The Making Of Industrialization

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The Making of Industrial Society 1. Industrialization refers to a process that transformed agrarian and handicraft-centered economies into economies distinguished by industry and machine manufacture. The principal features of this process were technological and organizational changes that transformed manufacturing and led to increased productivity. 2. Coal played a crucial role in the industrialization of Great Britain. Until the eighteenth century, wood has served as the primary source of fuel for iron production, home heating, and cooking. Prodigious uses of wood, however, had also hastened deforestation, causing serious wood shortages. 3. Steam engines burned coal to boil water and create steam, which drove mechanical devices that preformed work. 4. The factory system replaced both the putting-out system and protoindustrial factories and became the characteristic method of production in industrial economies. It began to emerge in the late eighteenth century, when technological advances transformed the British textile industry, and by the mid-nineteenth century most cotton production took place in factories. 5. Industrialization and the technological, organizational, and social transformation that accompied it might have originated in many parts of the world where abundant craft skills, agricultural production, and investment capital could support the industrialization process. 6. In the 1870s heavy iron and steel industries emerged in areas like western Pennsylvania and central Alabama where there were abundant supplies of iron ore and coal. By 1900 the United States had become an economic powerhouse, and industrialization had begun to spill over into southern Canada. 7. Cotton textiles were the major factory-made products during the early phase of industrialization, but new machinery and techniques soon made it possible to extend the factory

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