Renaissances movement led industrial revolution

Renaissances movement led industrial revolution - a view from intellectual social development. Introduction: Renaissance is considering as the beginning of modern times and end of middle Ages. It was a period during which whole attitude of the people and artistic activities received encouragement. But what need be remembered is that it did not come in all parts of the world at one and the same time but it spread gradually and slowly. The renaissance, also know as “II Rinascimento” (in Italian), was an influential cultural movement which brought about a period of scientific revolution and artistic transformation, at the dawn of modern European history. It marks the transitional period between the end of the middle ages and the start of the modern age. The renaissance is usually considered to have begun in the 14th century in Italy and the 16th century in northern Europe. Renaissance period is considered as the beginning of modern age. It was an age in which people had an urge to understand the present. Renaissance paintings found their expression in Italy. In fact paintings and sculpture were the most important aspects of Renaissance art. In architecture there was clear trend towards classicism. Renaissance music was free from classical influence. Literature and fine arts developed tremendously. Sprit of modern science was born during this period. The word renaissance signifies the rebirth of the freedom–loving adventurous through of men, which during the middle age has been fettered and imprisoned. It is consider as the beginning of modern times and end of Middle Ages. It was a period during which whole attitude of the people towards life changed. Many new philosophical ideas developed, scientific and artistic activities received encouragement. But what need be remembered is that it did not come in all parts of the world at one and same but it spread gradually and slowly. Industrial revolution term usually applied to the social and economic changes that mark the transition from a stable agricultural and commercial society to a modern industrial society relying on complex machinery rather than tools. It is used historically to refer primarily to the period in British history from the middle of the 18th century to the middle of the 19th century. Nature of the Industrial Revolution: There has been much objection to the term because the word revolution suggests sudden change, whereas the transformation was, to a great extends historians argue that the 13th and 16th century were also economic changes. However in view of the magnitude and 1850, the term seems useful. Dramatic changes in the social and economic structure inventions and technological innovations created the fact scale machine production and greater economic special laboring population; formerly employed predominantly production had also increased as a result of technology increasingly gathered in great urban factory centers. They occurred at later times and in changed tempo in other. The Industrial Revolution in Great Britain: Britain had up he magnificent oak forests in its fireplaces, but large deposits of coal were still available for industrial fuel. There was an abundant labor supply to mine coal and iron, and to man the factories. from the old commercial empire there remained a fleet, and England still possessed colonies to furnish raw materials and act captive markets for manufactured goods. Tobacco merchants of Glasgow and tea merchants of London and Bristol had capital to invest and the technical know-how derived from the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. Last but not least important, the insularity of England saved industrial development from being interrupted by war. Soon all Western Europe was more or less industrialized, and the coming of electricity and cheap steel after 1850 further speeded the process. The ground was prepared by voyages of discovery the 15th and 16th century, which led to a vast influx of primary time. Its effects: The Industrial Revolution has changed the face of national centers requiring vast municipal services. It created a self interdependent economic life and the urban world dependent on the will of the employer than the rural worker. Relations between capital and labor were aggravated, product of this unrest. Doctrines of laissez-faire, development. Adam Smith and David Ricardo sought to maximize the facilities. But the revolution also brought a need for a new intervention to protect the laborer and to provide necessary faire gradually gave way in the United States, Britain and capitalism. The economic theories of John Maynard made change. The Industrial Revolution also provided the economic safety of the professions, population expansion and improves the system and remains a primary goal of less developed nations. I. The Agricultural Revolution: The English countryside was transformed between 1760 and 18930 as the open-field system of cultivation gave way to compact farms and enclosed fields. The rotation of nitrogen-fixing and cereal crops obviated the necessity of leaving a third or half the land fallows each panting. Another feature of the new farming was the cultivation of turnips and potatoes. Jethro Tull (1674-1741) and Lord Townshend popularized the importance of the root crops. Tull’s most original contributions were the seed drill and horse hoe. The seed drill allowed a much greater proportion of the seed to germinate by planting it below the surface of the ground out of reach of the birds and wind. “Turnip” Townshed was famous for his cultivation of turnips and clover on his estate of Raynham in Norfolk. He introduced the four-course rotation of crops: Wheat Turnips Oats or barley Clover. Robert Bakewell (1725-1795) pioneered n the field of systematic stock breeding. Prior to this, seep had been valued for food quality. Bakewell selected his animals, inbred them, kept elaborate genealogical records, and maintained his stock carefully. He was especially successful with sheep, and before the century’s end his principle of inbreeding was well established. Under Bakewell’s influence, Coke of Holkham in Norfolk not only improved his own farms, but every year held “sheep shearing” to which farmers from all over Europe came for instruction and the exchange of knowledge. Propaganda for the new agriculture was largely the work of Arthur Young. In 1793 the Board of Agriculture was established, and Arthur Young was its secretary. Although a failure as a practical farmer, he was a great success as a publicist for scientific agriculture. Even George III plough some land at Buckingham Palace and asked his friend to call him “Farmer George”. II. Technological Change since 1700: The technological changes of the eighteen century did not appear suddenly. