| Term | Definition |
|---|
| Industrial Revolution | the transformation of the economy, the environment, and living conditions, occurring first in England in the eighteenth century, that resulted from the use of steam engines, the mechanization of manufacturing in factories, and innovations in transportation and communication. |
| Agricultural Revolution | the transformation of farming that resulted in the eighteenth century from the spread of new crops, improvements in cultivation techniques and livestock breeding, and the consolidation of small holdings into large farms from which tenants and sharecroppers were forcibly expelled. |
| Mass Production | the manufacture of many identical products by the division of labor into many small repetitive tasks. This method was introduced into the manufacture of pottery by Josiah Wedgwood and into the spinning of cotton thread by Richard Arkwright. |
| Josiah Wedgwood | English industrialist whose pottery works were the first to produce fine quality pottery by industrial methods. |
| Division of labor | a manufacturing technique that breaks down a craft into many simple and repetitive tasks that can be performed by unskilled workers. Pioneered in the pottery works of Josiah Wedgwood and in other eighteenth-century factories, it greatly increased the productivity of labor and lowered the cost of manufactured goods. |
| Mechanization | the application of machinery to manufacturing and other activities. Among the first processes to be mechanized were the spinning of cotton thread and the weaving of cloth in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century England. |
| Richard Arkwright | English inventor and entrepreneur who became the wealthiest and most successful textile manufacturer of the early Industrial Revolution. He invented the water frame, a machine that, with minimal human supervision, could spin many strong cotton threads at once. |
| Crystal Palace | building erected in Hyde Park, London for the Great Exhibition of 1851. Made of iron, glass, like a gigantic greenhouse, a symbol of the industrial age. |
| Steam engine | a machine that turns the energy released by burning fuel into motion; Thomas Newcomen built the first crude but workable steam engine in 1712. James Watt vastly improved his device in the 1760s and 1770s. Steam power was later applied to moving machinery in factories and to powering ships and locomotives. |
| James Watt | Scot who invented the condenser and other improvements that made the steam engine a practical source of power for industry and transportation. The watt, an electrical measurement, is named after him. |
| Electric telegraph | a device for rapid, long-distance transmission of information over an electric wire. It was introduced in England and North America in the 1830s and 1840s and replaced telegraph systems that utilized visual signals such as semaphores. |
| Business cycles | recurrent swings from economic hard times to recovery and growth, then back to hard times and a repletion of the sequence. |
| Laissez faire | the idea that government should refrain from interfering in economic affairs. The classic exposition of laissez faire principles is Adam Smiths Wealth of Nations. |
| Mercantilism | European government policies of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries designed to promote overseas trade between a country and its colonies to trade only with their motherland country. The British system was defined by the Navigation Acts, the French system was defined b the Navigation Acts, the French system by laws known as the Exclusif. |
| Positivism | a philosophy developed by the French count of Saint-Simon. Positivists believed that social and economic problems could be solved by the application of the scientific method, leading to continuous progress. Their ideas became popular in French and Latin America in the nineteenth century. |
| Utopian socialism | a philosophy introduced by the Frenchman Charles Fourier in the early nineteenth century. Utopian socialists hoped to create humane alternatives to industrial capitalism by building self-sustaining communities whose inhabitants would work cooperatively. |
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