Economic Advance and Social Unrest (1820-1850) – Chapter 22

1. Mrs. Tucker AP European History Victor Valley High School Economic Advance and Social Unrest (1820-1850) – Chapter 22

2. Main Ideas • Industrialization and its impact on labor and the family. • The changing role of women in industrial society. • Problems of crime and the response of police forces and prisons. • Classical economics and its theorists. • The development of socialism and radical reform. • The revolutions of 1848.

3. Toward an Industrial Society • Multiple factors • including natural resources, • availability of capital, • technological know-how, • a growing food supply, • a mobile population, and • large foreign and domestic demand ; helped make Britain the early leader in the Industrial Revolution.

4. Toward an Industrial Society • Textiles were the first industrialized industry. • Belgium, France, and Germany were also industrializing rapidly by the 1830s, though industrial production tended to be more dispersed on the Continent. • Population growth and urbanization continued; many cities were unable to accommodate the new influx of residents, so slums grew and crime increased.

5. Toward an Industrial Society • Most peasants had become landowners, but many lacked the capital to use their land effectively . • The ease with which people could leave rural land varied widely across Europe, with migration generally more difficult in eastern parts of Europe. • Railroads, canals, and improved roads made facilitated movement. • Large numbers of railways were built in the 1830s and 1840s, which reflected this period's emphasis on capital production rather than consumer production.

6. The Labor Force • The labor experience varied tremendously, according to industry and location. • In the first half of the 19th century, only textile manufacture was fully mechanized and factory based. • Skilled artisans made up far more of the nonagricultural workforce than factory workers did. • Both artisans and factory workers were proletarianized, meaning they no longer owned the means of production (tools and equipment) and no longer controlled the way their trades were conducted.

7. The Labor Force • Factory discipline attempted to human work practices. • Textile workers who resisted the factory mode of production were slowly impoverished. • Urban artisans often benefited by the early stages of the introduction of factories. • Urban artisans were slowly proletarianized, though, as labor and guild organizations were suppressed for political reasons, and craft-work was standardized for economic reasons. • British Chartists provided a model of a large-scale working-class political movement.

8. Family Structures and the Industrial Revolution • Industrialization transformed the family from being the chief unit of both production and consumption, to being the chief unit of consumption only. • This occurred slowly, and was not completed throughout Europe before the end of the 19th century. • The textile factory system in Britain provides a good model for the types of changes that occurred in industrialized family structure.

9. Family Structures and the Industrial Revolution • Early textile factories, in the 1820s, often employed whole families as a unit. • By the 1830s, however, work associated with textile machinery had largely been split into skilled work, performed by men who were relatively well paid, and unskilled work, performed by poorly paid unmarried women and the children of poor hand-loom weavers. • Child labor and education laws improved children's working conditions, but further separated them from their families.

10. Women in the Early Industrial Revolution • With industrialization, the gender division of labor that had characterized the middle class and aristocracy spread to the working class. • Starting in the 1820s, factory work for women became more widely available, but it paid less. • Wages for men in factories were often enough to support an entire family; in families where that was not the case, the children were more likely to enter the wage workforce than the wives were.

11. Women in the Early Industrial Revolution • Therefore, the women who worked in factories were generally young and single, or widowed. • Even by mid-century, more than half of all working women were still working someplace other than factories; in England, the largest group of working women were domestic servants, and in France they worked in agriculture.

12. Women in the Early Industrial Revolution • Domestic cottage industries employed huge numbers of women throughout Europe. • In virtually all cases, however, women were poorly paid. • Prostitution and sexual exploitation were widespread.

13. Women in the Early Industrial Revolution • Marriage and family life changed too, though slowly. • Women's domestic work – child-rearing, food preparation, cleaning, and often, administration of finances – became more sharply defined.

14. Problems of Crime and Order • Revolutions, industrialization, and urbanization all contributed to a fear of crime. • In cities, crime did in fact increase in the early to mid-19th century, though historians disagree about how much it increased, and why. • To assuage the fears of the propertied elite, prisons were reformed, and police systems were instituted or improved. • The existence of a paid, professional, non-political group of law-enforcement officers, distinct from the army, was a new development in 19th century Europe.

15. Problems of Crime and Order • By the end of the century, most Europeans of all classes viewed police favorably. • Forms of punishment for criminals had varied from country to country, and included sentencing convicts to naval galleys and transportation to Australia. • Efforts at prison reform were hampered by public hostility towards criminals.

16. Problems of Crime and Order • In the 1840s, the British and the French instituted reforms based on the idea that criminals could be rehabilitated. • Experimental prisons based on models used in the United States, in which prisoners were separated from each other and sometimes isolated completely, were tried in England and France. • By the end of the century, orderly societies had been established in both countries.

17. Classical Economics • Laissez-faire economic theories, based largely on Adam Smith's 1771 Wealth of Nations, predominated in this period. • Classical economists believed that competitive free enterprise was the best path to economic growth. • The state should protect the nation's economic structure and foreign trade through military power.

