The European Seaborne Empires in 1700

The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade peaked in 1750-1800

King Tegesibu of Dahomey, ca. 1790

African slave trader in Angola, 1787

Sale of Africans, ca. 1760:

The English merchant licks the slave’s chin to ascertain his age and state of

health

Revolt aboard a Slave Ship, 1787

J.W. Turner, The Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead & Dying), based on an incident

from 1781

Anthony Benezet, Quaker

abolitionist pamphleteer.The Society of

Friends founded the Society for the

Abolition of the Slave Trade in

1787

John Wesley (1703-1791), writing to William Wilberforce (1759-1832) on his deathbed

“Am I not a man and a brother?”(designed by Josiah

Wedgwood, 1790)

The European Economy around 1700

WHAT WAS “REVOLUTIONARY” ABOUT THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION?

1. Technology: the substitution of inanimate sources of energy (coal) for animate sources (muscle power, wind, water) in manufacturing.

2. Institutions: the development of large-scale units of production, with an elaborate division of labor and quasi-military discipline, to supplant the old household economy.

3. Sectors: a massive redeployment of investment capital and labor power away from agriculture, toward mining and manufacturing, a process linked with urbanization.

For a thousand years, iron and steel had been made by hand at charcoal forges

This forge at a small town near Paris, painted in

1823, would have seemed

very old-fashioned to any

Englishman

Alexis, “Interior of the Workshop of a Silkweaver of Lyon”

ENGLISH ECONOMIC

DEVELOPMENT BY 1800

Brown=coalOrange=iron oreBlue=woolensPurple=cottonWhite square=shipbuilding

Lack of wood forced the English to make use of coal,

and to dig ever deeper into the ground for it

This Newcomen steam engine, invented in 1712, needed so much coal that it could only be used at coal mines, for pumping or ventilation….

James Watt’s steam engine of

1774, which maintained a vacuum in the

piston

By 1784 the steam engine could yield rotary motion

James Hargreave’s “Spinning Jenny” (1769)

The Jacquard Power Loom (France, 1804)

British textile factory, 1840s: Note the prevalence of women &

children

Coke-fired blast furnace

to produce pig iron

Puddling furnace to refine pig iron into wrought iron (1784)

The “Iron Bridge,” Shropshire (built in 1787)

“Coalbrookdale by Night” (1801)

Francis Egerton,3rd Duke of Bridgewater,invested $30 million in a

canal to link his coal mines with Manchester and the port of

Liverpool

THE BRINDLEY AQUEDUCT IN BARTON(the Bridgewater Canal originated underground

in the coal mine and ended above ground)

On the day the Bridgewater Canal opened in 1761,

the price of coal in Manchester dropped 50%

Cuckoo clock, made in the Black Forest around 1770

Manchester in 1750 (population ca. 25,000)

Manchester in 1850 (population: 400,000)

THE INDUSTRIAL “TAKE-OFF” IN THE UNITED KINGDOM:

The growth curve kinks upward around 1780

YEARTons of raw

cotton consumed

Tons of pig iron forged

1750 1,000 23,000

1770 1,500 32,000

1780 3,000 40,000

1790 15,000 80,000

1810 56,0001,000,00

0

1850 300,0002,285,00

0

Estimate by N.F.R. Crafts of average annual growth of British industrial

output

1700-1760

0.71%

1760-1780

1.51%

1780-1800

2.11%

1800-1830

3.00%

BARRIERS TO INDUSTRIALIZATION IN CONTINENTAL EUROPE

• Low agricultural productivity; the open-field system

• High costs of transportation

• Internal tolls or tariffs

• Artisanal guilds

• Barriers to the free movement of workers

• Barriers to the free flow of capital

• Lack of information about markets

• Price controls

A.R.J. Turgot (1727-1781),

French Finance Minister

(1775-76): This

“physiocrat” sought in the spirit of Adam

Smith to abolish the corvée,

controls of the grain trade, and internal tariffs

Joseph Vernet, “Construction of a Road” (ca. 1780):Reliance on the corvée, which Turgot sought to abolish