Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution

Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution

Enlightenment

Before the eighteenth century disease was mainly a mass phenomena, epidemics were rife, and around 1700 increase in world trade and the movement of people into the growing cities meant that disease spread more easily and mortality rates rose.

Early European medicine was based around the 4 humours (See appendix 1), but there was also a large body of opinion which subscribed to the view that illness was God sent - sin causes suffering. Therefore humanity was powerless to change things - this thinking went for all the natural world, people were thought of incapable of changing their environment.

Within Europe the doctrine of the church, which held that your place in society, the way the world was organised, were ordained by God, and out of the control of man. Any discovery which contradicted Christian teaching was largely assumed to be in error and discounted.

Why did this change?

Enlightenment theory which heralded the growth of scientific research, including into anatomy, physics and other disciplines of relevance to health and illness, held that men (and they were mainly thinking of men) had free will, that they were masters of their own destiny and could master the natural world.

The word enlightenment is used to refer to the period spanning most of the 18th century which promoted new philosophical systems for understanding the natural and human worlds, and represented a major shift towards secular explanations.

It was facilitated by technological and social developments of which the printing press and secular publishing were the most important - ease of dissemination of ideas.

This gave rise to the scientific method, by which it was thought that by increasing knowledge, the whole of the natural world would be eventually explained

Enlightenment ideas led to changes in childbirth, the prevention of smallpox by inoculation, and developments in surgery - humans did not have to be passive and accept disaster as the will of God. Enlightenment theorists used science as their model, and perceived it as objective, critical and progressive. As part of this medical men began to question the nature of health and illness, and to look for medical cures.

The philosopher Kant said that ‘Have the courage to use your own mind’ was the motto of the enlightenment. It represented a time in which philosophy understood itself as entering the light of reason from the darkness of myth and superstition. It led to new explorations in all sorts of areas - astronomy, archaeology, philosophy, physics etc., the thinking being that reason, logic and science could be universally applied.

Religious healing still went on, witchcraft and astrology still influenced many people - not everyone accepted the new teaching.

In health care the enlightenment philosophy of free will influenced how hospitals and public health developed. It was accepted that some people could not help being poor, and they should be given aid and relief, but most people were responsible for their own poverty through drink or fecklessness. Therefore charity was expected to provide for the deserving poor, self help and local initiatives should provide public health and the state in the form of the poor law should be a last resort and act as a deterrent for the workshy.

How can we characterise the enlightenment?

Basically enlightenment was a shift in the way the world was perceived, a move away from the teachings of the church, and obedience to hereditary rulers.

• Rationalism – the gaining of knowledge by the use of reason, critical questioning (Descartes)
• Empiricism – the belief that all knowledge comes from experience (John Lock) The emphasis is on science and experiment
• Encyclopaedist – the new knowledge should be disseminated and debated
• Analytic/synthetic division – truth of reason and truth of fact. This idea was developed by Kant and brought empiricism and rationalism together.
• Logic – deductive and inductive argument

Induction is concerned with making generalisations about the world based on observation

Deduction starts with a theory and applies it to the empirical situation

• Determinism – all events are the results of previous causes

There have been many criticisms of these ways of thinking, but the enlightenment was important for the way in which previously indisputable ideas were able to be questioned, and refuted. The way was open for the massive changes to society that took place during the industrial revolution.

Industrialisation and urbanisation

Conditions for the industrial revolution

• England was a nation of production of goods for sale
• England had become a monetary rather than a bartering nation for those goods
• Self sufficient peasants had largely died out
• The development of the market meant communities did not have to produce all goods, but could purchase them in shops
• As the division of labour developed more specialised, skilled and inventive production occurred

These conditions allowed an advanced division of labour in which producers could produce for consumers in an impersonal way, with the two sides not known to each other.

The changes in the production of knowledge and experimentation of the enlightenment facilitated industrial development.

Example of cotton

Pre-industrialisation spinning of cloth was a cottage industry where clothes were made for the household.

A surplus population in the countryside which had to move into the new towns and cities for worked provided labour for factories where cotton could be produced cheaply.

Those who were left in the country could not compete with the new factories, as the productivity was lower, and therefore cost was much higher.