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the methods of making glass, clocks and chemicals advanced markedly. By 1700 in England and by 1750 in France, the tendency of the state and the guilds to resist industrialization was weakling. In fact, popular interest in industrialization resembled the wave of enthusiasm elicited by experimental agriculture. By the beginning of the eighteenth century in England, the use of machines in manufacturing was already widespread. In 1762 Matthew Boulton built a factory which employed more than six hundred workers, and installed a steam engine to supplement power from two large waterwheels which ran a variety of lathes and polishing and grinding machines. In Staffordshire an industries developed which gave the world good cheap pottery; chinaware brought in by the East India Company often furnished a model. Josian Wedgewood (1730-1795) was one of those who revolution the production and sale of pottery. From 1700 on, the Staffordshire potters used waterwheels or windmills to turn machinery were used extensively in the pottery-making process. The price of crockery fell, and eating and drinking consequently became hygienic. III.Changing Social Pattern for Industrial Revolution: The Industrial Revolution brought with it an increase in population and urbanization, as well as new social classes. The increase in population was nothing short of dramatic. England and Germany showed a growth rate of something more than one percent annually; at this rate the population would double in about seventy years. In the United States the increase was more than three percent, which might have been disastrous had it not been for a practically empty continent and fabulous natural resources. Only the population of France tended to remain static after the eighteenth century. The general population increase was aided by a greater supply of food made available by the agricultural revolution and by the growth of medical science and public health measures which decreased the death rate and added to the population base. Until the Industrial Revolution, most of the world’s population was rural. However, by mid-nineteenth century, half of the English people lived in cities, and by the end of the century, the same true of other European countries. Between 1800 and 1950 most large European cities exhibited spectacular growth. At the beginning of the nineteenth century there were scarcely two dozen cities in Europe with a population of 100,000 and but by 1900 there were more than 150 cities of this size. The rise of great cities can be accounted for in various ways: First, industrialization called the concentration of a work force and indeed, the factories themselves were often located where coal or some other essential material was available, as the rural in Germany and Lillie in northern France. Second, the necessity for marketing finished goods created great urban centers where there was access to water or railways. Such was the case with Liverpool, Hamburg, Marseilles and New York. And third, there was a natural tendency for established political centers such as London, Paris, and Berlin to become centers for the banking and marketing functions of the new industrialism. Rapid growth of the cities was not an unmixed blessing. The factory towns of England tended to become rookeries of jerry-built tenements, while the mining towns became long monotonous rows of company-built cottages, furnishing minimal shelter and little more. The bad living conditions in the towns can be traced to lack of good brick, the absence of building codes and the lack of machinery for public sanitation. But it must be added, they were also due to the factory owner’s tendency to regard laborers as commodities and not as a group of human beings. In addition to a new factory-owner bourgeoisie, the Industrial Revolution created a new working class. The new class of industrial workers included all the men, women and children laboring in the textile mills, pottery works and mines. Often skilled artisans found them degraded to routine process Labours as machines began to mass produce the products formerly made by hand. Generally speaking, wages were low; hours were long and working conditions unpleasant and dangerous. The industrial workers had helped to pass the Reform Bill of but they had not been enfranchised by it. Urbanization and class consciousness (1800-1850): The industrial revolution was more than an important event in the economic and technological history of the West. It helped to reshape the patterns of life for men and women, first in Britain, then in Europe and America and eventually thought much of the world. By increasing the scale of production, the Industrial Revolution brought about the factory system, which in turn compelled the migration of millions from the countryside and small towns into cities. Once in those cities, men and women had to learn a new way of life and learn it quickly how to discipline them to the factory whistle and survive in a slum, if they were first-generation urban