The Industrial Revolution (review)

Lee T. Wyatt provides an introduction to the Industrial Revolution as part of a Greenwood Press series devoted to significant issues between 1500 and 1900 and meant for high school or lower-level college students. He surveys the agricultural revolution in Great Britain, the years leading up to its Industrial Revolution, and the British Industrial Revolution itself, before turning to changes in the United States and on the European continent. He then discusses industrial changes outside of the West. And he appends biographies of significant figures, contemporary sources, photographs, and an annotated bibliography.

The Industrial Revolution included a variety of changes in agriculture, finance, transportation, urbanization, and government, all of which Wyatt surveys as well as discussing population growth, educational innovations, and cultural developments. Those areas that shared Britain's openness to change industrialized faster than did other areas. Fragmented, the German states impeded industrial development until the Zollverein (tariff union) removed impediments to trade. Of the non-Western states, Russia and Japan both industrialized, but Japan more successfully.

Although Wyatt has relied for source material on websites and older literature, he also draws on contemporary journals and reports to provide useful detail. For instance, he notes that British cotton manufacturers had to overcome the law that all shrouds be made from wool. He identifies the number of Chinese workers building railroads in the United States and notes the desirability to employers of their work ethic and cleanliness, even as their pay, $28 a month, was less than that of Irishmen. He compares the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851, which had six million visitors, around one-third of Britain's population, with the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876, with 9.8 million visitors, about 20 percent of the U.S. population. In 1851, Britain was clearly the leading industrial power, but by 1876 the United States was gaining strength and the high level of visitation to the Centennial is evidence of the nation's increasingly efficient transportation system.

The biographical sketches are informative short essays that add significantly to the narrative. But Wyatt seems unfamiliar with the history of technology as a field of inquiry, asserting, for example, that milling machinery, which "drilled holes in the key components of guns" early in the Civil War, spread to other industries by the end of the war (p. 105). Even though he is a retired army colonel and former history faculty member at West Point, Wyatt has Eli Whitney developing interchangeable parts, rather than the United States Ordnance Department. He presents Thomas A. Edison as the inventor of the "incandescent light bulb (1879)," rather than a system for generating, distributing, and consuming electricity to compete with gas. He writes that the "first power stations appeared in Great Britain in the early 1880s" but soon spread elsewhere and helped create such other industries as "electric lighting" (p. 134). His discussion of "mass society" (pp. 135–41) does not demonstrate a homogenization of Western society, which one might expect from the term and its history, but provides an opportunity to discuss significant social and cultural changes that occurred with industrialization and urban development.

Those interested in using this book in courses introducing the Industrial Revolution may like it because of its clear writing and nice examples, and even for its mistakes. The website also holds promise of providing many primary documents that would be useful in courses.