As the handloomers in the factories were replaced by machines, they too were forced out of work

What was necessary for this to occur was the existence of two classes of people – industrial capitalist who had the money to build factories, and the new machines; and a labouring class who had to sell their labour in order to buy the goods and services they could no longer produce in a subsistence way.

Results of industrialisation

Population growth

Industrialisation of England was accompanied by a massive increase in the population between 1750 and 1850 from 6-18 million, and a move away from the country into the new cities. In the 1851 census for the first time more people were urban than rural dwellers.

The nineteenth century was characterised by rapid population growth. At the time of the first census (1801) the total population of England and Wales was 8,892,526. One hundred years later it had reached 32,527,843. The population doubled over the first half of the century, and almost doubled again during the second half (Bédarida 1990). This increase was concentrated in urban areas, which saw their populations rise from 33.8% of the total in 1801 to 78% in 1901, whereas rural districts experienced depopulation, particularly during the second half of the century (Law 1967).[1] The pre-industrial link between population size and food production, whereby periodic harvest failure and famine helped to counteract the rising birth rate, had been eliminated (Carter and Lewis 1990). There was a fall in mortality rates, but fertility rates remained high until the latter part of the century, crude birth rates beginning to fall around 1880 (Hunt 1981)[2]. A lesser factor contributing to the population increase was immigration, the largest single group being Irish, although this has to be balanced by Britons emigrating.

Urbanisation

In 1851 for the first time over half the population of England were urban dwellers (Bédarida 1990),[3] but the change from a rural to an urban nation was not merely numerical. It brought about a new system of social relations and new lifestyles. As much of the migration into the cities was by young adults (the largest single group being 15-30 year olds), they helped to boost the rate of natural increase as well as adding to the population by their presence. They were more likely to marry, and married younger than their rural counterparts, but their rates of fertility were no higher than the rural population (Dennis 1984). During the early part of the century migration accounted for most of the increase in the population of London, but by the middle of the century, despite the problems of sanitation and overcrowding, it was the natural increase of births over deaths (Carter and Lewis 1990). This pattern was reproduced in other large urban areas. Before the industrial revolution trade and industry was organised and regulated by guilds and monopolies, which it was thought led to restrictive practices. So many new industries grew up away from the old towns, like Norwich or York, and in small towns, where such practices were fewer. Because of this industrial revolution was characterised by the creation of new cities, such as Birmingham and Leeds, where the forces of production could be reorganised to take advantage of mechanisation, technology and economies of scale, rather than the adaptation of old ones.

Segregation between rich and poor

Nearly 2.5 million people lived in London, and its geography, like that of most expanding British cities was designed to increase segregation between rich and poor.[4] This was facilitated by the separation of the middle class residence from the workplace (Summers 1979). “Towns expanded through infill and suburban development with little co-ordination or planning with consequent effects on health, congestion and an array of what have come to be known as ‘social problems’” (Williams 1990:172). Working class areas were equated with darkest Africa, and the fear of unknown, irreligious inhabitants was one impetus to maintain and increase segregation (Cannadine 1993).

Rising prosperity – but not for all

Although the nineteenth century overall was one of rising prosperity there were peaks and troughs, and not everyone benefited equally. The Great Exhibition of 1851 ushered an age of prosperity which lasted until 1873 (Gregg 1973). There then began a period of intermittent depression which lasted until 1896. Yet for many workers a drop in wages was offset by a sustained fall in the price of food (Pugh 1994).

For a few there was great wealth, and in 1870 per capita income was the highest in the world (Bédarida 1991), but this was not shared by all; during the 1860s in London, for example, real wages did not rise, and in some years actually fell. Rural poverty increased as surplus population suppressed wage rates of farm labourers (Newby 1987). There were also localised variations, for example the cotton famine in Lancashire during the American Civil War. For the middle classes, however, incomes doubled between 1851 and 1871.

Enlightenment ideas of ‘free will’ led to the notion that poverty was self inflicted through lack of character or fecklessness, and the poor were divided into the ‘deserving’ such as widows, who should be helped, and the undeserving (ex-prisoners, single mothers) who were expected to help themselves by thrift and hard work. This was the basis of much charity to the poor.

