Social Disruption of the Industrial Revolution in Europe

Introduction: Was the Industrial Revolution Peaceful?

It might be argued that the Industrial Revolution throughout Europe was not a revolution in the traditional sense, insofar as it involved no violence. Anyone making this argument, however, is unaware of the existence of the Luddites. Active in England in the early nineteenth century, at the height of the Industrial Revolution, Luddites were English textile workers who revolted against their replacement with industrial machinery and responded by destroying that machinery. The British government responded by sending in the army. The labor historian Eric Hobsbawm notes that "the 12,000 troops deployed against the Luddites greatly exceeded in size the army which Wellington took" to defeat Napoleon, which may give some sense of where governmental priorities actually lay.¹

The real point is that the Industrial Revolution was tremendously disruptive to the lives of ordinary workers and people, and what is remarkable in retrospect is only that there was not indeed more violence. A government that sees rebellion among displaced workers as posing a bigger threat than Napoleon Bonaparte, and accordingly sends a larger army to suppress them, offers some sense of why that violence was contained. Force and organization during the Industrial Revolution were asymmetrically arrayed — there was never any real or coherent prospect for sustained resistance. It is worth considering, however, the numerous ways in which the Industrial Revolution did disrupt and transform lives throughout Europe in this period.

Technology, Textiles, and the Highland Clearances

It is worth noting at the outset that the Industrial Revolution was not simply a technological revolution, although the rapid advances in and increased use of technology — spinning looms, steam engines, cotton gins, locomotives — are certainly the best-known part of the story. Consider, for example, the northern English textile industry that led to the Luddite rebellion against the technology itself. It is tempting to imagine that the only human effects of this newly introduced technology fell upon the skilled workers who were essentially displaced or rendered unemployed by the new textile devices. This would, however, be a fallacy.

The increased production of cloth under industrial conditions led, in turn, to an increased demand for raw material. In other words, such efficient means of producing cloth had emerged that they caused the demand for wool to spike. This led to the Highland Clearances in Scotland, in which the aristocratic nominal owners of large swaths of land decided that their estates would be more profitable if cleared of the human habitation that had been there for centuries, in order to make way for Cheviot sheep. The clearances were carried out by force, with entire townships burned to the ground and populations removed at gunpoint and sent to Nova Scotia in Canada. Donald MacLeod's eyewitness account of the Highland Clearances in 1819 indicates just how horrific this activity was, justifying the claims of Scottish nationalists some two centuries later that it practically constituted an official policy of ethnic cleansing:

"The consternation and confusion were extreme. Little or no time was given for the removal of persons or property; the people striving to remove the sick and the helpless before the fire should reach them; next, struggling to save the most valuable of their effects. The cries of the women and children, the roaring of the affrighted cattle, hunted at the same time by the yelling dogs of the shepherds amid the smoke and fire, altogether presented a scene that completely baffles description — it required to be seen to be believed. A dense cloud of smoke enveloped the whole country by day, and even extended far out to sea. At night an awfully grand but terrific scene presented itself — all the houses in an extensive district in flames at once. I myself ascended a height about eleven o'clock in the evening, and counted two hundred and fifty blazing houses, many of the owners of which I personally knew, but whose present condition — whether in or out of the flames — I could not tell. The conflagration lasted six days, till the whole of the dwellings were reduced to ashes or smoking ruins. During one of these days a boat actually lost her way in the dense smoke as she approached the shore, but at night was enabled to reach a landing-place by the lurid light of the flames."²

The simple fact is that the Highland Clearances involved no industry of any kind; therefore, apologists for the Industrial Revolution might easily overlook them in an account of social changes in the early nineteenth century. But it is easy enough to understand the Clearances as a direct result of the same social process that drove the Luddites to destroy textile-producing machinery. What was at stake in the Scottish Highlands was not industrial goods, but the raw materials required to produce them.

Bibliography

Blake, William. "Jerusalem." BlakeArchive.org. http://www.blakearchive.org/exist/blake/archive/transcription.xq?objectid=milton.b.illbk.02 (accessed March 6, 2014).

Hobsbawm, Eric. "The Machine Breakers." libcom.org. http://libcom.org/history/machine-breakers-eric-hobsbawm (accessed March 6, 2014).

MacLeod, Donald. The Stonemason: Donald MacLeod's Chronicle of Scotland's Highland Clearances. Ed. Douglas MacGowan. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2001.

Umachandran, Shalini. "Chequered History of a Textile Company." Times of India, March 12, 2010. (accessed March 6, 2014).