18. Classical Economics • The middle class approved of these economists' emphasis on thrift, competition, and personal industriousness. • Malthus argued, in his 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population, that food supply could not grow as quickly as population; if working-class wages were raised, working-class families would have more children, worsening the situation. • Later he suggested that the working class might spend additional money on consumer goods instead of children. • Ricardo, in his 1817 Principles of Political Economy, postulated the "iron law of wages," linking wages and fertility in an even more deterministic and pessimistic way than Malthus.

19. Classical Economics • In France, the July monarchy embarked on building projects, that provided jobs and wealth for the middle class, but did little to help the poor. • In Germany, internal trade barriers were lowered, but state direction of economic development continued. • In Britain, Bentham's attempts to codify utilitarianism – the principle of the greatest good, for the greatest number – increased the influence of classical economic theory. • In 1834, Bentham's followers passed a new Poor Law that funneled all poor relief through degrading workhouses, designed to motivate the poor to do anything possible to avoid them. • In 1846, the Corn Laws were repealed, allowing manufacturers to lower wages, Ireland to import grain, and Britain to embark on a free trade regime.

20. Early Socialism • As opposed to the classical economists, who conceptualized society as a conglomerate of atomistic, selfish individuals, the socialists believed that society could and should be organized as a community. • The socialists rejected the classical economists' claim that the free market was the best vehicle for producing and distributing goods. • The earliest socialists, the so-called utopian socialists, tended to advocate some form of sexual liberation alongside their critique of the market economy, which cost them credibility.

21. Early Socialism • They believed some government would put their ideas into practice. • Saint Simon in France advocated rational management; after his death in 1825, Saint-Simonian societies carried on discussions of economics and sexual politics. • Owen, a British cotton manufacturer, combined a wholesome environment for employees with a healthy profit for himself at his factory in New Lanark. • Later he established the community of New Harmony, Indiana, then returned to Britain and organized the Grand National Union, which collapsed in the 1830s

22. Early Socialism • Fourier, in France, identified boredom as one of the great problems of industrialized work. • In the 1840s, anarchists rejected industry and government. • Blanqui called for professional revolutionaries. • Proudhon encouraged mutualism, which would cause the state to become unnecessary.

23. Early Socialism • Marxism gained dominance over other socialist theories largely because of Marx' extensive use of historical examples in his writing, which allowed him to claim scientific stature for his theories, and because his theories incorporated the scholarship and intellectual tools developed by Hegel, the French socialists, and the British classical economists to – with Engels – create an overarching explanatory model that promised universal emancipation as its endpoint. • Marx believed revolution, not reform, was inevitable. • Though some of his predictions had already been disproved by the mid-19th century, his theories proved themselves to be enormously appealing and influential.

24. 1848 – Year of Revolutions • Revolutions, each spurred by particular local circumstances, occurred throughout Europe in 1848. • All essentially ended in failure. • During the revolutions, middle class liberals, who wanted more representative government, civil liberty, and minimal economic regulations, joined forces with the urban working class, which sought improved working and economic conditions.

25. 1848 – Year of Revolutions • Nationalists generally hoped to use the revolutions to further their own ends. • Conservatives fought back, however, and the middle class/working class marriages of convenience tended to falter when the political liberals had gotten what they wanted and refused to support working class social demands.

26. 1848 – Year of Revolutions • In France, king Louis Philippe abdicated in February, 1848; in the new National Assembly, moderates and conservatives quickly displaced Paris radicals. • Napoleon's nephew, Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, was elected president in December, and in 1852 he proclaimed himself emperor. • Between 1848 and 1852, French women were politically active, but they were suppressed again after 1852. • In the Habsburg Empire, Hungary called for independence in March 1848. • Serfs were emancipated in Austria and Hungary. • The Slavs held their first Pan-Slavic Congress in the summer, in the process handing Russia a tool that it would use against western European countries.

27. 1848 – Year of Revolutions • Northern Italy revolted against the Habsburgs, but was quickly suppressed. • In late 1848 and early 1849, revolt spread throughout Italy, and the French sent troops to protect the pope until 1870. • In Prussia, Frederick William IV went along with liberal demands while it suited him, then reverted to his own ways of reforming the state. • In Germany, attempts to revise the German Confederation failed and led to a long-standing division between German liberals and the working class.

28. In Conclusion • Industrialization was accompanied by social change in 19th century Europe. • Population migrated to the cities, while married women migrated out of the paid workforce. • Elites were concerned about the security of their property, so police systems and "reformed" prisons sprang up throughout Europe.

29. In Conclusion • Classical economists and socialists sparred over the best way to organize the economy, and society more generally. • When real revolution erupted, as it did in much of Europe in 1848, conservative and reactionary forces won the day handily, and the liberal middle class was politically separated from the working class for the foreseeable future.