Homework - Use the source material listed below to answer the questions on the assignment sheet. These sources will be the focus of class discussion in the next class - the question sheet is available here.
Source # 1 - Graph comparing the GDP per capita of people in England (UK) to India. GDP stands for "Gross Domestic Product" and is a measure of total output of an economy. GDP per capita divides that output by the population of a country and is an indication of the economic well-being of a population.
Source # 2 - British Postcard showing "Christmas in India" (1881)
Source # 3 - Map of showing the expansion of British control in India
Source # 4 - Video of British East India Company rules India - click here
Source # 5 - Video of British Women view India - click here
Source # 6 - Video of British Missionaries in India - click here
Source # 7 - Graphs showing British cloth exports to India and Indian cloth exports to Britain.
Biography - Azimullah Khan Yusufzai
Azimullah Khan Yusufzai was born to a poor family in India around 1830. When he was seven, he and his mother found shelter at a Christian mission during a famine. Azimullah was educated at the mission school, where he learned English and French, but he refused to convert to Christianity because he was a Muslim. After he left the mission school, he went to work as a secretary to several British military officers.
Azimullah became the secretary and adviser to Nana Sihib, an Indian noble who family had surrendered its territory to the British East India Company in return for an annual payment. At the time Azimullah went to work for Nana Sihib, he was involved in a dispute with the British East India Company because the Company had decided to stop making the annual payment to his family. In 1853, Nana Sihib sent Azimullah to England to appeal directly to the officers of the British East India Company to start making the payments again.
Azimullah’s trip to England had deep and lasting impact on him. He saw the dirty and polluted industrial cities full of poor British workers. He realized that, in contrast to the British who lived in India in large houses with servants, most people in Britain did not live much better than people in India. While he was in England he met John Stuart Mill, the famous British thinker, who was an official in the British East India Company. Azimullah was upset and offended when the Company refused to change its decision about paying Nana Sihib. On his return to India, Azimullah traveled to see the fighting in the Crimean War between England and Russia. In Crimea he saw the sick British soldiers suffering under poor leadership. While he failed in the purpose of his trip to England, he returned India realizing that the British had no special ability that the Indians lacked and that it was possible to militarily defeat the British.
When he returned to India, Azimullah encouraged Nana Sihib to turn against the British. He also began to produce anti-British writings with a printing press he had brought back from Europe and distributed these. In 1857, when the Sepoy soldiers (Indian soldiers working for British East India Company) rebelled against the British, Azimullah convinced Nana Sihib to support the rebellion. Nana Sihib became a leader in the rebellion – including ordering the massacre of British women and children when the British surrendered at Cawnpore. While it is unknown what happened to Azimullah after the British crushed the rebellion, he most likely died of a fever in 1859 on the run from the British in the north of India.
Source # 8 - Video of Azimullah Khan Yusufzai's trip to England - click here
Source # 9 - Map of Regions in India affected by the Sepoy Mutiny
Source # 10 - Graphic explaining the loading process of the Enfield Rifle
Source # 12 - Chart showing the number of famines and deaths in Indian history.
Source # 13 - British picture of famine relief during the Famine of 1877.
Source # 14 - British cartoon of famine relief
Source # 15 - Graph showing British food exports from India during the period of the 1876 - 78 Famine.
Source # 16 - Graph showing British food exports during the two famines between 1896 to 1902.
Biography - Surendranath Banerjee
Surendranath Banerjee was born to a wealthy and noble family in India in 1848. His father was a doctor and made sure that Banerjee received a liberal education. After graduating from university, Banerjee traveled to England to take the Indian Civil Service Exam. This exam was given once a year in England and it was necessary to pass the exam to get an administrative position in the British colonial government in India. The British set up the exam in England to make it very difficult for any Indian person to take and pass the exam. Banerjee was the first Indian to pass the exam in 1869. The British government still made it hard to him to get a post and only in 1871 was Banerjee given the position as an assistant to a judge. However, Banerjee was soon fired from his job because of British racism toward Indians.
