Social 3

1. The general trend of population growth throughout Europe from 1000 to 1800 was exponential. Some false assumptions about population are that people always married young and had large families. Another is that past societies were ignorant and could do nothing to control their num-bers. However, the total population of Europe grew slowly until 1700 and followed an irregular cyclical pattern. The Black Death caused a sharp drop in population after 1350, as it killed a third of the population. After 1500, the surging population overreached the agricultural production, leaving less food per person and higher food prices than wages. The standard of living fell and by 1600, population growth had slowed and stopped.

2. The four main factors that contribute mainly to a decline in population are famine, epidemic dis-ease, war, and poor living conditions. Famine was caused by poor farming methods and periodic crop failures. Disease usually accompanied famine and killed the weakened population. War not only killed people but spread diseases like venereal ones. Armies used scarce food supplies for themselves and disrupted the agricultural cycle. Poor living conditions spread diseases as well as fostered unhappiness. Minor cuts became life-threatening ordeals. In the Thirty Years’ War, all of these occurred and two-thirds to one-third of the population in the German states died.

3. There were many factors attributed to the growth in European population during the 1700s. In some areas, some women had more babies than before due to new opportunities for employment in rural industry that allowed them to marry earlier. However, it was mostly because less people were dying. The Black Death stopped showing up in cities after the last epidemic in 1721 in Mar-seilles. After 1600, the black rat, and its accompanying fleas, that had brought the Black Death had been overtaking by a new rat of Asiatic origin, whose fleas carried the plague poorly and had little taste for human blood. Smallpox inoculations saved many English lives. Improvements in the water supply and sewerage resulted in somewhat better public health and helped reduce diseases in some urban areas of western Europe. Improvements in water supply and in the drainage of swamps and marshes reduced infectious insects. Humans became more successfully in storing the supply of food and thus protecting against famine. The many canals and road built in western Eu-rope during this time lessened the impact of local crop failure and famine and allowed for emer-gency supplies able to be brought in. Wars were not as destructive in the 1600s and spread fewer diseases. New foods, like potatoes, were introduced that contained a large source of vitamins A and C.

b.
1. The growth in population increased the number of rural workers with little or no land, causing them to have to develop industry in rural areas. Poor people in the countryside often had to sup-plement their earnings from agriculture with other types of work, and capitalists from the city were eager to employ them, though at lower wages than urban workers. In the Middle Ages, in-dustry was dominated by urban craft guilds and merchants who sought to monopolize all industry. By the 1700s, rural poverty and the need to employ landless proletariats overwhelmed the effort of urban artisans to maintain their monopoly. This new system has been called the cottage indus-try, domestic industry, protoindustrialization, and the putting-out system. In the putting-out sys-tem, there are the merchant capitalist and the rural worker. The merchant put out raw materials to the cottage workers, who processed the raw materials in their own homes and returned the fi-nished product to the merchant for some money. Sometimes rural workers would buy their own materials and then sell it to the merchants. The system grew because underemployed labor was abundant, and poor peasants and landless laborers would work for low wages. Workers and mer-chants could change procedures and experiment since production in the countryside was unregu-lated.

2. Textiles, all types of knives, forks, housewares, buttons, gloves, clocks, and musical instruments could be produced quickly in the putting-out system. Luxury goods for the rich, like tapestries and porcelain, were produced. The rural textile industry was categorized as a family enterprise be-cause all the members in the family helped in the work by working the equipment. The women and children prepared the raw material and spun the thread while the man of the house wove the cloth. Because there was so much work, large families and marrying early were encouraged. After the dirt was beaten out of the raw cotton, it was thoroughly cleaned with strong soap in a tub, with the youngest children stomping on it. Slightly older children and aged relatives carded and combed the cotton or wool, allowing for the mother and the older daughter to spin it into thread.

