Industry, Industrialization, the Industrial

Revolution
Prof. Mary A. Yeager
Week 5, Lecture 5
UCLA 2016

Last Week with Prof. Yeager

Previous lecture led from the Financial Revolution into the

Industrial Revolution, raising the possibility of inter-related
revolutions that might be more revolutionary than
evolutionary, in sources of inspiration and in impact
However, also consider the possibility that two/three
evolutionary strands, interacting, intersecting over time,
may well create the conditions for increases in productivity
that are self-sustaining and critical to the emergence of what
has been called self-sustaining, modern economic growth
SSMEG: had a revolutionary impact on
world/national/regional economies, but not all parts of the
world have industrialized even yet; not all economies
were/have been revolutionized in ways that increase
productivity, enable self-sustaining growth that increases per
capita income/wealth
WHY SHOULD WE BE INTERESTED IN THESE RATHER TIRED
SETS OF DEBATES? Why now? Anxieties about growth,
stagnation, environmental limits of growth
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The Arc of the Lecture, 1815-1840

Stepping into and Moving Beyond a Definitional and

Conceptual Quagmire

Re-Imagining the INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION as Industrious:

Many Mini-Revolutions

The Puzzle: Finding a Satisfactory Index of Industrialization:

Combining Old and New Views, Quantitative and Qualitative
Evidence

Manu-Factories

Mapping, measuring, interpreting the industrial terrain

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Stepping into and Moving Beyond a Definitional and

Conceptual Quagmire

Industrialization:
a disturbing force (Hurst)
a process (Palgrave)
is what happened [in this area]during
these years it involved not just a single
kind of innovation but a range of new
ways of living and working. And it also
involved the maintenance of old ways.
(Prude)
Structural/sectoral shifts: the general
shift from agriculture to manufacture,
the rapid and widespread adoption of
mechanical means of production and
inanimate forms of energy, the spread of
the wage labor system, and the coming
of large factories. (Licht xv)

One Economic Historian (Bruchey) Imagines a Dog

the Industrial Revolution as a knowledge dog with a tail

whose length is debated.

Tail is long but what about the rapidity of the wiggle?

What lay at the heart of the transition was an interdependent

process of technological innovation in which change begot
further change.
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Walton and Rockoff Dodge the Quagmire

W & R mix the terms Industrial Revolution and

Industrialization never defining precisely what either term
means

Re-Imagining the INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION as

Industrious: Many Mini-Revolutions

Jan De Vries: Industrious revolution

emphasizes demand side
changing cultural imperatives, particularly the
heightened desire to work hard in order to acquire new
consumer goods
consumer driven narrative
possibilities for economic independence
importance of self exploitation

More Alternatives: Intellectual, Social

Bezs-Selfa, Forging America

Peskin Manufacturing Revolution
Promotional rhetoric makes a
the invisible hand of the
difference:
marketplace
Attracts skilled workers
innate human
Alerts investors to opportunities
acquisitiveness
the irresistibility of
Pushes legislators to pass
technology
protective tariffs and bounties
state power
Pro-manufacturing ideology
coercive violence
anchored in nationalism rather
than liberal market capitalism

Who were the Industrial Revolutionaries?

The New Industrial Revolutionaries

Men AND women who exhibited a will to manufacture and a

desire to consume far earlier than they had a way or the means
and income; manufacturing advocates and eager consumers of
manufacturing goods, including iron manufacturers who used
slaves, (and molded men), and consumers of manufactured
goods, created cultural legitimacy for the technological
innovations and consumption that followed; new way of
understanding time and money, new strategies for disciplining
labor, new strategies for getting the goods you wanted.

To what extent does slave labor, family households, complicate

the notion of an industrious revolution? To what extent does
the notion of an industrious revolution depend upon seeing a
close link between industry and independence? What about
industry and dependence?
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Revolution/Evolution?

