The First Industrial Revolution

Author(s):  
Jonathan Scott

This chapter concerns the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution involved the transformation of organic economies by means of a complex of changes which gave birth to the modern world. In Europe, East Asia, and elsewhere those economies were agricultural. Thus the chapter discusses the replacement of an economy 80 per cent of the output of which might have been agricultural by another in which manufacturing became the dominant sector. This involved a transition in the scale of manufacturing from artisanal to large-scale workshop and then factory production. In Britain, that entailed technological innovation, but it would not have been possible in the first place without prior sustained changes in the rest of the economy and society.

Vulcan ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-110
Author(s):  
Seymour E. Goodman

The Industrial Revolution provided the environment and opportunities for the large-scale development and deployment of military technological innovation in “real time,” that is, in time to influence the conduct and outcomes of a major conflict while that conflict was in progress. The case of the Union and Confederate strategies and their implementations during the American Civil War is particularly exemplary because both sides looked to ironclad warships in opposing ways. For the first year of the war each side pursued real-time ironclad warship deployment efforts to influence three different strategic races on a continental scale. Confederate success could have had enormous impacts on the course and outcomes of the war, but by August 1862 the Union had won all three races. Each was won in a different way, each portended how the conduct of the war on water continued, and each provided lessons for both navies to learn. Both sides went forward with revised strategies and renewed vigor to try to build and deploy more than one hundred ironclad warships between them. Over the next three years, the extensive Confederate ironclad program failed in multiple and costly ways to deliver much to the Confederate war effort. The even more extensive Union ironclad program did better primarily by securing what had been won the first year and neutralizing the continuing Confederate ironclad threat, although it failed in other important ways.


2016 ◽  
Vol 54 (3) ◽  
pp. 957-958

Murray Milgate of Queen's College, University of Cambridge reviews “Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World,” by Deirdre Nansen McCloskey. The Econlit abstract of this book begins: “Presents a social and intellectual history of how the ideology of European liberalism accorded a new liberty and dignity to commoners—including the bourgeois—and shaped the revaluation by society of trading and the betterment of technologies. Focuses on how a great enrichment happened, and will happen; how explanations from the left and right have proven false; how bourgeois life had been rhetorically revalued in Britain at the onset of the industrial revolution; how a probourgeois rhetoric formed in England around 1700; how England had recently lagged in bourgeois ideology, compared with the Netherlands; how reformation, revolt, revolution, and reading increased the liberty and dignity of ordinary Europeans; how nowhere before on a large scale had bourgeois or other commoners been honored; how words and ideas caused the modern world; how history and economics have been misunderstood; and how rhetoric made and can readily unmake the contemporary world.”


Author(s):  
Hans Joas ◽  
Wolfgang Knöbl

This book provides a sweeping critical history of social theories about war and peace from Thomas Hobbes to the present. It presents both a broad intellectual history and an original argument as it traces the development of thinking about war over more than 350 years—from the premodern era to the period of German idealism and the Scottish and French enlightenments, and then from the birth of sociology in the nineteenth century through the twentieth century. While focusing on social thought, the book draws on many disciplines, including philosophy, anthropology, and political science. It demonstrate the profound difficulties most social thinkers—including liberals, socialists, and those intellectuals who could be regarded as the first sociologists—had in coming to terms with the phenomenon of war, the most obvious form of large-scale social violence. With only a few exceptions, these thinkers, who believed deeply in social progress, were unable to account for war because they regarded it as marginal or archaic, and on the verge of disappearing. This overly optimistic picture of the modern world persisted in social theory even in the twentieth century, as most sociologists and social theorists either ignored war and violence in their theoretical work or tried to explain it away. The failure of the social sciences and especially sociology to understand war, the book argues, must be seen as one of the greatest weaknesses of disciplines that claim to give a convincing diagnosis of our times.


Author(s):  
William R. Thompson ◽  
Leila Zakhirova

No two system leaders were identical in their claims to being the most innovative states in their respective zones, eras, and periods of leadership. Nonetheless, three general categories emerge: maritime commercial leadership, a pushing of agrarian boundaries, and sustained industrial economic growth. Those that made breakthroughs in the latter category, of course, redefined the modern world. Frontiers were critically important in all four cases of system leadership (China, the Netherlands, Britain, and the United States), but not exactly in the same way. Major improvements in transportation/communication facilitated economic growth by making interactions more feasible and less expensive, although the importance of trade varied considerably. Expanding populations were a hallmark of all four cases, even if the scale of increase varied. Population growth and urbanization forced agriculture to become more efficient and provided labor for nonagricultural pursuits. Urban demands stimulated regional specialization, technological innovation, and energy intensification, expanding the size of domestic markets and contributing to scalar increases in production. Just how large those scalar increases were depended on the interactions among technological innovation, power-driven machinery, and energy transition. Yet no single change led automatically to technological leadership. While lead status was never gained by default, it helped to have few rivals. As more serious rivals emerged, technological leaderships became harder to maintain.


