exclusively to mining operations. But for
Speaker 1: the first time, human and animal muscle were no longer
Speaker 1: the sealing of mechanical power. Steam heated water had been
Speaker 1: harnessed to do steady repetitive labor. Mines stayed dry. Coal
Speaker 1: production surged, and with more coal available, the conditions for
Speaker 1: further industrial growth quietly fell into place. The true transformation
Speaker 1: came decades later in the workshops and lecture rooms of Scotland.
Speaker 1: In the seventeen sixties, a young instrument maker named James
Speaker 1: Watt was asked to repair a model Newcomen engine at
Speaker 1: the University of Glasgow. As Watt was studying the machine,
Speaker 1: he saw its fatal flaw. It wasted enormous amounts of
Speaker 1: energy repeatedly heating and cooling the same cylinder. His solution
Speaker 1: was simple, there would be a separate condenser. This was
Speaker 1: deceptively simple but utterly revolutionary. By condensing steam in a
Speaker 1: separate chamber, Watt's engine dramatically increased its efficiency, and this
Speaker 1: improvement changed everything. Steam engines were no longer confined to
Speaker 1: coal rich mines. They could now be used economically in mills,
Speaker 1: factories and workshops. Wherever you needed a piston driven up
Speaker 1: and down, you could now use a steam engine. With
Speaker 1: the backing of industrialist Matthew Bolton, Watt refined and commercialized
Speaker 1: his design. Together they sold not just engines, but power itself,
Speaker 1: leasing machines and charging customers based on the work performed.
Speaker 1: It was a new way of thinking about energy as
Speaker 1: a commodity. As Watt's engines spread, the geography of industry
Speaker 1: was quickly rewritten. Factories didn't need fast flowing rivers any
Speaker 1: longer to power water wheels. Now factories could be built
Speaker 1: in cities much closer to both labor pools, ports, and
Speaker 1: domestic markets. Steam power severed industries dependence on nature's rhythm.
Speaker 1: Production could continue day and night, winter and summer, rain
Speaker 1: or shine. It was now clock that replaced the river
Speaker 1: and the seasons as the regulator of work. Now, as
Speaker 1: of course I mentioned, the steam engine will also reshape
Speaker 1: labor in society. But as I mentioned before, we'll get
Speaker 1: to that in a moment. Now, want to turn to
Speaker 1: iron production. Iron production followed a similar path. New smelting
Speaker 1: techniques using coke instead of charcoal, made iron quickly cheaper
Speaker 1: and more abundant. Stronger iron, of course, meant better machines,
Speaker 1: better tools, and eventually better railways. Now one city came
Speaker 1: to symbolize it all, Manchester. In the early eighteenth century.
Speaker 1: Manchester was relatively unremarkable. It was a modest market town
Speaker 1: in Lancashire, surrounded by damp fields and vast streams known
Speaker 1: locally for wolves, but little else. No great court met there,
Speaker 1: no cathedral dominated its skyline, and no king ruled. Yet.
Speaker 1: Within a century, Manchester became the beating heart of the
Speaker 1: cotton industry, the global cotton industry, so dominant, so productive
Speaker 1: that it earned a new nickname whispered with both awe
Speaker 1: and anxiety alike cotton opolists. The transformation began quietly, almost invisibly,
Speaker 1: with cotton itself imported from the Americas and then eventually India.
Speaker 1: Cotton was lighter, softer, and easier to wash than wool
Speaker 1: or linen. Demand almost immediately soared across Britain and Europe.
Speaker 1: Manchester's early advantage was not power or capital, but people.
Speaker 1: The region had a long tradition of textile skills spinners,
Speaker 1: weavers and dyers working in cottages under the so called
Speaker 1: putting out system. Merchants supplies raw cotton, families spun it
Speaker 1: and just wove it at home. By the mid seventeen hundreds,
Speaker 1: Manchester had become a commercial hub, linking rural labor to
Speaker 1: distant markets. And then technology arrived. Everything changed, and everything accelerated.