In 1875, Banerjee became a professor of English in India and began to organize the Indian National Association, the first political organizations for Indians. He traveled across India giving speeches attacking the British for their racial discrimination against Indians. This made him very popular across India. Four years later he founded a newspaper to support his political movement. Using his organization as a base, in 1885 he participated in the founding of the Indian National Congress and became its president in 1895. Banerjee believed that it was important for Indian leaders to work slowly and with the British to win political power for the Indians. He expressed his idea in his book “A Nation in the Making” where he said he admired the way the British government worked, argued for personal freedom and said the goal should be for Indians to become a self-governing part of the British Empire.
As the leader of the Indian National Congress, Banerjee argued that they should work with the British and was against Indian leaders who wanted to have revolution against the British to win independence from Britain. For example, he was critical of Mahatma Gandhi. However, in the early twentieth century, British rule became more unpopular with the Indian population and Banerjee, with his moderate views, lost the support of many in India. In 1921, Banerjee was knighted for his support for the British Empire. In the last years of his life, he was the prime minister of a self-governing region in northeast India.
Source # 17 - In 1884, a British official working for the British Viceroy wrote, “In this there is nothing offensive or disparaging to the natives of India. It simply means that we are foreigners and that not only in our own interest but because it is our highest duty towards India itself, we intend to maintain our dominion. We cannot foresee the time in which the cessation of our rule would not be the signal for universal anarchy and ruin, and it is clear that the only hope for India is the long continuance of the benevolent but strong government of Englishmen.”
Homework - Use the source material listed below to answer the questions on the assignment sheet. These sources will be the focus of class discussion in the next class - the question sheet is available here.
Quiz - Read the Class Notes on Imperialism for Thursday, December 3, 2015.
Biography - Victoria, Queen of England
Victoria was born in 1819, the only child of the British royal family. Victoria became Queen of England when she was 18 years old. Victoria became queen when William IV died 27 days after Victoria's eighteenth birthday. Victoria had grown up protected from the harsh reality of the Industrial Revolution and the effect it was having on people across England. In fact she was horrified by her first sights of Industrial England, which she saw on a trip across the country as a teenager. She described what she saw as, “black, engines flaming, coals, in abundance; everywhere, smoking and burning coal heaps, intermingled with wretched huts and carts and little ragged children." Early in her rule, she was dependent on her Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, who tried to protect Victoria from the harsh realities of British life and even advised her not to read Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens because it dealt with "paupers, criminals and other unpleasant subjects".
In 1839, Victoria met Prince Albert, her cousin from Germany and immediately fell in love with him. They were married the next year and had nine children together. Albert was very interested in the technology of the Industrial Revolution and convinced Victoria to support British industry. He convinced her to take her first trip by train in 1841 and afterwards she said she was “quite charmed” by the experience. Under his direction, Victoria supported the Great Exhibition in London in 1851 which was showcase of industry and art from around the world that demonstrated British power. The Great Exhibition was housed in a greenhouse like building called the Crystal Palace that covered several acres of land. In addition, Albert thought that Victoria should be made aware to the hardships of the Industrial Revolution and should something about child labor and poverty. Albert’s death in 1861 had a deep impact on Victoria and she remained in mourning for the rest of her life.
Under Victoria’s rule, the British Empire expanded to become the largest empire in the world by adding territory in Asia and Africa. By then end of her rule, Britain controlled an empire that contained 20% of the world’s surface and 25% of its population. Victoria strongly supported the British imperialism and believed that British rule was beneficial to people around the world. The British often took colonial lands through war, such as the Opium Wars in China or the war against the Zulu in southern Africa, and used military power to put down rebellions, such as the Sepoy Mutiny in India. was very interested in the well being of her colonial subjects. Victoria supported these wars, writing, "If we are to maintain our position as a first-rate Power, we must… be Prepared for attacks and wars, somewhere or other, CONTINUALLY.”
While Victoria never traveled to her overseas empire, she was interested in her colonies and how the people under her rule lived. She was especially interested in India, which she described as the “Jewel of the Crown”, meaning the most important of her colonies. She even had the British government create the title “Empress of India” to show her connection to the country. She did symbolic gestures to connect her to India, such as having an Indian secretary who taught her Hindi, having Indian food included at royal dinners and wearing Indian jewelry.