2008 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 788-801 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jee-Hoon Jeong ◽  
Baek-Min Kim ◽  
Chang-Hoi Ho ◽  
Yeon-Hee Noh

Abstract The variations in the wintertime precipitation over East Asia and the related large-scale circulation associated with the Madden–Julian oscillation (MJO) are examined. By analyzing the observed daily precipitation for the period 1974–2000, it is found that the MJO significantly modulates the distribution of precipitation over four East Asian countries; the precipitation rate difference between wet and dry periods over East Asia, when the centers of MJO convective activities are located over the Indian Ocean and western Pacific, respectively, reaches 3–4 mm day−1, which corresponds to the climatological winter-mean value. Composite analysis with respect to the MJO suggests that the MJO–precipitation relation is mostly explained by the strong vertical motion anomalies near an entrance region of the East Asia upper-tropospheric jet and moisture supply in the lower troposphere. To elucidate different dynamic origins of the vertical motion generated by the MJO, diagnostic analysis of a generalized omega equation is adopted. It is revealed that about half of the vertical motion anomalies in East Asia are induced by the quasigeostrophic forcings by the MJO, while diabatic heating forcings explain a very small fraction, less than 10% of total anomalies.


Significance It is the only country in South-east Asia with a large-scale nuclear plant, although this was never loaded with fuel. Other countries in the region have tentative plans to develop nuclear power programmes. Impacts The current absence of nuclear power programmes will help avert the diversion of capital from renewable energy development in the region. South-east Asian countries with small, non-power reactors, built for research, will try to maintain these facilities. Across the region, the need for electricity grid investment will increase as more decentralised generation sources are deployed.


1996 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 229-266 ◽  
Author(s):  
James H. Fetzer

Perhaps no technological innovation has so dominated the second half of the twentieth century as has the introduction of the programmable computer. It is quite difficult if not impossible to imagine how contemporary affairs—in business and science, communications and transportation, governmental and military activities, for example—could be conducted without the use of computing machines, whose principal contribution has been to relieve us of the necessity for certain kinds of mental exertion. The computer revolution has reduced our mental labors by means of these machines, just as the Industrial Revolution reduced our physical labor by means of other machines.


Author(s):  
E.B. LENCHUK ◽  

The article deals with the modern processes of changing the technological basis of the world economy on the basis of large-scale transition to the use of technologies of the fourth industrial revolution, shaping new markets and opens up prospects for sustainable economic growth. It is in the scientific and technological sphere that the competition between countries is shifting. Russia remains nearly invisible player in this field. The author tried to consider the main reasons for such a lag and identify a set of measures of state scientific and technological policy that can give the necessary impetus to the scientific and technological development of Russia.


Author(s):  
N. Rylach

Under the megatrend, we mean large-scale technological, economic, social, political changes that occur slowly, but in the long run, when they are rooted, they substantially and permanently affect most of the processes in society. Such relative stability in the trajectory of the main forces of change can predict some elements of medium and long-term future changes. The article investigates such megatrends of the development of global innovation networks as the structural nature of the global innovation system, the development of systemic interconnections in the field of innovation, the interaction of national innovation systems and global, the internationalization of innovation activity, and the paradigm of "open innovation". The methodological principles and structural elements of the concept of the national innovation system are determined in the paper, the connection of national innovation systems with the phenomenon of internationalization of the innovation sphere is explored. The theoretical principles of the phenomenon of internationalization of innovation activity are investigated, as well as the preconditions for the emergence of the concept of "open innovation" and its current trends have been established. The concept of open innovation is an important precondition for the emergence and functioning of global innovation networks. The paper analyzes the genesis and specificity of the phenomenon of global innovation networks, outlines their structure and dynamics. It has been determined that global innovation networks play an important role in the development of the modern world economy, as they stimulate international cooperation in the innovation sphere, transfer of knowledge to the world economy and general scientific and technological development and growth of world production.


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