Industrial Revolution DBQ 2020
Use Heimler's format worksheet to work through the DBQ. Turn in either a picture of the worksheet or a word document you type up.
Historical Context: The Industrial Revolution marked the change from an agrarian and handicraft economy to one dominated by industry and machine manufacturing. This process began in Britain in the 18th Century and from there spread to other parts of the world.
Prompt: What were the causes of industrialization in England and what impact did industrialization have on society in England.
Documents:
Document 1: Arnold Toynbee, Lectures on the Industrial Revolution of the 18th Century in England, Humboldt (adapted)
|
Passing to manufactures, we find here the all-prominent fact to be the substitution of the factory for the domestic system, the consequence of the mechanical discoveries of the time. Four great inventions altered [changed] the character of the cotton manufacture; the spinning jenny, patented by Hargreaves in 1770; the water-frame, invented by Arkwright the year before; Crompton’s mule [spinning machine] introduced in 1779, and the self-acting mule, first invented by Kelly in 1792, but not brought into use till Roberts improved it in 1825. None of these by themselves would have revolutionised the industry. But in 1769—the year in which Napoleon and Wellington were born— James Watt took out his patent for the steam-engine. Sixteen years later it was applied to the cotton manufacture.
|
Document 2: Andrew Ure, The Philosophy of Manufactures: or, an Exposition of the Scientific, Moral, and Commercial Economy of the Factory System of Great Britain, A. M. Kelley
|
Steam-engines furnish the means not only of their support but of their multiplication. They create a vast demand for fuel; and, while they lend their powerful arms to drain the pits and to raise the coals, they call into employment multitudes of miners, engineers, ship-builders, and sailors, and cause the construction of canals and railways: and, while they enable these rich fields of industry to be cultivated to the utmost, they leave thousands of fine arable fields free for the production of food to man, which must have been otherwise allotted to the food of horses. Steam-engines moreover, by the cheapness and steadiness of their action, fabricate [produce] cheap goods, and procure [acquire] in their exchange a liberal supply of the necessaries and comforts of life, produced in foreign lands. . . .
|
Document 4: Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, W. O. Henderson and W. H. Chaloner, eds., Stanford University Press
|
Every great town has one or more slum areas into which the working classes are packed. Sometimes, of course, poverty is to be found hidden away in alleys close to the stately homes of the wealthy. Generally, however, the workers are segregated in separate districts where they struggle through life as best they can out of sight of the more fortunate classes of society. The slums of the English towns have much in common—the worst houses in a town being found in the worst districts. They are generally unplanned wildernesses of one- or two-storied terrace houses built of brick.
|
Document 5: Flora Tristan, The Workers’ Union, University of Illinois Press (adapted)
|
Flora Tristan was a 19th-century French activist and a member of the lower working class. In 1843, she wrote The Workers’ Union.
1. Consolidation of the working class by means of a tight, solid, and indissoluble [indivisible] Union. 2. Representation of the working class before the nation through a defender chosen and paid by the Workers’ Union, so that the working class’s need to exist and the other classes’ need to accept it become evident. 3. Recognition of one’s hands as legitimate property. (In France 25,000,000 proletarians have their hands as their only asset.) 4. Recognition of the legitimacy of the right to work for all men and women. 5. Recognition of the legitimacy of the right to moral, intellectual, and vocational education for all boys and girls. 6. Examination of the possibility of labor organizing in the current social state [social conditions]. 7. Construction of Workers’ Union palaces [buildings] in every department, in which working-class children would receive intellectual and vocational instruction, and to which the infirm and elderly as well as workers injured on the job would be admitted. 8. Recognition of the urgent necessity of giving moral, intellectual, and vocational education to the women of the masses so that they can become the moral agents for the men of the masses. 9. Recognition in principle of equal rights for men and women as the sole [only] means of unifying humankind. . . . |