workers, how-to manage a work force and achieve respectable prominence for themselves in the community, if they were businessmen and their wives. One particular lesson that industrialization and urbanization thought was that of class consciousness. Men and women, to a far greater degree than heretofore, began to perceive themselves as part of a class with interest of its own opposition to the interests of men and women in other classes. We shall examine this range of social and cultural changes as they occurred during the first fifty years or so of the nineteenth century , after looking briefly first at the condition of the bulk of the population, which despite industrialization, remained on the land. Since the Industrial Revolution came first to Britain, our focus will be on that country. Yet the pattern set by the British was one that was repeated to a great extent in other European countries, as industrialization came to them in time. Population patterns: The dramatic story of the growth of industrialization and urbanization must not be allowed to obscure the fact that in 1850, the population of Europe was still overwhelmingly a peasant population. While in England by 1830 a sizable minority lived in towns and cities, elsewhere society remained predominantly rural. In France and Italy 60 percent lived in the country, in Prussia over 70 percent, in Spain over 90 percent, in Russia over 95 percent. Demographic pressures, which helped produce chaos in the cities, likewise caused severe hardship in the countryside. The populations of the predominantly agricultural nations leapt forward with those that were in industrializing. The population of Europe as a whole, estimated roughly at 205 millions by 1800 had risen to 274 millions by 1850 and to 320 millions by 1870. In Britain with its comparatively high standard of living, the numbers increased from 16 millions to 27 millions. Yet the rural Irish, despite their periodic famines, increased too, from 5.5 to 8 million and the Russians from 39 to 60 million, in the same period. Causes of continuing population expansion: The causes of this continuing population explosion remain obscure. The notion that the explanation can be traced to a desire on the part of parents in industrial countries to produce more family wage-earners is now downplayed by scholars, given the facts that increases occurred in rural regions as well. One contributing factor to this continued growth may have been a decline in the virulence of certain fatal diseases as a result of the cyclical potency of microbes. Certainly the curbing of cholera, through the adoption of sanitary reforms and smallpox as Edward Jenner’s technique of vaccination gained gradual acceptance after 1796, help to explain the population trend. The increasing ability and desire of governments to monitor and improve the lives of their subjects had a direct effect on the decline of the death rate. At the same time the availabity of less expensive foods of high nutritional value most notably the potato and the ability to transport foodstuffs cheaply by rail meant European populations would not suffer as much from undernourishment as in the past and that they would thus be less susceptible demitting illness. Other plausible explanations suggest that the population increase was the result of rising birth rates caused by earlier marriages. As serfdom declined peasants tended to set up households as at a younger age. The spread of cottage industries also allowed more rural couples to marry and set up households even without the inheritance of land. This “proletarianization” of the countryside contributed not only to lowed age at marriage but also to a higher number of marriages. A relatively small expansion in the population of a region in one generation would result in a far greater one in the next. As the population grew, the number of young and fertile people grew faster thereby significantly increasing the ratio of births to total population. Wretched rural conditions: Whatever the reasons for the population increase, conditions remained such as to make the life of the proper rural inhabitants of Europe seldom more than bleak. Overpopulation brought underemployment and hence poverty, units train. Millions of tiny holdings produced a bare subsistence living, if that. Farms still sowed and harvested by hand. Conditions in rural areas deteriorated shapely whenever there was a bad harvest. The average daily diet for an entire family in a “good” year might amount to no more than two or three pounds of bread a total of about 3,000 calories. Hunger often near –starvation as well as epidemic disease wee still common occurrences. The result was a standard of living if one can dignify the condition with name that for many rural inhabitants of many areas in Europe actually declined in the first half of the nineteenth century, although not enough to reverse general population growth. Government in some countries attempted to solve the related problems of population pressure and impoverishment passing laws rising the age of marriage. In some of the states of southern and western Germany as well as in Austria, men were forbidder to many before the age of thirty and were also required to prove their ability to support a family. Government did their best to encouraged emigration to ease the overcrowding, the majority of emigrants relocating in the Americas. Emigrant ion from England rose from 57,000 in 1830, to 90,000 in 1840, to 280,000 in 1850. Ireland in the early of the nineteenth century, witnessed the departure of over 15 million before the great potato famine of 1846, when approximately three out of every tour acts operates were blighted. After the potato famine the flow of emigrations in creased to a flood. Agricultural capitalism: Even had such policies acted as an effective curb on population growth-which, in the main, they did not; they would nevertheless have failed to prevent the