Queen Victoria was the longest serving monarch in British history. During her reign Britain went through the Industrial Revolution and built a world-wide empire – it was said that, “the sun never set on the British Empire”. The period that she ruled Britain is remembered as a “golden age” that is called the “Victorian Era".
Source # 1 - Map Of British Empire (1886)
Source # 2 - Cartoon of British Empire (1882)
Biography - David Livingstone, Explorer
David Livingstone was born in Scotland (Northern England) in 1813 to a poor but religious family. As a child he worked in a textile factory. He put himself through medical school and planned to work as a Christian missionary in China. However, because of the Opium Wars in China, Livingstone decided to work as a missionary in Africa instead. In 1851, Livingstone arrived in South Africa.
As a missionary, Livingstone's traveled from village to village going into parts of southern Africa that had never been explored by other Europeans, such as the Kalahari Desert. Livingstone wrote back to England describing in full detail the areas he explored and was awarded a gold medal by the Royal Geographic Society. Livingstone became aware of the slave trade in Africa and he made it his life’s work to end the slave trade or the “open sore of the world” as he called it. Livingstone believed that his explorations would open up Africa to trade with the rest of the world and improve the lives of Africans. Livingstone thought that this would end slavery because Africans would have better ways to make money than by trading slaves. His rally against the practice of slavery made him a staunch enemy of many of the Europeans living in Africa.
Livingstone explored deep into central Africa following the Zambezi Rivers all the way to Victoria Falls, one of the largest waterfall in the world. When Livingstone returned to England in 1856, he was praised as a national hero and he toured Europe giving lectures about his explorations. However, some of his later expeditions went badly. His trip back up the Zambezi River in 1858 was troubled by diseases that killed several members of the expedition, including his wife Mary. His expedition for find the source of the Nile River also ran into trouble when his crew deserted him and spread the rumor that Livingston had been killed by the Ngoni tribes.
However, Livingstone was still alive and continued to explore central Africa. By this point in his life all of his travels across Africa had weakened his health – he had been mauled by a lion and suffered from both malaria and cholera. By 1871, he was nearly bed ridden and low on both medical and food supplies and living near Lake Tanganyika in east Africa. The world was interested in discovering the fate of Livingstone, and an American newspaper hired Henry Stanley, and explorer and journalist, to find Livingstone. Working his way across Africa, Stanley finally final found Livingstone at his camp near Lake Tanganyika, greeting him with the famous line: "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" Stanley tried to convince the ailing Livingstone to return with him to England, but Livingstone vehemently refused, and Stanley was force to leave him behind.
Livingstone recovered with supplies left by Stanley and resumed his search for the source of the Nile. In 1873, Livingstone died in Africa having not been able to find the source of the Nile. His African crew removed Livingstone's heart (to be buried in Africa), and then carried his body by hand over 1000 miles back to the coast where his body was shipped to England for burial in England.
Source # 3 - Video of Livingstone's Exploration in Africa
Biography - Charles Gordon, Soldier
Charles Gordon was born in 1833 at a army family in a military in England. His father was a Major General and Gordon studied military engineering at the Royal Military Academy. When he graduated, he was made a lieutenant in the British army and was send to fight against Russia in the Crimean War in 1854. After the war ended, Gordon worked as part of an international commission marking the new border for Russia.
After he was promoted to captain in 1859, he volunteered fight China in the Second Opium War. After the British won the war and gained more land in China, he remained in China as part of the British army. When the Taiping Rebellion broke out in China, Gordon led the British forces to support the Chinese government in defending the city of Shanghi from the rebel forces. Then in 1862, the Chinese government put Gordon in command of the Chinese army, called the “Ever Victorious Army” fight against the rebellion. Because of his success in doing this, the Emperor gave Gordon the title “titu” or “commander”. In 1863, Gordon returned to England and was knighted by Queen Victoria.
After serving in various posts in the British Army in England, in 1872, Gordon was offered the chance to serve in the Egyptian army. As an officer in the Egyptian army, worked to suppress the slave trade in East Africa and was eventually made Governor-General of the territory of Sudan, which is south of Egypt. He resigned this position in 1879 and then spent several years serving in military posts in India, Africa and South Africa and toured the Middle East.