Speaker 1: Inventions like the spinning jenny, the water frame, and later
Speaker 1: the power loom shattered the old limits of production. These
Speaker 1: machines demanded space, coordinated and energy. At first, fast flowing
Speaker 1: rivers provided power necessary to run all the equipment, but
Speaker 1: water alone just couldn't keep up with the demand and
Speaker 1: with the ambitions of Manchester's growing commercial elite. And so
Speaker 1: the decisive shift came with the steam engine. As coal
Speaker 1: fired engines spread, factories were no longer tied to rivers.
Speaker 1: They clustered instead along canals, railways, and streets, packed with
Speaker 1: the labor necessary to run them. Manchester proved perfectly positioned
Speaker 1: for this new industrial geography. There was a lot of
Speaker 1: coal in Lancashire. The damp climate, once an inconvenience, turned
Speaker 1: out to be ideal for cotton spinning, keeping fibers from snapping.
Speaker 1: Engineers carved canals, the Bridgewater Canal chief among them, slashing
Speaker 1: the cost of shipping coal and raw cotton into the city.
Speaker 1: Warehouses rose, and mills quickly multiplied. Brick chimneys pierced the skyline,
Speaker 1: pouring smoke into the air as the engines thumped day
Speaker 1: and night. By the early nineteenth century, Manchester had become
Speaker 1: something truly unprecedented, a city built almost exclusively around a
Speaker 1: single industry. Cotton mills towered over the rows of workers,
Speaker 1: housing thousands of men, women and children labored in spinning
Speaker 1: rooms and weaving sheds, drawn by wages, but then ultimately
Speaker 1: trapped by necessity. Observers struggled to describe what they saw.
Speaker 1: The city seemed alive, with motion belts, turning looms, chattering,
Speaker 1: wagons rolling, and steam hissing from every direction. To the
Speaker 1: people of the early nineteenth century, I'm sure this felt
Speaker 1: like sci Fi does today. Visitors, honestly from across Europe
Speaker 1: came to witness the industrial marvel that was Manchester. Some
Speaker 1: admired it, others recoiled. Alexey de Destoukville, touring England in
Speaker 1: the eighteen thirties, wrote of Manchester as a place quote
Speaker 1: where civilization works its miracles, and a civilized man is
Speaker 1: turned back almost into a savage end quote. Wealth accumulated rapidly,
Speaker 1: but so did poverty. Fackery owners built fortunes, but workers
Speaker 1: crowded into slums with little sanitation or fresh air. Disease
Speaker 1: spread as fast as industry. But of course, cottonopolis didn't
Speaker 1: exist in isolation. Manchester's mills were part of a global system.
Speaker 1: But one part. Raw cotton arrived generally and largely from
Speaker 1: the American South, grown by enslaved labor. Finished cloth flowed
Speaker 1: outward to Africa, Asia, and the Americas, shaping and reshaping
Speaker 1: economies and cultures far beyond Britain. Manchester was not just
Speaker 1: a city. It was just a node in a world
Speaker 1: wide web of extraction, production and consumption, and the city
Speaker 1: also quickly became a crucible of ideas. Industrial capitalism was
Speaker 1: visible here in its rawest form, and so it was
Speaker 1: the resistance to it. Manchester witnessed early labor organizing, political
Speaker 1: reform movements, and fierce debates over free trade versus workers' rights.
Speaker 1: And then there was the event that's called the Peterloo Massacre.
Speaker 1: On a warm August morning in eighteen nineteen, tens of
Speaker 1: thousands of people gathered for a peaceful political gathering at
Speaker 1: Saint Peter's Field, just outside the growing industrial town of Manchester.
Speaker 1: They all came in their Sunday best men, women and
Speaker 1: children alike, drawn by one simple demand political reform. In
Speaker 1: an age where when booming industrial cities had little or
Speaker 1: no sometimes representation in parliament, working people wanted a voice
Speaker 1: equal to their numbers At the center of this crowd
Speaker 1: stood the radical order Henry Hunt, a celebrity reformer known
Speaker 1: for his booming voice and his theatrical flare. Hunt was
Speaker 1: to speak on parliamentary reform, universal male suffrage, and the
Speaker 1: abolition of corrupt in what were called rotten boroughs. These
Speaker 1: were tiny medieval villages who were once decent sized, maybe
Speaker 1: five six hundred years ago, but which nowadays had hardly
Speaker 1: anyone at all. However, under the existing system, thanks to
Speaker 1: old medieval dues that still existed, these tiny villages oftentimes
Speaker 1: had more political representation and power than industrial giants like Manchester.