3. There was always an imbalance in the family textile system because the work of four or five spin-ners was needed to keep one weaver steadily employed. This caused the wife and husband to have to constantly find more thread and more spinners. The wife hired widows and unmarried women as spinsters. Sometimes, the weaver’s son was sent on horseback to find thread. Also, the weaver and his wife might also have to become small capitalist employers. Relations between workers and employers were often tense. There were disputes over the weights of materials and the quality of the cloth. Merchants accused workers of stealing raw materials, and weavers com-plained that merchants delivered underweight bales. Because cottage workers tended to work in spurts and had to procrastinate and sometimes not reach their quota, merchants were susceptible and powerless. Therefore, some merchant capitalists intensified their search for ways to produce more efficiently and squeeze more work out of cottage workers.


1. The British Industrial Revolution began around the 1780s and is continuing to today. Three major fac-tors contributed to Great Britain’s entrance into the Industrial Age. First, the expanding Atlantic econ-omy of the 1700s benefited mercantilist Britain well, as its colonial empire and strong positions in Lat-in America and in the Africa slave trade provided a growing market for British manufactured goods, along with its domestic market. Because it was much cheaper to ship goods by water than by land, England’s closeness to water helped its economy greatly. In addition to its proximity to water, the canal-building boom in the 1770s added to this advantage, as large deposits of iron and coal were transported easily. There were also no internal tariffs to hinder trade. Second, agriculture was a strength, as the English farmers were second only to the Dutch in productivity in 1700 and constantly adopting new methods of farming. This resulted in a period of bountiful crops and low food prices, al-lowing the ordinary English family to not have to spend everything it earned just to buy food. Instead, it could buy manufactured goods. Third, Britain had other assets that helped give rise to industrial lea-dership, like an effective central bank and well-developed credit markets. The monarchy and aristo-cratic oligarchy provided stable and predictable government since 1688. The domestic government was not controlled, encouraging personal initiative, technical change, and a free market. Britain also had a large class of hired agricultural laborers, increased by the second round of enclosures in the late-1700s. These rural workers were mobile, unlike the village-bound peasants in France and western Germany.

2. In Britain, the putting-out system grew so greatly that its limitations began to outweigh its advantages, as in the textile industry in 1760. Carpenter James Hargreaves invented his version of the cotton-spinning jenny in 1765. At the same time, manufacturer Richard Arkwright invented the water frame. These two inventions led to an explosion in the cotton textile industry in the 1780s. Hargreaves’s jenny was simple, inexpensive, and hand-operated. At first, six to twenty-four spindles were mounted on a sliding carriage, with each spindle spinning a slender thread. The woman moved the carriage back and forth with one hand and turned a wheel to supply power with the other. Arkwright’s water frame could hold several hundred spindles and required water to power it. Because of this, the machines re-quired large specialized mills with as many as one thousand workers. The frame could only spin coarse, strong thread, which was then re-spun by hand-powered cottage jennies. Samuel Crompton around 1790 invented a new technique that also required more power than the arm could power. Be-cause of this, all cotton spinning was gradually concentrated in factories. Cotton goods became much cheaper and were bought by all classes. Families using cotton in cottage industry did not need to con-stantly search for yarn, as all the thread needed could be spun in the cottage on the jenny or obtained from a nearby factory. The wages of weaves rose greatly until 1792, giving them one of the best-paying jobs. Large numbers of agricultural laborers became handloom weavers.

3. Until the late 1780s, most British factories were in rural areas, where there was access to waterpower. Working condition were less satisfactory than those of cottage weavers and spinners, as the factories resembled the poorhouses where inmates had to labor for very little pay. Factory owners turned to young children, especially those abandoned by their parents and put in the care of local parishes, to do their work. The factory owners exercised almost complete authority over the children. The children were forced by law to labor for as many as fourteen years. They were locked up nightly in factory dormitories and received little or no pay. There works thirteen or fourteen hours a day, six days a week. There was harsh physical punishment to maintain discipline. Factories were the heart of the Industrial Revolution and became the symbol of the good and bad of industrialization.