In 1883, Gordon was preparing to work in the Congo Free State, when the British government ordered him to return to Sudan to put down a rebellion lead by Mohammed Ahmed. Ahmed claimed to be the Mahdi (the savior of Islam) and his soldiers were quickly taking over Sudan. Gordon was given the task of saving the Egyptian army which was on the verge of being overrun by the Mahdi’s army. Mohammed Ahmed's troops were overwhelming the thinly-stretched Egyptian forces in the region. With the situation deteriorating, London instructed the Egyptians to withdraw from Sudan in December 1883. Realizing that his forces were too small to defeat the Madhi army, Gordon ignored orders to retreat and instead fortified the city of Khartoum in Sudan and asked the British for reinforcements. In 1884, the Madhi army began its attack on Khartoum. After a year’s delay in which the British government debated about sending an army to aid Gordon (Victoria pressured the government to save Gordon), the British army began to advance into Sudan with the goal of rescuing the Gordon’s forces. As the British army got close to Khartoum, the Madhi army launched a massive assault on the city and over whelmed Gordon’s starving soldiers. Gordon was killed in the fighting and his body was never found. The British army reached the city two days after it fell to the Madhi army. At this point, the British army retreated to Egypt. In 1898, the British invaded Sudan again and, with the help of Maxim guns, it destroyed the Madhi army in the Battle of Omdurman.
Biography - Cecil Rhodes, Miner & Colonial Leader
Cecil Rhodes was born in England in 1853 in England to a religious family. As a teenager he became sick with a lung illness and left school to live with his brother in South Africa, where his family thought the environment would be better for his condition. He arrived in the British colony South Africa in 1870 with a large amount of money lent to him by a relative. Rhodes invested the money in land that he could use to mine diamonds and, working with a group of business partners, he established a mining company.
In 1872 Rhodes suffered a slight heart attack. As part of his program to recover from this, Rhodes and his brother went on an expedition into the lands north of the British colony in South Africa that were controlled by native African tribes, like the Zulu and the Matabele. Rhodes took advantage of this trip to study the opportunities in mining gold in these regions It was during this journey, Rhodes fell in love with the countryside of southern Africa and began to think of how to get control of these lands.
In 1873 Rhodes left South Africa and returned to England to attend Oxford University. While he did not study long enough to earn a degree, he experience there helped form his idea that the British were superior to other people and that the British Empire was beneficial to the world. After his death, Rhode’s fortune was used to establish the Rhodes Scholarship to pay for people around the world to attend Oxford.
When Rhodes returned to South Africa, the diamond mining industry was doing badly because of technical problems due to diamonds being in harder ground that often flooded. When other miners gave up on the mining, Rhodes bought their land and worked on solving the problems in getting to the diamonds. This persistence paid off and diamond mining made Rhodes very wealthy. In 1880, Rhodes and his business partners put their land holdings together to form the De Beers Mining Company.
Also in 1880, Rhodes became a leader in the British Colony in South Africa by becoming part of the colony’s parliament. In 1890, Rhodes became Prime Minister, or leader of the Parliament. Rhodes used this power to pass laws that would benefit miners such as supporting the northern expansion of the colony to take the lands of the African tribes and use them for mining. In 1893, Rhodes used a conflict over cattle between the Matabele and Mashona tribes as an excuse to attack the Matabele and take its land. Rhodes had already negotiated a treaty with Lobengula, the chief of the Matabele, to having mining rights to the land. Now, with the support of Queen Victoria, Rhodes broke that treaty and sent a small army equipped with Maxim machine guns to take the Matabele land. Rhodes’ army quickly defeated the much larger Matabele army and the lands of the Matabele were divided among the soldiers in Rhode’s army and became part of the British Empire.
Rhodes also supported wars against the Boers, white Dutch settlers who had set up their own country north of the British colony of South Africa. The reason was to gain control of the Boer lands, which had large diamond and gold deposits. Rhodes died before the British won their wars against the Boer and took the Boer lands. Rhodes also died unable to realize his dream of extending the British Empire all the way, from north to south, across Africa.
Source # 4 - Map, published in 1899, showing Rhodes plan to build a railroad connection from Cairo to Capetown.
