Why Industry Began Where It Did
A list of preconditions, not a single cause
- A variety of factors contributed to the growth of industrial production and eventually resulted in the Industrial Revolution.
- The CED's seven: proximity to waterways; the geographical distribution of coal, iron and timber; urbanisation; improved agricultural productivity; legal protection of private property; access to foreign resources; and the accumulation of capital.
- A variety is the point — no single one of these explains industrialisation on its own.
Select all the CED's industrialisation factors.
Coal/iron/timber distribution, urbanisation, foreign resources and capital complete the seven.
Geography and energy
- Waterways move heavy goods cheaply; coal, iron and timber are what an early industry consumes and builds with.
- Where these sit close together, the cost of moving them nearly disappears.
- So the CED's first two factors are really one argument: industry starts where its inputs are already next to each other.
Improved agricultural productivity mattered because it...
A factory needs workers who are no longer needed in a field.
Farming had to improve first
- Improved agricultural productivity and urbanisation are linked: fewer farmers feeding more people is what frees labour for cities.
- A factory needs workers who are not needed in a field, and that only happens after yields rise.
- This is the same Champa-rice logic from unit 1, arriving at a different destination.
Which kind of precondition is this?
Sort each of the CED's factors.
Select all the changes the factory system brought, per the CED.
Two changes: where work happens and how finely divided it is.
No single factor explains industrialisation. The CED lists seven and calls them a variety of factors — coal alone, or capital alone, explains nothing, since many regions had one without the others. An answer that names one cause has answered a different question.
One factor, such as coal, is enough to explain industrialisation.
The CED's phrase is a variety of factors; many regions had one without the others.
Law and capital
- Legal protection of private property makes long investments safe enough to make.
- Accumulation of capital supplies the money, and access to foreign resources supplies raw materials the home country lacks.
- The last of these connects unit 5 to unit 4: the Atlantic system is where much of that capital and those resources came from.
"Access to foreign resources" links unit 5 back to the ____ system of unit 4.
Much of the capital and raw material came from there.
The factory concentrated everything
- The development of the factory system concentrated production in a single location and led to an increasing degree of specialisation of labour.
- Two changes in one sentence: where work happens, and how finely divided it is.
- Specialisation raises output per worker and lowers the skill each task requires — which 5.9 will read as a social consequence.
Coal and iron close to navigable water, in a country whose farms already fed its towns, whose law made an investment recoverable, and whose overseas trade supplied both cotton and profits. Remove any one and the sequence stalls — which is why the CED's word is variety and not cause.
A variety of factors produced industrialisation: waterways; coal, iron and timber; urbanisation; improved agricultural productivity; legal protection of private property; access to foreign resources; accumulation of capital. The factory system concentrated production in a single location and increased specialisation of labour.