Topic 5.8 Notes – Reactions to the Industrial Economy from 1750 to 1900

How Industrial Capitalism Created Pressure for Change

Industrial capitalism joined private ownership of production with machines and wage labor. Factory owners controlled the means of production, and workers had to sell their labor for wages.

Industrialization raised output and created wealth, but those gains were uneven. Early factory workers often dealt with:

• Long hours and low pay
• Dangerous machinery and injuries
• Child labor
• Unemployment insecurity during downturns
• Crowded urban housing with poor sanitation

Child labor in a textile mill

The change in work itself mattered. In artisan shops or household production, people had more control over pace and skill. In factories, work ran by the clock, under supervision, with repetitive tasks. That loss of control helped create resistance.

Two classes show up constantly in this topic:

• Bourgeoisie = factory owners and others who owned productive property
• Proletariat = wage-earning working class

Resistance became organized because workers were packed together in cities and factories. That made shared problems visible and made it easier to form associations, print newspapers, strike, and support political parties.

Labor Unions and Workers’ Political Movements

Workers first tried to change industrial society from inside it.

Labor unions

Labor unions organized workers to bargain collectively for:

• Higher wages
• Shorter hours
• Safer conditions
• The right to organize

Common tactics included dues, petitions, strikes, demonstrations, lobbying, and backing political parties. The eight-hour workday became a major symbol of labor demands.

Unions faced serious obstacles:

• Employers used blacklists and replacement workers
• Governments sent police or troops
• Workers were divided by skill, religion, ethnicity, gender, and nationality

Britain’s union laws

• Combination Acts, 1799-1800 banned worker combinations
• Repealed in 1824
• Trade Union Act, 1871 legalized unions in Britain

Workers’ political movements

Some workers wanted more than better pay. They wanted political power too.

Chartism in Britain pushed the People’s Charter of 1838, including:

• Universal male suffrage
• Secret ballot
• Payment for members of Parliament

Later in the century, labor and socialist parties grew. Germany’s Social Democratic Party became one of the strongest working-class mass parties.

Reform Within Industrial Society

Many critics wanted to regulate capitalism, not destroy it. That pushed governments to take on new responsibilities.

Bismarck is a favorite test example because he was conservative. He reformed partly to reduce unrest and weaken socialism.

Urban reform grew from obvious city problems. London’s Great Stink of 1858 pushed Joseph Bazalgette to build a major sewer system. Cities added sewers, clean water, paved streets, transport, parks, and housing rules.

Religious and cooperative responses mattered too:

• Charities and mutual-aid societies helped the poor
• Cooperatives offered worker- or consumer-owned alternatives
• Rerum Novarum (1891) defended worker rights but rejected both unrestricted capitalism and revolutionary communism

Socialist and Revolutionary Alternatives

Socialism is the broad label for ideas favoring more equal distribution and social control of production.

Early socialism

• Robert Owen improved conditions at New Lanark and promoted cooperatives
• Charles Fourier imagined planned cooperative communities

Marxism and communism

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels gave the most influential revolutionary critique.

• Communist Manifesto (1848)
• Capital (1867)

Core Marxist ideas:

• History moves through class struggle
• Historical materialism says material production shapes society
• Workers must develop class consciousness
• The proletariat should overthrow the bourgeoisie
• Goal = abolish private ownership of the means of production and eventually create a classless communist society

“Workers of the world, unite” meant international class solidarity.

Different strategies and anarchism

Some socialists wanted revolution. Social democracy wanted gradual change through elections, unions, and laws.

Anarchism, tied to Mikhail Bakunin, opposed both capitalism and coercive state power. The big difference from Marxism is that anarchists wanted the state abolished immediately.

Ottoman and Qing Modernization Under Industrial Pressure

These reforms came from outside pressure more than worker protest. Ottoman and Qing rulers were trying to survive in a world dominated by industrial powers.

Ottoman Empire and the Tanzimat

The Tanzimat reforms ran from the Gülhane Edict of 1839 to the constitution of 1876. They reorganized the military, centralized taxes, expanded secular schools, built railroads and telegraphs, created new ministries, codified laws, and promised greater equality for non-Muslims.

Limits mattered. Elites and religious leaders resisted, foreign debt grew, and Abdülhamid II suspended the constitution in 1878. The map below helps show the bigger context. Even as reformers tried to strengthen the state, the empire had already lost large territories by this point.

Ottoman territorial losses by 1878

Qing China and Self-Strengthening

After the Opium Wars, unequal treaties, and the Taiping Rebellion, Qing leaders tried Self-Strengthening. Officials like Zeng Guofan and Li Hongzhang built arsenals, shipyards, a navy, technical schools, telegraphs, railroads, mines, and steamship companies, and sent students abroad.

The idea was to keep the Confucian order while borrowing Western technology. Corruption, poor coordination, and conservative opposition weakened the effort. Defeat in the First Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895) exposed those limits, and the Hundred Days’ Reform of 1898 was shut down by Empress Dowager Cixi.