Source # 5 - British cartoon, published in 1892, showing Rhodes standing over Africa holding a telegraph cable.
Source # 6 - Cartoon - German Cartoon How to be a Colonial Power (1904) showing how the British ran their empire.
There will be a test on the Industrial Revolution on Monday, November 23, 2015. Listed below are sample test questions to help you study for the test.
The test will have the same format as the previous test, the one on Nationalism. You will be given two questions, you will have draw reasoning diagram for both questions and write a topic sentence that you would use to answer both questions. You will then have to write an answer to one of the questions.
1. How did changes in agriculture, finance and technology come together to create the Industrial Revolution?
2. How did the Industrial Revolution change where and how people worked and lived – and in the long run, the quality of their lives?
3. How did the Age of Progress represent the triumph of liberal values that a society based on democracy and capitalism would result in a happier and wealthier society?
4. How did the conditions of workers in the early part of the Industrial Revolution support the position of socialists?
5. How did improvements cities and worker’s lives during the later part of the nineteenth century (the Age of Progress) refute Karl Marx’s communist ideas and support the liberal capitalist ideas of Alfred Marshall?
6. How did the technological improvements in agriculture and the economic institutions created during the Commercial Revolution provide crucial building blocks for the development of the Industrial Revolution in England?
7. Nineteenth century French philosopher Émile Durkheim once said, “Socialism is not a science…. It is a cry of pain”. Considering the living and working conditions of workers during the Industrial Revolution, would it correct for Durkheim to describe socialism this way?
8. Socialist-Anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon said, “All profit is theft” and liberal economist Alfred Marshall believed that capitalism could “make every man a gentleman” (gentleman meant someone with enough free time to think of things besides making money). How do these quotes reflect how socialists and liberals thought of capitalism?
Homework - Use the source material listed below to answer the questions on the assignment sheet. These sources will be the focus of class discussion in the next class - the question sheet is available here.
Essay question for this unit is: Which is a more important goal for a society: economic equality or economic growth?
Source # 1 - Muck & Brass - On-line Simulation on Managing Industrial Cities (This will not work on your ipad because it is Flash - you will have to use a computer) - click here
Source # 2 - Video on the building of the sewer system in London - click here
Source # 3 - Video on Micheal Faraday - click here
Source # 4 - Video on the Crystal Place - click here
Source # 5 - Building of the Eiffel Tower - click here
Homework - Use the source material listed below to answer the questions on the assignment sheet. These sources will be the focus of class discussion in the next class - the question sheet is available here.
Essay question for this unit is: Which is a more important goal for a society: economic equality or economic growth?
Biography - Karl Marx
Karl Marx was born in Prussia in 1818, one of nine children. His father was a successful lawyer, who introduced Marx to philosophy and wanted Marx to become a lawyer. At the University of Berlin, Marx studied law and philosophy and became involved in radical student groups. He received his doctorate from the in 1841, but his radical politics prevented him from procuring a teaching position. At this point began to work as a journalist, but the government shut down the newspaper he was writing for because of its radical politics.
In 1843, Marx went to live in Paris, which was the center of radical revolutionary politics in Europe. While he was there, he befriended Friedrich Engels. Engels came from a wealthy German family yet supported radical politics and used his money to support Marx for the rest of Marx’s life. After a year in Paris, Marx was expelled from France for his writings and he moved to Belgium. In Belgium, Marx first learned about the idea of communism and began to organize communists across Europe into a single group. A group of communists in England invited Marx and Engels to join a meeting of the Communist League and write a document that described the goals of communism. In 1848, Marx and Engels published The Communist Manifesto. Because of the revolutionary statements in The Communist Manifesto, Marx was prohibited from living in most of Europe. He lived the rest of his life in England.
Marx spent his time in England working on researching and writing the book Capital. The book combined deep historical research and economic theory and described Marx’s communist ideas in detail. He published the first volume of Capital in 1867. The other two volumes of Capital were published after his death by Engels. In addition, in 1864, Marx was a leader in the First International, a meeting of radical revolutionaries from around the world which had the goal of uniting revolutionaries in a common effort to overthrow capitalism.
