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Industrial Revolution

Terms in this set (55)

The period of greatly increased output of machine-made goods that began in England in the middle 1700s.
Industrial Revolution
One of the fenced-in or hedged-in fields created by wealthy British landowners on land that was formerly worked by village farmers.
Enclosure, Enclosure Movement
The system of growing a different crop in a field each year to preserve the fertility of the land.
Crop Rotation
A person who organizes, manages, and takes on the risks of a business.
Entrepreneur
In a factory, an arrangement in which a product is moved from worker to worker, with each person performing a single task in its manufacture.
Assembly Line
An economic system based on private ownership and on the investment of money in business ventures in order to make a profit.
Capitalism
An economic system in which the government makes all economic decisions.
Command Economy
An economic system in which the people own all means of production, private property does not exist, and all goods and services are shared equally.
Communism
The four factors of production.
Land, Labor, Capital, Entrepreneur
A business owned by stockholders who share in its profits but are not personally responsible for its debts.
Corporation
The resources that are needed to produce goods and services.
Factors of Production
A large building in which machinery is used to manufacture goods.
Factory
Commerce between nations without economic restrictions or barriers.
Free Trade
The idea that government should not interfere with or regulate industries and businesses. Means "let them do as they please."
Laissez-Faire
A social class made up of skilled workers, professionals, businesspeople, and wealthy farmers that grew extensively during the Industrial Revolution.
Middle Class
This system allowed men, women, and children to work in the home. Workers often engaged in the production of woolen cloth, copper, tin, iron, and leather goods.
Cottage Industry, Putting-Out Industry
This act limited the number of hours children under the age of nine could work. It also provided money for inspectors and provided procedures for enforcement.
Factory Act, 1883
Inventor of the Rocket, the first steam locomotive that traveled the rail line from Liverpool to Manchester at the roaring speed of 16 mph.
George Stephenson
An idea developed by David Ricardo claiming that if workers were paid more, they would produce more children, would consume the increase. Therefore, he said, the working class would forever exist at subsistence levels.
Iron Law of Wages
Inventor of the spinning jenny, which has multiple spindles enabling spinning to keep up with weaving for the first time.
James Hargreaves
An act passed that prohibited women, girls, and boys under ten from working in the mines.
Mines Act, 1842
In his Essay on the Principle of Population, this Englishmen compared human beings to lemmings and tiny rodents whose populations exploded until they outstripped the naturally occurring resources and then committed mass suicide.
Thomas Malthus
A 50-page pamphlet published by Karl Marx in 1848 that outlined the guidelines of the communist ideal.
Communist Manifesto
An English cotton lord considered one the earliest socialists and propagators of utopianism because he paid his employees high wages, reduced working hours, and provided social services (schools, housing, stores, etc.).
Robert Owen
The label applied to the middle of the nineteenth century.
Age of Steel, Age of the Middle Class
Englishman who introduced a method that produced steel in far greater quantities without increasing costs.
Henry Bessemer
The business owners according to Engels and Marx.
Bourgoisie
Inventor of the incandescent lamp.
Thomas Edison
Inventor of the telephone.
Alexander Graham Bell
Swedish chemist who invented dynamite thus making it possible to blast tunnels through rock.
Alfred Nobel
Using the scientific method, this person discovered microbes (small, invisible organisms) that cause diseases.
Louis Pasteur
Inventor of the flying shuttle.
John Kay
Inventor of the water frame.
Richard Arkwright
Skilled craftspeople in the Midlands and Northern England who in 1812 attacked the machines that they believed threatened their livelihoods. Their attempt to stop industrial mechanization failed.
Luddites
The working class according to Engels and Marx.
Proletariat
The application of new agricultural techniques that allowed for a large increase in productivity in the eighteenth century.
Agricultural Revolution
An ideology based on the belief that people should be as free from restraint as possible.
Liberalism
The political, economic, and social theories of Karl Marx, which included the idea that history is the story of class struggle and that ultimately the proletariat will overthrow the bourgeoisie and establish a dictatorship en route to a classless society.
Marxism
This was the "first important political movement of working men organized during the nineteenth century." It took its name from an effort achieve political democracy through the implementation of universal male suffrage, payment for members of Parliament, the elimination of property qualifications for members of Parliament, and annual sessions of Parliament.
Chartism
The world's first industrial fair in Great Britain that contained over 100,000 exhibits that showed a wide variety of products.
Crystal Palace Exhibition/ Great Exhibition of 1851
A spinning machine created by Richard Arkwright that had a capacity of several hundred spindles and used waterpower it therefore required a larger and more specialized mill - a factory.
Water Frame
A breakthrough invention by Thomas Savery in 1698 and Thomas Newcomen in 1705 that burned coal to produce steam, which was then used to operate a pump; the early models were superseded by James Watt's more efficient model, patented in 1769.
Steam Engine
A government's way of supporting and aiding its own economy by laying high taxes on imported goods from other countries, as when the French responded to cheaper British goods flooding their country by imposing high tariffs on some imported products.
Tariff Protection
Policies aimed at protecting and developing a country's economy.
Economic Nationalism
An individual's sense of class differentiation.
Class-consciousness
A gender division of labor with the wife at home as mother and homemaker and the husband as wage earner.
Separate spheres
English laws passed in 1799 that outlawed unions and strikes, favoring capitalist business people over skilled artisans. Bitterly resented and widely disregarded by many craft guilds, the acts were repealed by Parliament in 1824.
Combination Acts
Refusal to work
Strike
Workers joined together in voluntary associations to press for reforms.
Union
The idea that people should judge ideas, institutions, and actions on the basis of their utility, or usefulness.
Utilitarianism
The birthplace of the Industrial Revolution.
Great Britain
Author of Principles of Political Economy and Taxations.
Ricardo
Inventor of the seed drill.
Tull
Inventor of the cotton gin.
Eli Whitney
Adam Smith's book that argued for a free market economy.
Wealth of Nations
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