The Industrial Revolution, Defined

It may be a bit presumptuous to assume that the reader is familiar with the meaning of the phrase ‘Industrial Revolution’, but it is not an unreasonable assumption, given the fact that the period so-called is arguably the most important in human history. At no other point in history have so many parts of the sum human experience been so radically and rapidly altered – or, at least, at no other point in recorded history. Indeed, the radical alteration of human society around innovations in the means of production, thus feeding into other innovations that, in turn, cause other alterations and so on, is not unique. The most notable other example is the Agricultural Revolution, itself an alteration in the means of producing sustenance. Dispensing with the need for hunter-gatherer societies presented an enormous wealth of opportunities and posed material, intellectual, and social problems for the burgeoning civilisations of the day, even influencing biological factors beyond the direct and intelligent command of humanity.

This neatly describes the cumulative effect of the Industrial Revolution: the dispensation of the need for an agricultural economy. This shift from the lion’s share of the man-hours of a locale being devoted to the business of survival to the other modern entrepreneurial enterprises defined the Industrial Revolution.

Profundity is not found in the observation of the nature of the Industrial Revolution. This is because the bulk of economic activity remains devoted to the production of goods or services, which the members of that economy ultimately consume or export for consumption elsewhere. Much of the labour in an industrialised economy is dedicated to the production of items used in the supply chains of end-point consumables. What differs from the agrarian economy in this regard is the extreme division of productive labour. For example, industrial farming makes use of a wide range of products not commonly available to the typical farmer. This doesn't necessarily stem from a lack of individual aptitude but rather as a consequence of the time a farmer must spend on farming itself. A farmer has little time to spare for activities related to producing fertilisers, antibiotics, tractors, or other agricultural machinery, along with the required inputs for those machines. If the farmer discovers extra time, he is more likely to expand his farming operations rather than invest it in learning additional supportive trades. This preference is driven by the practicality of utilising time effectively in the field with which he is already intimately enmeshed. There is only so much a single man can accomplish, but two or more individuals working towards a collaborative goal through the specialisation of their efforts can achieve more than the sum of their independent endeavours. Therefore, the Industrial Revolution consisted of productivity gains found through collaborative specialisation, liberating more available man-hours to further specialise collaboratively. That this process requires certain social organisational features to begin and alters those very features throughout its natural progression is reasonably included in the encompassing term 'Revolution'.

An astute reader will note that this conceptualisation of the Industrial Revolution eliminates significant elements synonymous with it, particularly those industrial objects and ideas, such as the steam engine, vaccinations, railways, electronics, and synthetic fertilisers—among others too numerous to list here. For any supposed counterexample to this maxim about the underlying nature of the Industrial Revolution that one may care to name, a more comprehensive understanding of the history of the development of that counterexample reveals precisely the opposite: the aforementioned collaborative specialisation provided the opportunity to significantly refine the process by which the relevant parts of the collaboration were accomplished.

The steam engine, for instance, existed in functional prototypical form in 60 AD, vaccinations are simply a safer means of the ancient art of inoculation against serious diseases, railways offer a large-scale alternative to the road transport of goods or people, electronics merely perform logic-gated tasks faster, and synthetic fertilisers reduce the time inputs and risks associated with the natural alternative. Furthermore, this fundamental aspect of the industrialising economy was understood and described by none other than Adam Smith. Smith dedicates the bulk of the first book of his treatise to precisely this division of labour and the consequent gains to productivity observed in Europe at the time while commenting on the causes of innovations that emerged within that context.

However, he fails to grasp that this beneficent state of affairs is wildly atypical, describing the world of economics (and political economy) as he sees it at a unique point in history—not as it is for the vast remainder. Thus, the approximate start and end dates of the Industrial Revolution can be described in terms of the advent of the societies capable of that economy-spanning collaborative specialisation and the point at which those societies ceased to be able to achieve it.

Such societies emerged in a significant number and concentration in Europe after the successful syncretisation of Aristotelian and Stoic philosophies into Christianity in the late thirteenth century. The peculiar marriage of an effective method of categorisation and comparison, a body of normative ethics premised upon an objective reality, and a religion whose central figure is a member of the working class produced a zeitgeist wherein the requisite collaboration for industrialisation became possible, if not inevitable. These three intellectual influences provide an effective structure to investigate the natural world, a systematised optimisation of discrete human behaviour based on the understanding of humans as social animals living in an objective reality, and a justification for the implementation of the same with heavy encouragement to make life materially better for oneself and others in similar stations. In other words, the means, the opportunity, and the motive to progress industrially aligned at the end of the Medieval Period, or the early market economies of Renaissance Italy were the start date and location of the Industrial Revolution — evidenced by that region experiencing the first inkling of the exponential growth in economic output that has come to erroneously define the Industrial Revolution. Of course, there are moments of industrial progress outside the confluence of those three intellectual forces, but those moments are brief, lacking in the snowballing character of the Industrial Revolution.

Much can be gleaned from the acknowledgement of this earlier start date about the intrinsic peculiarities of the Industrial Revolution. This includes a more accurate formal inquiry into the Philosophy of Technology and the nearly endless study of the development of specific industrial production methods. However, these aspects are tangential to the salient property of the Industrial Revolution: it is primarily a social phenomenon that facilitates alterations to the social milieu of the industrialising society.

Historical examples abound of significant developments in the intellectual framework outlined, most notably the explicit rejection of the three pillars that caused the Industrial Revolution in the first place. The principles of Hedonism, Nihilism, and Relativism directly assault the intellectual edifice, and their varied spawn slip through in subtler weathering but could not exist absent the staggeringly copious amounts of wealth produced by the very things they undermine.

Without the primary industrial byproduct of the Revolution in easy access to historically unprecedented wealth, Hedonism is virtually impossible for the vast majority of living persons, Nihilism would result in mass suicides from the sheer horrific rigour of daily life, and the tithes Relativism forces a society to pay in terms of deteriorating the standards of legally, ethically, and morally acceptable behaviour could not be materially tolerated for long.

So, it can be seen from these examples and multitudinous others the reader may occasion to produce for himself that the Industrial Revolution produced a fertile soil for the seeds of its own unmaking. Far from the exponential growth often taken for granted, the spurt in human industrial accomplishment is sigmoidal.

While there remains a great deal of further analysis and inspection to be had in the quarters identified here, and several realms of intriguing tangents necessary to fully explore the Industrial Revolution, this little essay ought to serve as an adequate starting point in that monumental endeavour by properly defining the subject matter as an epoch of intellectual and societal excellence. An excellence so great that the civilisation could afford to forget obvious things, at least for a little while.