Biography - John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill was born in England in 1806 to a prosperous family. His father had a high position in the British East India Company and he educated Mill in the philosophy – by age 12, Mill had read all of the major philosophers, including Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Adam Smith. As a teenager, Mill became a supporter of the idea of Utilitarianism, that is based on the idea that society should be run in order to create “the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people.” This thought was at the core of many of Mill’s later ideas. His father secured Mill a position working for the British East India Company and Mill would spend his whole life working in a high position in the company. In his early twenties, Mill suffered a severe case of depression that had been caused by the stress of his education. After the depression passed, Mill found that the experience moved him to become more critical of utilitarianism and develop his own thoughts.
In 1848, Mill the book Principles of Political Economy, which was the leading economics textbook for the next 40 years. In the book, Mill defended the ideas of capitalism developed by Adam Smith because it made society wealthier. However, Mill recognized that there were problems with capitalism and he argued that there was a role for the government in regulating the economy to make society better off. For example, he thought that worker’s hours should be limited and that the government should tax the wealthy and use the money to help the poor. Mill also believed that the government should support the education of everyone because that would improve the happiness of society.
Mill followed up his work in economics in 1859 with his book On Liberty, in which he described how government should work. Mill held to the idea personal freedom was the most important thing because free people will make choices that will make them happy, which means society would be happier, and that free people work to have the most fulfilling life. However, Mill also saw that there was the danger that free people might hurt each other. To deal with this problem, Mill developed the “harm principle” which said that the government could limit personal freedom “is to prevent harm to others." Mill believed that democracy was the best system of government and that everyone should have the right to vote, although more educated people should get more votes.
Mill was also a strong advocate for women’s education and right to vote. His wife, Harriet Taylor had strong influence on Mill’s thinking. She was well educated and Mill thought of her as his intellectual equal. In 1861, he wrote the book The Subjection of Women, which argued that women should have the right to vote. In 1865, Mill was elected to the British Parliament where he spent his time trying to win women political equality to men and being critical of the British government’s policy toward its colonies. After he left office in 1865, he spent the last remaining years of his life on fighting for women’s rights.
Source # 1 - Chart Comparing Capitalism to Marxism
Source # 2 - Painting - The Strike by Robert Koehler (1886)
Source # 3 - Who Wants to be a Cotton Millionaire - On-line Simulation of Managing a Textile Mill (This will not work on your ipad because it is Flash - you will have to use a computer) - click here
Source # 4 - Chart showing the relationship between worker output or worker productivity and wages. The "nil" means there is no information about wages during that time period.
Homework - Use the source material listed below to answer the questions on the assignment sheet. These sources will be the focus of class discussion in the next class - the question sheet is available here.
Essay question for this unit is: Which is a more important goal for a society: economic equality or economic growth?
Biography - Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens was born in England in 1812 to a poor family. When he was a child, his father was put in debtor’s prison because of unpaid bills and the young Dickens was forced to work in a factory. This experience had a deep and lasting impact on Dickens that he would use in his writings. Dickens went on to work in an office and then as a court reporter in London. It was during this time that he met his wife Catherine, with whom he would have ten children.
Dickens began to write fictional stories based on what he saw in the streets of London. These stories were published in newspapers in monthly installments and made Dickens a popular writer. His readers ranged from the wealthy nobles and industrialists to the poor workers, who would pool their money to buy his stories. His first novel was Oliver Twist, which told the story of an orphan living in the streets and included many points from Dickens’s own childhood. This novel and his other stories, like A Christmas Carol, made him famous in England and the United States. Dickens traveled twice to the United States giving lectures across the country. While in the United States he spoke out against slavery.
Dickens is known as one of the first realist writers because of the way he described the brutality of life in industrial England. This was clear in his novels Bleak House, which deals with the hypocrisy of British society, and Hard Times that described life in an industrial town at the peak of economic expansion. Dickens was very critical of the changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution and felt that his writing would make society aware of the terrible living conditions of the poor in the industrial cities, especially the children. Dickens spoke out on the need to help the poor and donated money to clean up the slums and build proper housing for the poor.
Source # 1 - Excerpts from Hard Times (1854) by Charles Dickens
Chapter 5
Let us strike the key-note, Coketown, before pursuing our tune.
