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Internet Modern History Sourcebook

Industrial Revolution

See Main Page for a guide to all contents of all sections.

• The Industrial Revolution
  • The Agricultural Revolution of the 17th-18th Centuries
  • The Revolution in the Manufacture of Textiles
  • The Revolution in Power
    • Railroads
    • Steam Ships
  • The Great Engineers
  • The Process of Industrialization
• The Industrial Revolution and the Transformation of the World
• Social and Political Effects
  • The Lives of Workers
  • Urban Life: New Social Classes
  • Social Reformism
• Literary Response

• Wikipedia: Industrial Revolution
• 2ND Arnold Toynbee (1852-1883): Lectures on the Industrial Revolution in England [Was At McMaster, now Internet Archive][Full Text]
  Toynbee popularised in English the phrase "Industrial Revolution" (it had been used by French and German writers earlier) in these lectures published just after his death.
• WEB The National Archives: Empire and Industry 1750-1850
• The Agricultural Revolution of the 17th-18th Centuries
  • Wikipedia: British Agricultural Revolution
  • Abraham Cowley (1618-1667): Of Agriculture, 1650 [At this Site]
  • Turnips
  • Accounts of the "Potato Revolution" 1695 - 1845 [At this Site]
  • 2ND John A. Mazis: The Potato [Was At UMN, now Internet Archive]
  • Field Rotation
    • Wikipedia: Norfolk four-course system
      
  • Animal Breeding
  • 2ND Rowland Prothero: English Farming, Past and Present(1912) full text, [Internet Archive]
• The Revolution in the Manufacture of Textiles
  • Wikipedia: Textile manufacture during the British Industrial Revolution
    With lists and illustrations of the various mechanical innovations.
  • Leeds Woolen Workers' Petition, 1786 [At this Site]
    Attacking the effects of machinery.
  • Leeds Cloth Merchants' Letter, 1791 [At this Site]
    Defending machinery.
• The Revolution in Power
  • WEB The Steam Engine Library [Internet Archive backup here]
    Full texts of many books on the history of the Steam Engine. A splendid resource.
  • Thomas Newcomen: The Newcomen Engine [At Internet Archive, from exeter.ac.uk][Sketch picture]
  • Wikipedia: Newcomen atmospheric engine 1712
  • James Watt (1736-1819): The Steam Engine, c. 1769 [At this Site][Picture]
  • 2ND Thomas H. Marshall: James Watt, 1925 [At Steam Engine Library][Full Text] [Internet Archive backup here]
  • Richard Guest: Compendious History of the Cotton Manufacture, 1823, excerpts [At this Site]
    On the application of steam power to cotton looms and the social effects.
  • William Radcliffe: Origin of...Power Loom Weaving, 1828, excerpts [At this Site]
    On the application of steam power to cotton looms.
    Wikipedia: Coalmining in the UK: Industrial Revolution
    With maps and charts.
  • Map: Coalfields in the British Isles [Internet Archive backup here]
  • Railroads 
    • Wikipedia: Steam Locomotive
    • Wikipedia: History of rail transport in Great Britain 1830–1922
      With illustrations and maps.
    • Map: NW European and German Railway Network 1849
    • Map: Development of French Rail Network up to 1860
  • Steam Ships
    • Line of American Packets Between New York and Liverpool, Evening Post, New York, October 27, 1817 [At AMDOCS] [Internet Archive backup here]
      Not steam ships, but an indication of the growth of a market.
    • Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806-1859): The S.S. Great Britain, 1839 [At History UK][Picture+text] [Internet Archive backup here]
      The first ocean-going steam propeller ship.
    • 2ND Two Steamboat Disasters at a Time, The U.S. Nautical Magazine and Naval Journal Vol. IV (1855), p 259. [At AMDOCS] [Internet Archive backup here]
  • 2ND Curt Anderson: The Two Countries That Invented the Industrial Revolution [Was At emachinetool.com, now Internet Archive]
    An explanation of the different functions of invention in Britain and the United States.
• The Great Engineers
  • List of the Great Engineers [Was At Heriot-Watt, now Internet Archive]
  • WEB Charles Babbage Page, (1791-1871) [At Exeter University] [Internet Archive backup here]
    Babbage was a major pioneer in computing.
  • Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806-1859): Works [Was At University of Dundee, now Internet Archive]
• The Process of Industrialization
  • Tables Illustrating the Spread of Industrialization, [At this Site]
  • Spread of Railways in Europe [At this Site]
  • Wikipedia: Lieven Bauwens
    An industrial technology spy who smuggled plans from Britan to Flanders, where the steam and textile innovations in the UK first spread to continential Europe.
  • Andrew Ure: A Dictionary of Arts, Manufactures and Mines 1840, full text [Project Gutenberg]
  • 2ND Jennifer Tann and M. J. Breckin: The International Diffusion of the Watt Engine, 1775-1825, The Economic History Review New Series, Vol. 31, No. 4 (Nov., 1978), pp. 541-564 [Jstor]
  • WEB The Industrial Revolution in the United States [Library of Congress]

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The Industrial Revolution and the Transformation of the World

