Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution is the period in European (and especially British) history from roughly 1750 to 1850 CE which saw a rapid rate of technological development that had profound economic and social consequences. Technological advances such as mechanized industrial and agricultural production and the creation of railways led to widespread social change including urbanization, the rise of the working and the middle classes, the advent of social programs like public education and public health, and renewed imperialism.

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Politically, the era saw numerous revolutions, not least the American, the French, and Haitian cases, the latter being an early coffin-nail in the Atlantic slave system. The replacement of enslaved labour with wage labour was an important feature of the Industrial Revolution.

While many monarchies survived and managed to hold onto the reins of power, the era saw some proliferation of democracy, tempered by a limited franchise, as well as the "invention" of nationalism.

Among the new technologies and discoveries, both electricity and radioactivity were quickly latched onto by new generations of woo-meisters.

Railroad

The development of rail transportation was a crucial aspect of the Industrial Revolution. Before the development of steam power, rail was powered by donkeys or people, and was mainly used in mines. With the onset of steam, travel by rail became faster than riding animal-powered transportation and allowed for the more efficient transportation of massive quantities of goods. By 1869, a rail spanned the entirety of the United States.

Inequality

The Industrial Revolution increased social inequality in several ways. It introduced large wealth disparities between industrialized countries and pastoral ones, and between rural and urban areas of the same country. These inequalities gave rise to political movements to redistribute wealth; communism and socialism arose during the period.[1]

Quantifying the impact

Thomas Piketty presents the following table:[2][note 1]

Annual average growth rateWorld GDP growth per year, %World population growth per year, %GDP per capita growth per year, %
0-17000.10.10.0
1700-20121.60.80.8
   1700-18200.50.40.1
   1820-19131.50.60.9
   1913-20123.01.41.6
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See also

Notes
  1. Because a growth in population implies a growth in production without inherent growth in per-capita production, Piketty subtracts the world population growth per year from the world GDP growth per year to find the per capita growth per year.

References
  1. As you were, The Economist, October 13th 2012
  2. http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/capital21c/en/pdf/T2.1.pdf
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