It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood, it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness. It contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and to-morrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next.
These attributes of Coketown were in the main inseparable from the work by which it was sustained; against them were to be set off, comforts of life which found their way all over the world, and elegancies of life which made, we will not ask how much of the fine lady, who could scarcely bear to hear the place mentioned. The rest of its features were voluntary, and they were these.
You saw nothing in Coketown but what was severely workful. If the members of a religious persuasion built a chapel there—as the members of eighteen religious persuasions had done—they made it a pious warehouse of red brick, with sometimes (but this is only in highly ornamental examples) a bell in a birdcage on the top of it. The solitary exception was the New Church; a stuccoed edifice with a square steeple over the door, terminating in four short pinnacles like florid wooden legs. All the public inscriptions in the town were painted alike, in severe characters of black and white. The jail might have been the infirmary, the infirmary might have been the jail, the town-hall might have been either, or both, or anything else, for anything that appeared to the contrary in the graces of their construction. Fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the material aspect of the town; fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the immaterial. The M’Choakumchild school was all fact, and the school of design was all fact, and the relations between master and man were all fact, and everything was fact between the lying-in hospital and the cemetery, and what you couldn’t state in figures, or show to be purchaseable in the cheapest market and saleable in the dearest, was not, and never should be, world without end, Amen.
Chapter 10
In the hardest working part of Coketown; in the innermost fortifications of that ugly citadel, where Nature was as strongly bricked out as killing airs and gases were bricked in; at the heart of the labyrinth of narrow courts upon courts, and close streets upon streets, which had come into existence piecemeal, every piece in a violent hurry for some one man’s purpose, and the whole an unnatural family, shouldering, and trampling, and pressing one another to death; in the last close nook of this great exhausted receiver, where the chimneys, for want of air to make a draught, were built in an immense variety of stunted and crooked shapes, as though every house put out a sign of the kind of people who might be expected to be born in it; among the multitude of Coketown, generically called ‘the Hands,’—a race who would have found more favour with some people, if Providence had seen fit to make them only hands, or, like the lower creatures of the seashore, only hands and stomachs—lived a certain Stephen Blackpool, forty years of age.
Stephen looked older, but he had had a hard life. It is said that every life has its roses and thorns; there seemed, however, to have been a misadventure or mistake in Stephen’s case, whereby somebody else had become possessed of his roses, and he had become possessed of the same somebody else’s thorns in addition to his own. He had known, to use his words, a peck of trouble. He was usually called Old Stephen, in a kind of rough homage to the fact.
A rather stooping man, with a knitted brow, a pondering expression of face, and a hard-looking head sufficiently capacious, on which his iron-grey hair lay long and thin, Old Stephen might have passed for a particularly intelligent man in his condition. Yet he was not. He took no place among those remarkable ‘Hands,’ who, piecing together their broken intervals of leisure through many years, had mastered difficult sciences, and acquired a knowledge of most unlikely things. He held no station among the Hands who could make speeches and carry on debates. Thousands of his compeers could talk much better than he, at any time. He was a good power-loom weaver, and a man of perfect integrity. What more he was, or what else he had in him, if anything, let him show for himself.
Source # 2 - Video on the impact of new technology on life - click here
Source # 3 - Graphic on Child Labor
Source # 4 - Chart on Child Labor in Cotton Factories
Source # 5 - Excerpt from An Impartial Representation of the Case of the Poor Cotton Spinners in Lancaster (1780) which detailed Arkwright’s new factory system:
"Arkwright's machines require so few hands, and those only children, with the assistance of an overlooker. A child can produce as much as would, and did upon an average, employ ten grown up persons. Jennies for spinning with one hundred or two hundred spindles, or more, going all at once, and requiring but one person to manage them. Within the space of ten years, from being a poor man worth £5, Richard Arkwright has purchased an estate of £20,000; while thousands of women, when they can get work, must make a long day to card, spin, and reel 5040 yards of cotton, and for this they have four-pence or five-pence and no more."
Source # 6 - Video on railroads & telegraph connection to British Empire - click here
Source # 7 - Chart showing population growth of British cities
Source # 8 - Graph of Life Expectancy in British Cities
Source # 9 - Graph Showing the Change in Wages from 1850 - 1900
Homework - Use the source material listed below to answer the questions on the assignment sheet. These sources will be the focus of class discussion in the next class - the question sheet is available here.