Emergence of the middle classes

From the end of the eighteenth century the middle classes had been growing numerically and proportionately[5], and in terms of wealth and importance. This had much to do with the growing number of professions which had emerged or expanded to serve the industrial revolution e.g. surveyors, accountants. “Suburbs distanced the threat of social change and offered a spatial device which inoculated the middle class against the hazard of the city without requiring them to relinquish their political control over it.” (Morris 1993:24). They provided a safe haven, against the perceived threat of large assemblies, with their potential for riot and disorder, thought to be associated with chartism and trade unions. There was also a more pragmatic reason for the distancing of home and work, as industrial processes made most businesses more undesirable as residences, so that professional people like doctors maintained the link between home and workplace later than industrialists (Davidoff and Hall 1987).

Artisans’ housing came between that of the labouring classes and the middle class, and provided a buffer.

The role of women

Suburbs were also a sign of increasing wealth, as the move away from the production unit could only be achieved when women were no longer needed in the running of the business, although, as Davidoff and Hall (1987:117) point out, not all women were prepared to give up their involvement. Among Evangelicals at least, women’s role in business was “a matter of negotiation, rather than a fixed code.” They could then create a lifestyle of gentility, copied partly from the upper class and based around leisure, for husband and family. The separation of home and work also meant a demarcation between work and leisure time.

Hall (1993) charts the move in 1844 of the Cadbury family from their home above the tea and coffee shop, which was owned by John Cadbury, to a house in Edgbaston, which at the time was in the country. Unlike her mother in law ho played a large part in the running of her husband Richard Tapper Cadbury’s drapery business, John’s wife Candia was never actively involved in the running of his shop. The move out of the family shop severed all links between the Cadbury women and business.

For the middle classes the move out of cities was choice; for the working classes[6] the move into them was necessity. This was not a uniform move, as industrialisation continued in a haphazard manner with a different pace according to the industry and the rate of mechanisation (Gregg 1973). As Bédarida (1990:57) points out “there was a hybrid mixture of archaism and modernism. Side by side with highly mechanised activities there continued to exist many sorts of pre-industrial production.”

The rural economy

In the same way that urban areas were heterogeneous, so there was no uniformity about the notion of rural England (Howkins 1991). As stated above, the most obvious feature of nineteenth century rural life was a slowing of population increase up to 1861, and of depopulation after the 1870s, but agriculture still remained the largest single employer until the census of 1901. This crude figure, however, encompasses all from the largest landowner to day labourers, and almost certainly underestimates women’s agricultural work. It also hides the blurred nature of occupational boundaries, as many people took many seasonal jobs over the course of the year (Samuel 1975).

Depopulation was differentially experienced, as migration was often a two (or more) staged affair, with individuals moving to larger villages, and then to towns and cities. Even one family leaving a very small hamlet could, however, have a devastating effect on the local economy (Howkins 1991). It was not just to work in industry that people were leaving the countryside, but also, especially among women, to join the increasing domestic service market. Rural women had a reputation for reliability, and many live-in domestic servants were originally from rural counties like Norfolk (Howkins 1991).

Land ownership meant that many families were dependent on one person or family for both home and work, and were subject to control in their behaviour and habits. Political or religious dissent, drunkenness, or any other ‘moral’ failing was liable to result in eviction. These highly controlled villages were regarded by their owners and many contemporary philanthropists as ‘model’ villages, but the estates on which they relied for employment and housing could not have survived without the casual labour of neighbouring villagers, whose physical conditions were likely to have been insanitary and overcrowded (Howkins 1991). As with cities and their suburbs, social classes were segregated in rural areas. Landowners and tenant farmers tended to live outside villages, and farm workers inside them. This was especially true of Southern England, where more hired labour was employed (Newby 1987).

Changes to ideas on health and medicine

Patterns of ill health

Mainly caused by the conditions in the cities, overcrowding, poor sanitation, widespread poverty.

Infectious diseases were common and the cause of many deaths. Spread by overcrowding and poor sanitation.

Industrial diseases and injury was also frequent, especially before the Factory and Mines Acts introduced some safety measures.

See Powerpoint slides 11-22

Summary

Enlightenment and the changes brought about by industrialisation and urbanisation had a profound effect on society,

The cities were growing rapidly (Birmingham’s population grew from 60,000 in 1800 to 260,000 by 1851), as poorer people moved from the country areas in search of work.