Speaker 1: Now the crowd was orderly marching information, carrying banners, and
Speaker 1: many of them had taken oaths to perform any protests
Speaker 1: in a non violent fashion, but local magistrates watched with
Speaker 1: fear to them. The French Revolution wasn't a distant memory,
Speaker 1: and Napoleon had finally been put away about four years ago,
Speaker 1: but it was still a warning siren. As Hunt rose
Speaker 1: to speak, the magistrates made their decision, Declaring the assembly illegal,
Speaker 1: They ordered the arrest of the speakers. The task fell
Speaker 1: to the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry, local part time cavalrymen
Speaker 1: poorly trained and deeply hostile to the radical crowd. As
Speaker 1: the yeomanry charged into the densely packed field, panic spread instantly.
Speaker 1: Horses plunged into bodies, sabers flashed, people fell and were trampled.
Speaker 1: Within minutes, chaos reigned. The regular army followed, disbursing the
Speaker 1: remaining crowd with bayonets. When it was over, at least
Speaker 1: fifteen people lay dead and hundreds were injured, many of
Speaker 1: them women and children. The name Peterloo coined in bitter
Speaker 1: irony after Waterloo captured the public outrage. It wasn't a
Speaker 1: foreign battlefield this time, but a massacre of civilians just
Speaker 1: demanding political representation. The government's only response was to deepen
Speaker 1: the wound, rather than condemning the violence. Parliament passed the
Speaker 1: quote unquote six Acts, tightening controls on public meetings and
Speaker 1: the press. But Peterloo could not be erased. News of
Speaker 1: the bloodshed spread through radical newspapers, poems, and pamphlets, most
Speaker 1: famously in Percy blythe Shelley's The Massacre of Anarchy. Over time,
Speaker 1: Peterloo became a symbol of the moment when the industrial
Speaker 1: working class paid in blood for the idea that political
Speaker 1: power should follow the people, not property. Now. As we'll
Speaker 1: find out, Manchester's long march towards reform was not nearly over,
Speaker 1: but it was the moment when the movement made it
Speaker 1: clear that the cost of silence would be impossible to ignore.
Speaker 1: By the mid nineteenth century, Manchester stood as the symbolic
Speaker 1: like a capital of industrial modernity. Its cotton powered Britain's economy,
Speaker 1: its factories set the model for the world, and its
Speaker 1: social problems exposed the cost of rapid industrial glowth smoke, blackened, overcrowded,
Speaker 1: and astonishingly productive. Cottonopolis embodied both the promise and the
Speaker 1: peril of the industrial Revolution. Manchester did not merely grow
Speaker 1: because of cotton, it was remade by it. In turning
Speaker 1: fiber into fabric on an unprecedented scale, the city spun
Speaker 1: itself into history, proof that industry could build empires, transform landscapes,
Speaker 1: and redefine what a city could be now for workers,
Speaker 1: industrialization throughout Britain was a brutal shock. Families poured into
Speaker 1: cities looking for wages, and they found overcrowded housing, polluted air,
Speaker 1: and streets thick with mud and waste. Tenements packed multiple
Speaker 1: families into single rooms. Clean water was scarce basically everywhere,
Speaker 1: and disease rapidly, especially cholera and second and third typhoid
Speaker 1: and tuberculosis. Now inside the factories, conditions were harsh. Worked
Speaker 1: days stretched from twelve to fourteen hours. Machines were dangerous,
Speaker 1: they were unguarded, and they were relentless. The pace of
Speaker 1: labor was no longer set by daylight custom were the
Speaker 1: church's calendar, but it was set by the never ending
Speaker 1: grinding of the gears and the belts. Children were, of course,
Speaker 1: especially vulnerable. They were cheap, small, and easily controllable. Boys
Speaker 1: and girls worked in textile mills and coal mines, crawling
Speaker 1: under machines or hauling loads in darkness. Reformers later recalled
Speaker 1: children quote stunted in growth, pale and prematurely aged end quote.
