The Industrial Revolution And "The Social Question" () Just as a political revolution is a vast upheaval that transforms society beyond politics, so too theIndustrial Revolutionextended far beyond economics. The term "Industrial Revolution" was coined in the 1820s and 1830s to describe the monumental changes taking place throughout Europe, comparable to those wrought by the French Revolution. Contemporary responses to the Industrial Revolution varied considerably. Some observers were optimistic, impressed by the new means of production, which dramatically increased mankind's wealth and power over nature. Others were not so positive, concerned that the social and environmental effects of industrialization might prove disastrous. However much its legacy is debated, the Industrial Revolution marks a clear line between traditional society and a recognizably modern world. Observers react to two overlapping processes: industrialization and a rapid rise of European population (begun before industrialization and bringing extensive distress and upheaval in its own right). European population rose from 140 million in 1750 to about 265 million in 1850. The introduction of the potato in Ireland, Germany, and elsewhere allowed more food per acre. Household textile production and the income it brought also allowed young people, at first, to form their own households earlier in life; rates of illegitimacy, children born outside marriage, rose as well. First children were born at an earlier age from the late-18th century on; over several generations the cumulative contribution to population growth was considerable. Medical advances, such as the control of smallpox, assisted in increasing life expectancy though its role in the acceleration of family formation and rising birth rates is debatable. From 1800 to 1850 population went from 11 to 22 million in Great Britain, from 5 to 8.5 million in Ireland (until famine struck in the mid 1840s), and from 39 to 60 million in European Russia, the largest of the countries. Against this general trend, the French population was among the slowest growing of Europe, rising from about 26 million during the revolution to almost 30 million by 1815 and 35 million by mid-century. 1
The relationship of the rise in population to the Industrial Revolution is ambiguous; the growing population in the countryside certainly created the oft-impoverished labor supply for the new factory cities. But, as apologists for the brutal conditions in the early phases of the Industrial Revolution point out, without industrialization there probably still would have been misery arising from over-population - Ireland, with its doubling of size and absence of industry, has been compared to India - and only a transformation of technology and production could absorb the new generations. In turn these transformations of technique with the capacity to create wealth by providing cheap textiles, new machines, and modes of transport revolutionized traditional human relationships.
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