rural stress that resulted from the continuing spread of agricultural capitalism. The speed with which agricultural change occurred in various parts of Europe depended upon of particular governments. Those more sympathetic to new capitalist impulses facilitated the transfer and reorganization of land by means of enabling legislation. They encouraged the elimination of small farms and an increase in larger, more efficient units of production. In England over half the total area of the country, excluding waste land was composed of estates of a thousand acres or more. In Spain, the fortunes of agricultural capitalism fluctuated with the political tenor of successive regimes: with the coming of a liberal party to power in 1820 came a law encouraging the free transfer of land, with the restoration of absolutism in 1823 came a repeal of the law. Russia was one of the countries least affected by agricultural change in the first half of the nineteenth century. There land was worked in vast blocks; some of the largest landowners possessed over half a million acres. Until the emancipation of the serfs in the 1860s, landowners claimed the labor of dependent peasant populations for as much as several days per week. But the system of serfdom gave neither landowners nor serfs incentive farming nor land- management techniques. The legacy of manorialism: European serfdom, which bound hundreds of men, women and children to particular estates for generations, prohibited the use of land as a negotiable commodity and therefore prevented the development of agricultural entrepreneurship. In France, despite the fact that memorialize had been abolished by the Revolution, there was no rapid movement towards large-scale capitalist farming. An army of peasant proprietors, direct beneficiaries of the Jacobins democratic constitution, continued to work the small farms they owned. The fact that France suffered far less agricultural distress, even in the 1840s, than did other European countries and the fact that there was less migration in France from the country to the cities and overseas than there was in Germany and England, are marks of the general success of this rural lower middle class in sustaining itself on the land. Its members were content to farm in the old way, opposed agricultural innovolution and indeed, innovation generally. Despite their venation of the Revolution, they were among the most conservative elements in European society. Rural societies and industrialization: Rural populations, though isolated from urban centers, found themselves directly affected by the events of the Industrial Revolution. Factories brought about a decline in cottage industry and a consequent loss of vital income, especially during winter months. Improved communication networks not only afforded rural populations a keener sense of events and opportunities elsewhere, but also made it possible for governments to intrude upon the lives of those men and women to a degree previously impossible. Central bureaucracies now found it easier to collect taxes from the peasantry and to conscript its sons their armies. Rural disturbances: Country people responded with sporadic violence against these and other harsh industrious upon their lives. In southern England in the late 1820s, small farmers joined forces to burn barns and hayricks in protest to the introduction of threshing machines, symbol of the new agricultural capitalism. They masked and otherwise disguised themselves, riding out at night under the banner of their mythical leaders, “captain Swing .” their raids were proceeded by anonymous threats such as the one received by a large-scale farmer in the country of Kent: “pull down your threshing machine or else fire without delay. We are five thousand men and will not be stopped.” Other major rural disturbances occurred in Ireland, Silesia and Galicia in the 1830s and 1840s and indeed to a lesser degree, right across Europe. Russia, serf uprisings were a reaction to continued bad harvests and exploitation rather than to agricultural innovation and displacement. In no country, however was the agrarian population a united political force. Those who owned land, those who leased it as tenants and those who worked it as laborers had interests as different from each other those of the urban populations. Conditions by supplying both water and drainage. Yet by 1850, these projects had only just begun. Paris perhaps better supplied with water than any European city, had enough for no more than two baths per capita per year; in London , human waste remained uncollected in 250,000 domestic cesspools; in Manchester, fewer than a third of the dwelling were equipped with toilets of any sorts. The standard of living debate: Conditions such as these are important evidence in the debate that has occupied historians for the past several decades. The question is: did the standard of living rise or fall in Europe during the first half century of the Industrial Revolution? One school, the “optimists”, argues that workers shared in the more general increase in living standards which occurred throughout Europe from 1800 onward. A variation on this optimistic theme maintain that whatever the hardships workers were compelled to suffer during the period of intense industrialization after 1800, they represent the necessary and worthwhile price society had to pay before it could “take off” into a period of “ sustained economic growth” farcifies , in terms of standard of living, were required to permit accumulation of a capital base sufficient to guarantee economic expansion and an eventual level of general prosperity higher than any civilization had hitherto achieved. Other historians insists that such an analysis encourages one to ignore the evidence of physical squalor and psychological disruption that men, women and children suffered as they provided the statistical “base” for future economic historian’s abstract