The Industrial Revolution: Crash Course European History #24

Hi I’m John Green and this is Crash Course European History.

So we’re going to turn our attention now to the Industrial Revolution, one of the most

significant developments in human history.

Like, imagine with me that it’s 1820.

I got this idea from the economist Robert Gordon by the way.

You live in, say, England.

You probably work in agriculture.

When you walk to town, you’re either pulling your own cart, or if you’re lucky you have

a horse.

You have no running water or electricity.

When you wash your few items of clothing, you do so by hand.

You cook over a fire.

You think of time not primarily in minutes and hours, but mostly in relationship to solar

cycles--how close it is to night, or to morning, or to midwinter.

And in all these respects, your life in 1820 is basically identical to the lives of people

in 1720, or 1520, or for that matter 1220.

That’s not to say life hasn’t changed in those hundreds of years--as we’ve explored

in this series, lots has changed--but as Gregory Clark observed, in terms of standard of living,

Europeans in 1800 basically led lives similar to those of Neandrathals.

Now imagine that you close your eyes in 1820 and wake up in 1920.

By now, most people in England do not work in agriculture.

They may work in shops, or transportation, or mining, oe workshops, or in factories.

They measure time in minutes.

Cars exist.

Some people have radios, which transmitted information through thin air.

A few people even have refrigerators, which dramatically decrease food spoilage and the

risk of foodborne illness.

Occasionally you might even see an airplane flying in the sky.

Oh, and also, your country has just emerged from an astonishingly deadly war fought with

highly lethal weapons such as chlorine gas, weapons that people of 1820 could not possibly

have imagined.

Welcome to the Industrial Revolution.

[Intro] In this series, we’ve already talked about

revolutions in agriculture that increased European productivity and revolutions in trade

that increasingly distributed goods among people in towns and cities instead of having

each individual family produce everything it needed.

And these forces combined to help create more division of labor: like, farmers could focus

on farming, and textile workers could focus on textile creation, which was more efficient

than having each family do every kind of work.

So let’s begin in the eighteenth century, when European industrial production is said

to have begun.

Europe’s population was growing after centuries of non-stop wars, plagues, and the worst of

the little ice age.

Meanwhile, products such as coffee, tea, and chocolate made with heated water killed bacteria,

while products from abroad expanded and varied the pool of nutrients, with corn and potatoes,

for instance, generally more calorie-dense per acre than wheat.

In short, lives were getting longer and populations rising.

This meant that on average people had a little more time to learn, tinker, and experiment.

Many different artisans invented small improvements to existing mechanical devices.

Perhaps most famously, John Kay’s flying shuttle increased the pace and productivity