• The Industrial Economy in the Context of Ancient and Medieval Economies
• WEB Five Ways to Compute the Relative Value of a UK Pound Amount, 1270 to Present
• World GDP over the last two millennia [Our World in Data]
• Total economic output of England 1270-2016
• The Great Transition
• 2ND Monica Green, “Black as Death”, Inference: International Review of Science 4, open-access. [review essay of Bruce Campbell: The Great Transition: Climate, Disease and Society in the Late-Medieval World (Cambridge University Press, 2016) [Internet Archive version here]
• The Great Divergence
  • 2ND Peter Perdue: Review of Kenneth Pomeranz. The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. [H-Net] [Internet Archive version here]
    "England was a "fortunate freak" (p. 207) whose coal supplies, close to abundant water and accessible ports, made the steam engine economically feasible. China, whose main coal deposits were in the northwest, far from its textile manufacturers in Jiangnan, had no use for a steam engine, and no reason to overcome the huge cost of getting coal to the lower Yangtze. Such very local accidents of geology had a powerful effect on creating the preconditions for the first industrial breakthrough."
  • 2ND Patrick O'Brien: Ten Years of Debate on the Origins of the Great Divergence [IHR] [Internet Archive version here]
• World Systems Theory
• Summary of Immanuel Wallerstein on World System Theory
• Map: Diachronic map of the main empires of the modern era (1492-1945)
• Map: European colonial empires at the start of the Industrial Revolution 1754
• Map: Colonisation 1822
• Map: Colonisation 1885
• Map: World Empires 1920

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Social and Political Effects

• The Lives of Workers
  • Observations on the Loss of Woollen Spinning, 1794, excerpts [At this Site]
  • The Life of the Industrial Worker in Ninteenth-Century England [At Victorian Web] [Internet Archive version here]
  • Edwin Chadwick (1803-1890): Report on Sanitary Conditions, 1842 [At Victorian Web] [At Victorian Web] [Internet Archive version here]
  • Women Miners in the English Coal Pits, 1842 [At this Site]
  • Texts on the Physical Effects of Factory Work [At Victorian Web] [At Victorian Web] [Internet Archive version here]
  • Harret Robinson: Lowell Mill Girls, 1834-1848 [At this Site]
  • Michael Faraday: Observations on the Filth of the Thames, contained in a letter addressed to the Editor of " The Times" Newspaper, 1855 [Was At U.C. Irvine, now Internet Archive]
  • Pollution caused by a Chemical Factory in the Westphalian town of Iserlohn (1839-1852) [At GHDI] + PDF version [Internet Archive version here]
  • Excerpts from a Clinical Report and Autopsy by Professor Traube on a Patient with Lung Disease caused by Coal Dust (1860) [At GHDI] + PDF version [Internet Archive version here]
  • WEB The Plight of Women's Work in the Early Industrial Revolution in England and Wales with documents. [At Women in World History] [Internet Archive version here]
  • WEB Victorian Social History [At Victorian Web] [Internet Archive version here]
• Urban Life: New Social Classes
  • The Working Class
    • The Peterloo Massacre, 1819 [At this Site]
    • Wikipedia: Peterloo Massacre
    • J. Fletcher: Moral Condition of the Ribbon Weavers of Coventry, Parliamentary Report, 1840 [At this Site]
    • Friedrich Engels: Industrial Manchester, 1844, excerpts [At this Site]
      From The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844.
    • Friedrich Engels: The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844, full text [Project Gutenberg]
  • The Industrial Bourgeoisie
    • Andrew Ure (1778-1857): The Philosophy of the Manufacturers, 1835, excerpts [At this Site]
• Social Reformism
  • Florence Nightingale (1820-1910): Rural Hygiene [At this Site]
    Life on the farm was not that much of an improvement over a factory. But, eventually, the social activists turned their eyes on the countryside as well.

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Literary Response

• William Blake: Preface to 'Milton', 1804 [Wikisource]
  Contains the words to the later hymn "Jerusalem."
• William Wordsworth (1770-1850): The Excursion, 1814 [At this Site]
• Benjamin Disraeli: Sybil, Or, The Two Nations, 1845, full text [Project Gutenberg]
• 2ND Dr Andrzej Diniejko and George P. Landow: Benjamin Disraeli’s Sybil, or How to Reconnect the Two Nations [At Victorian Web] [Internet Archive version here]
• Charles Dickens: Hard Times 1854 Excerpts [Was At PIMA, now Internet Archive]
• Charles Dickens: Hard Times 1854 Chapter 2 [Was At Mt Holyoke, now Internet Archive]
• Elizabeth Gaskell: North and South, 1855, excerpts [Was At Clinch Valley College, now Internet Archive]
• Elizabeth Gaskell: Mary Barton - A tale of Manchester life [At Project Gutenberg][Full Text]
• Elizabeth Gaskell: North and South [At Project Gutenberg][Full Text]
• Elizabeth Gaskell: Cranford [At Project Gutenberg][Full Text]
• Thomas Carlyle: Signs of the Times: The "Mechanical Age [At this Site]
• Emile Zola (1840-1902): Germinal, 1885, extracts [Was At WSU, now Internet Archive]
• Andrew Carnegie (1835­1919): The Gospel of Wealth, 1889 [At this Site]

NOTES:

The Internet Modern Sourcebook is part of the Internet History Sourcebooks Project. The date of inception was 9/22/1997. Links to files at other site are indicated by [At some indication of the site name or location]. Locally available texts are marked by [At this Site]. WEB indicates a link to one of small number of high quality web sites which provide either more texts or an especially valuable overview.

The Internet History Sourcebooks Project is located at the History Department of  Fordham University, New York. The Internet Medieval Sourcebook, and other medieval components of the project, are located at the Fordham University Center for Medieval Studies.The IHSP recognizes the contribution of Fordham University, the Fordham University History Department, and the Fordham Center for Medieval Studies in providing web space and server support for the project. The IHSP is a project independent of Fordham University.  Although the IHSP seeks to follow all applicable copyright law, Fordham University is not the institutional owner, and is not liable as the result of any legal action.

© Site Concept and Design: Paul Halsall created 26 Jan 1996: latest revision 6 October 2023 [CV]