4. Waterpower was used most in the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. This would have forced in-dustries to remain near rivers and streams. In the past, humans have used animals to do work as well as water to grind grain and wind to pump water and drain swamps. Wood was used for heat as well as in manufacturing. However, wood was always in short supply, and by 1740, the British iron industry was stagnated. Britain could import wood from Russia, but that eventually ended. Britain then used its abundant but scattered reserves of coal as an alternative to wood. Coal had been used in Britain in the late Middle Ages, and by 1640, it heated most homes in London and provided heat for making beer, glass, soap, and other products.

5. One pound of good coal contains about 3,500 calories of heat energy. It was more abundant than wood, and a hard-working miner can dig out 500 pounds of coal a day using hand tools. An extremely inefficient converter could produce 27 horsepower-hours of work from the 500 pounds. The miner produces only about one horsepower-hour in a day. As more coal was produced, mines were dug deeper and were constantly filling with water. Animal walking in circles had to power mechanical pumps, creating expensive and bothersome power. Because of this, Thomas Savery in 1698 and Tho-mas Newcomen in 1705 invented the first steam engines. They were both very inefficient and burned coal to produce steam, which was then injected into a cylinder or reservoir. Newcomen’s engine had the steam in the cylinder cooled, creating a partial vacuum in the cylinder that allowed the pressure of the earth’s atmosphere to push the piston in the cylinder down and operate a pump. In 1763, Scot James Watt was called on to repair a Newcomen engine being used in a physics course at the University of Glasgow. He saw that the cylinder was being heated and cooled for every single stroke of the piston and to fix this, he added a separate condenser where the steam could be condensed without cooling the cylinder. He then entered into a partnership where he hired John Wilkinson, who learned to bore cylinders accurately and thus create an effective vacuum. Over the next twenty years, Watt made many further improvements. The steam engine drained mines and made possible the produc-tion of ever more coal to feed steam engines elsewhere. They began to replace waterpower in the cotton-spinning mills during the 1780s as well as in flour mills, malt mills, flint mills, and the mills ex-ported to the West Indies to crush sugar cane. The iron industry was transformed by allowing iron makers to switch over rapidly from limited charcoal to unlimited coal in the smelting of pig iron.

6. Rail lines had been used by the coal industry to move coal wagons within mines and at the surface. They reduced friction and allowed a horse or a human to pull a heavier load. In 1816, a rail capable of supporting a heavy locomotive was developed, creating many experiments with steam engines. In 1825, George Stephenson built an effective locomotive, the Rocket, that, in 1830, could travel at six-teen miles per hour. His car raced on the very first railroad that connected Liverpool to Manchester. The line was a financial and technical success, causing other private companies to quickly build more rail lines. Within twenty years, there was line over the main part of Great Britain. The railroad greatly reduced the cost and uncertainty of shipping freight overland. With cheaper transportation costs, markets became larger and even nationwide, encouraging larger factories with more sophisticated machinery. Throughout Europe, the construction of railroads contributed to the growth of a class of urban workers. The building of railroads created a strong demand for labor. Many landless farm laborers and poor peasants went to build railroads. After finishing construction, many men went to towns in search of work.

7. The significance of the Great Exposition was that it showed off Britain’s industrialization. It was held in the Crystal Palace, a hall built entirely of glass and iron, which was now cheap and abundant. Millions visited and became awed at Britain production of two-thirds of the world’s coal and more than one-half of its iron and cotton cloth. Britain had now become the workshop of the world.

8. The British gross national product had quadrupled its 1780-value in 1851 while the population of Brit-ain grew from about 9 million in 1780 to almost 21 million in 1851. The increase in population pro-vided a more mobile labor force. In Thomas Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population, he argued that population would always tend to grow faster than the food supply. He wanted the population to remain under control by wanting for men and women to marry later in life. However, he was not op-timistic about this approach. David Ricardo added to Malthus’s thought by argued that there was an iron law of wages that because of the pressure of population growth, wages would always be just high enough to keep workers from starving. They were wrong in the long run as countries eventually be-came richer and so did their people.