Speaker 1: And yet factory wages, however low they might be, were,
Speaker 1: oftentimes for everyone, just better than simply starving to death
Speaker 1: in the countryside. For many, industrial labor wasn't they made freely.
Speaker 1: It was accepted because there simply were no alternatives. But
Speaker 1: not everyone accepted this new world quietly. In the early
Speaker 1: nineteenth century, groups of skilled workers called Luodites, smashed machines
Speaker 1: that they believed threatened their livelihoods. They weren't anti technology
Speaker 1: in principle, but anti exploitation. You're actually starting to see
Speaker 1: some similar patterns emerging here today in twenty twenty six,
Speaker 1: as people talk about perhaps how to resist the encroachment
Speaker 1: of AI into now white collar professions. At the time,
Speaker 1: when facing the Luodites, the government responded with troops, executions,
Speaker 1: and harsh laws, but at the same time new ideas
Speaker 1: were taking shape. Classical economists like Adam Smith argued that markets, competition,
Speaker 1: and specialization would over time generate wealth for society as
Speaker 1: a whole. His vision of the division of labor, epitomized
Speaker 1: by the pin factory, described the logic driving industrial growth,
Speaker 1: but critics emerged as well. Karl Marx, observing industrial capitalism
Speaker 1: in Britain, argued that factories concentrated wealth in the hands
Speaker 1: of owners while alienating workers from the products of their labor.
Speaker 1: Industrial society, he claimed, was built on exploitation that would
Speaker 1: ultimately collapse under its own contradictions. Between these polls, reformers
Speaker 1: pushed for much more gradual change. Parliament eventually passed the
Speaker 1: Factory acts limiting child labor and shortening workdays. Overall sanitation
Speaker 1: reforms slow as they were eventually improved urban health trade unions,
Speaker 1: once illegal as we know, slowly gained recognition, giving workers
Speaker 1: collective bargaining power. Industrialization didn't soften overnight, but it did
Speaker 1: slowly but surely evolve. Now. Look, I've talked a lot
Speaker 1: about Britain here, and the United Kingdom was the first
Speaker 1: country to industrialize, but it wasn't alone for very long.
Speaker 1: Industrial technology quickly spread to Europe and North America in
Speaker 1: the nineteenth century. Belgium, France, and the German States built
Speaker 1: railways and factories. In the United States, abundant land resources
Speaker 1: and immigrant labor fueled rapid industrial growth after eighteen twenty.
Speaker 1: Railroads talk more about them later quickly stitched nations together.
Speaker 1: Steamships shrank oceans. Telegraph wires could now carry information at
Speaker 1: unprecedented speed. The world became more connected and more unequal.
Speaker 1: The industrial powers extracted raw materials from colonies and sold
Speaker 1: back manufactured goods, locking many regions into dependent economic rules.
Speaker 1: The industrial Revolution was, at the end of the day,
Speaker 1: not just a story of machines. As I'll keep coming
Speaker 1: back to an eluding in future episodes, it was a
Speaker 1: story of empire, global trade and honestly, really uneven development.
Speaker 1: By the late nineteenth century, industrialization had totally changed daily life.
Speaker 1: Mass production lowered the cost of goods. Urbanization now had
Speaker 1: become the dominant pattern of human settlement, and time itself
Speaker 1: was now standardized, regulated by clocks, schedules and the factory whistle.
Speaker 1: The modern world emerged from the smoke filled workshop and
Speaker 1: crowded streets, and the industrial Revolution wasn't done. It kept evolving. Eventually,
Speaker 1: Electricity will replace steam, oil will replace coil, Automation will
Speaker 1: replace what remains of muscle. But the core tensions the
Speaker 1: industrial Revolution created between labor and capital growth in inequality
Speaker 1: remain with us still today. And maybe that's the greatest legacy, honestly,
Speaker 1: of the industrial revolution, not the machines that it built,
Speaker 1: but the questions that it continues to force humanity to
Speaker 1: confront about work, justice, value, and honestly, what progress truly
Speaker 1: and actually means. These are questions we debate still today.
Speaker 1: All Right, next time, it's back to more political history
Speaker 1: in Europe, and we'll see how the European nations dealing
Speaker 1: with the changes of industrialization were confronting a post French
Speaker 1: Revolution and Napoleonic world