calculations. Change in society: the Industrial Revolution also had considerable impact upon the nature of work. It significant changed the daily lives of ordinary men, women and children in the regions where it took root and grew. Growth of cities: One of the most obvious changes to people’s lives was that more people moved into the urban areas where factories were located. Many of the agricultural Laborers who left villages were forced to move. Beginning in the early 18th century, more people in rural areas were competing for fewer jobs. The rural population had risen sharply as new sources of food became available, and death rates declined due to fewer plagues and wars. At the same time, many small farms disappeared. This was party because new enclosure laws required farmers to put fences or hedges around their fields to prevent common grazing on the land. Some small farmers who could not afford to enclose their fields had to sell out to larger landlords and search for work elsewhere. These factors combined to provide a ready work force for the new industries. New manufacturing towns and cities grew dramatically. Many of these cities were close to the coalfields that supplied fuel to the factories. Factories had to be closed to sources of power because power could not be distributed very far. The names of British factory cities soon symbolized industrialization to the wider world: Liverpool, Birmingham, Leeds, Glasgow, Sheffield, and especially Manchester. In the early 1770s Manchester numbered only 25,000 inhabitants. By 1850, after it had become a center of cotton manufacturing, its population had grown to more than 350,000. In the pre-industrial England, more than three-quarters of the population lived in small villages. By the mid-19th century, however, the country had made history by becoming the first nation with half its population in cities. By 1850 millions of British people lived in crowed, grim industrial cities. Reformers began to speak of the mills and factories as dark, evil places. Conclusion: The Industrial Revolution established the basis for our economic, our social and in many respects our political institutions. Imagine what life would be without machinery and capitalism and you have a picture of the states of living before the Industrial Revolution. The intricate complexities of societies today the hustle and bustle of our existence and our economic interdependence with other people are the products of industrialization. The Industrial Revolution can not be confined to one place, to one class or to one age. It influenced everything, everywhere and it is still going on. Some profound social changes in England were due principally to the Agricultural Revolution, during which the old was disestablished and new classes appeared. There was a new lands aristocracy, comings that they had mad from trades. Besides, there was brought into being mass agricultural laborers, who had been deprived of their own holdings by the enclosure movement. Finally, there was a considerable group of renters who tilled the land for the wealthy owners. The old yeomanry class disappeared from the farms, many of them being forced to seek employment in the cities. This change in agriculture was an integral part of the transformation in England of a society that was predominantly agricultural into one that was industrial. By means of the changes productivity was greatly increased; but in the process of changing the poorer agricultural classes suffered. Practically everything that is known as modern can be traced to the Industrial Revolution. The French Revolution broke the power of the old aristocracy and established a precedent for people to revolt in favor of individual liberty and freedom of economic enterprise. The ideas of democracy and of applied nationalism received their dynamic characteristics from the rebellion that the French people staged against the old order in their country. The Industrial Revolution started developments that were destined to affect almost everyone who lived afterward. In our own experiences, the nationalism, democracy, imperialism, cultural activities, social problems and all phases of economic developments in the world of today can be understood only in the light of changes that were made by that beginning of great revolution in industrial life. Most of what we have termed progress in the last century could not have taken place without the industrial transformation that started in the middle of the 18th century; and likewise, most of our present-day problems can be traced to the same source. Hitler’s rise to power in Germany, Japan’s threat in the Far East and relief problems in the United States are by products of the new economic order that the Industrial Revolution brought into being. Therefore, modern history is, indeed, an outcome of those two momentous revolutions. References: Burckhardt, Jacob (1878), The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans S.G.C Middlemore (republished in 1990 under ISBN 014044534X) Ergang , Robert (1967), The Renaissance(ISBN 0442023197) Ferguson, Wallace K. (1962), Europe in Transition, 1300-1500 (ISBN 0049400088) Haskins, Charles Homer (1972), The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (ISBN 067476025) Huizinga, Johan (1924), The Waning of the Middle Ages (republished in 1990 under ISBN 0140137025) JENSEN, De Lamar (1992), Renaissance Europe (ISBN 0395889472) Lpez, Robert S. (1952), Hard Times and Investment in Culture. Clow, Archibald and Cow, Nan L. (1952). Chemical Revolution, (Ayer Co Pub, June, 1952), pp. 65-90. ISBN 0-8369-1909-2. R.M. Hartwell, The Industrial Revolution and Economic Growth, Methuen and Co., 1971, page 339-341 ISBN 0-416-19500-8. General Strike 1842 from chartists.net, Accessed 13 November 2006. Mabel C. Buer, Health, Wealth and Population in the Early Days of the Industrial Revolution, London: George Routledge & Sons, 1926, page 30, ISBN 0-415-38218-1.