What makes the Industrial Revolution a turning point in history is

that people for the first time began to learn how to make production
grow at a faster pace than population itself, so that output per
capita could rise as well as numbers of peoplethe Industrial
Revolution is the most significant event ever to have affected the
material welfare of humankindit has made possible sustained
increases in real income per capita.. Bruchey(ENTERPRISE)

JSG: Chaining the Lightening of Heaven: situates IR in the years

before the CW, captures picture of little inventions leading to
innovations, and importance of communication (telegraph)
(Morse/Vail/Field, newspapers/Bennett), links to finance/Wall Street
Department Stores, consumption palaces, increases demand;
stresses unusual industries/inventions, including ice, central
heating, cast iron cook-stoves/women/households, croton water ;
changing daily lives, optimistic notions of change, progress,
demand side, cultural + technologies (as knowledge, making lives
better)
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The Puzzle: Finding a Satisfactory Index of

Industrialization: Combining Old and New Views,
Quantitative and Qualitative Evidence

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Looking Backward to Hamilton and Forward to the

New Institutional and New Economic Historians

Hamiltons Report on Manufactures, 1791

Hamiltons Case for Manufacturing
The division of labor.
An extension of the use of machinery.
Additional employment to classes of the community
not ordinarily engaged(women?) in the business.
The promoting of emigration from foreign countries.
The furnishing greater scope for the diversity of
talents and dispositions, which discriminate men
from each other.
The affording a more ample and various field for
enterprise.
The creating, in some instances, a new, and
securing, in all, a more certain and steady demand
for the surplus produce of the soil.
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From household production and putting-out system

to factory

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From household production and putting-out system

to factory

Advantages of the factory: control and managerial

economies
Centralized workshop: yarn-making, watch-making,
weaving, apparel, shoemaking, pencil-making

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New Economic Historians (quantifiers, cliometricians)

+
Institutional Economic Historians

Robert Gallman:
value added, at level of firm
the difference between the value of a firms
output and the value of the input purchased
in order to produce. It represents, quite
literally, the value the firm has added. (Lee)

No GNP, GDP data so

commodity output (Mining, Manufacturing,
Agriculture, about 80% GNP)
Institutional Economic Historians
Smith
Marx
Chandler, the spread of the factory system
McClane Report

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Chandler

Census Data
New Energy Source: Anthracite Coal
Whats the difference between
Anthracite and Bituminous?
Why should we Care?

Bituminous Coal
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Chandlers Evidence, Quantitative and Qualitative

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Market and Price Signals

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Production/Consumption: Pennsylvania Coal

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Chandler and the Manufacturing Census, 1832-1850

How to Make Sense of the Census

Read with probing eyes: he catches the anomalies associated

with two different types of coal or energy sources; the foreign
and domestic markets for these varieties of coal (foreign
anthracite (hard coal), domestic US anthracite found in NE
Pennsylvania, bituminous found in W Penn., near Pittsburgh;
points to an existing demand for coal, coal mine owners in NE
Penn who want domestic coal to become a substitute for
expensive imported anthracite; coal miners want to get the
coal to market, they construct coal canals (in NE Penn.)open
up a domestic (cheaper source for anthracite coal than foreign
coal) that becomes a cheaper energy source for heat-using
industries along NE corridor (Connecticut )

Debates about industrialization need to be interrogated;

quantitative + qualitative is key; move beyond things to see
social actors, how they were thinking about their relationships
to resources, to productivity, new ways of thinking about
opportunities

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Tracking the Industrializing Economy: More Data

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Markets and Price Signals, again

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Contributions of Manufacturing to Economic Growth

the rise of manufacturing industry supplied the cutting edge of

a gradual acceleration in the long-term rate of economic growth in
the closing decades before the Civil War. (Bruchey)

Compare with previous lecture on Financial Revolution, which

suggested that finance not industry powered the acceleration in
economic growth.

Moving Away from the Thing Theory of Development (Jane Jacobs)

to.Thinking about Business, Work, Industry and Men and Women,
Production and Consumption

Agriculture/Manufacturing: Which Sector contributes more to the

acceleration of growth? Or is there evidence to suggest that the
agriculture and industrial transformations were in fact integrated,
mutually reinforcing processes (local/nonlocal/market/price
signals?)
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