Essay question for this unit is: Which is a more important goal for a society: economic equality or economic growth?
Biography - James Watt
James Watt was born in England in 1736. He was educated at home and as a teenager worked in his father’s business making navigation instruments for ships. As a young man, he went to work at the University of Glasgow repairing scientific instruments. It was here that he met and befriended Adam Smith. In 1763, he was asked to repair the university’s Newcomen steam engine. The large Newcomen steam engine had been invented in 1712 to pump water out of coal mines. Watt quickly realized that the Newcomen steam engine was terribly inefficient. It wasted about three quarters of its heat, which made it very expensive to operate anywhere except for coal mines where coal was very cheap. Watt recognized the large profits to be made from making an efficient steam engine. After this, Watt spent several years working on steam engines until he was able to build a faster and more fuel efficient steam engine that only used one-third the coal used by the Newcomen steam engine. Unfortunately, Watt did not have the money needed to start a business producing steam engines.
In 1775, Watt met and went into business making steam engines with Matthew Boulton, a successful business man in Birmingham, England, which was an important manufacturing city. Watt and Boulton worked well together because Watt had strong engineering skills and Boulton was a shrewd businessman. The first steam engines they produced were purchased by mine owners for pumping water out of the underground mines. In 1781, Boulton and Watt realized that the steam engine could be used to power many different types of machines and they began to sell their engines to paper, flour, iron and textile factories. By 1800, they had sold about 500 steam engines and had become very wealthy. In addition, they set up a program to help their workers if they became sick and to care for them when they got old. Watt died in 1819 and was buried next to Matthew Boulton. In 1882, the term “watt” as a measure of electricity and mechanical power was named in his honor.
Biography - Richard Arkwright
Richard Arkwright was born in England in 1732, the youngest of thirteen children. His family was poor and he was educated at home. As a young man, Arkwright worked as a barber. However, he was not happy with the work and realized that he could make more money if he made wigs from hair. While working as a wig maker, he invented a water proof dye that he sold to finance his work on inventing machines. In 1768, working with John Kay, a clock maker, Arkwright invented a spinning machine that could spin 128 threads at the same time. Up to this point, spinning thread was difficult work and a skilled spinner could only spin one thread at a time. In addition to being able to produce more thread, Arkwright’ machine was simple to use and unskilled workers could learn to operating with only a little training.
In 1771, Arkwright went into business operating the first water powered textile factory and by 1774 the factory employed 600 workers. In order to get more workers, Arkwright built housing near the factory for the workers and the number of workers grew to 1500. The workers in Arkwright's factory worked for 13 hour a day from 6am to 7pm. In addition, about two-thirds of Arkwright's workers were children, some as young as six. Arkwright was also the first to use one of James Watt's steam engines to power machinery in his factory. The success of this factory made Arkwright wealthy and famous. He went on to build several more factories and sell the technology in his factories to other factory owners. His technology was used in more than a hundred factories. Arkwright has since been called “the father of the factory system”.
Source # 1 - Excerpt from An Impartial Representation of the Case of the Poor Cotton Spinners in Lancaster (1780) which detailed Arkwright’s new factory system:
"Arkwright's machines require so few hands, and those only children, with the assistance of an overlooker. A child can produce as much as would, and did upon an average, employ ten grown up persons. Jennies for spinning with one hundred or two hundred spindles, or more, going all at once, and requiring but one person to manage them. Within the space of ten years, from being a poor man worth £5, Richard Arkwright has purchased an estate of £20,000; while thousands of women, when they can get work, must make a long day to card, spin, and reel 5040 yards of cotton, and for this they have four-pence or five-pence and no more."
Source # 2 - Diagram of British Textile Factory
Source # 3 - Video on development of the railroad in England - click here
Source # 4 - Map of Industrial England
Source # 5 - Graph of Railroad Construction in England
Source # 6 - Graph of British Coal Production
Source # 7 - Graph of Cotton Consumption in British Mills
Source # 8 - Graph of British railroad construction
