Economic revolution (industrial revolution)

To the end of the early modern period, Europe remained a preindustrial society. Its manufactured goods came from small workshops (мастерские), and most of its machinery was powered by animals, wind, falling water, or human labor. These two facts reinforced each other, and together they constricted Europe's economic development. Water-powered manufacturing, for instance, could develop only in favored regions and remained constantly subject to weather-related interruptions; with limited supplies of power, there was little reason to concentrate manufacturing processes in large workshops.

By 1850, however, these descriptions no longer applied to large areas of western Europe, and by 1914 the European economy as a whole was dominated by large factories, many of them employing thousands of workers. Both manufacturing and transportation now relied on steam power, and gasoline and electric motors were becoming common. The quantity and variety of goods manufactured rose accordingly, a transformation suggested by the development of the British iron industry: Britain produced about 30,000 tons of pig iron in 1760, about one million tons in 1810. Contemporary awareness of change advanced even more quickly than the reality. In his 1848 Manifesto of the Communist Party, written at a time when most Europeans still worked in agriculture and when even British manufacturing was still evenly divided between factories and small workshops, Karl Marx (1818–1883) presented industrialization as the obvious destiny of all European society. The rapidity of these changes and their far-reaching effects amply justify historians' designation of the period as the "industrial revolution." In the century after 1780, European life was transformed.

Industrialization thus numbers among the most important processes that brought the early modern period to a close, and as such it raises important questions about the period itself. Signs of dramatic economic and technological change were already apparent in later eighteenth-century Britain, prompting historians to ask how this phase of rapid change could have emerged from the relatively stable early modern economy and why it emerged first in Britain. More broadly, historians have asked why Europe industrialized ahead of other regions of the globe, and what contributions Europe's empires in the Americas and elsewhere made to its industrialization. Answers to these questions have been varied and surprising. Though the concept of industrialization itself remains unchallenged, recent historical research has overturned much conventional wisdom about how the process took place.

1 Edict of Nantes, French Édit De Nantes, law promulgated at Nantes in Brittany on April 13, 1598, by Henry IV of France. It granted a large measure of religious liberty to his Protestant subjects, the Huguenots. The edict upheld (поощряет) Protestants in freedom of conscience and permitted them to hold public worship (церковная служба) in many parts of the kingdom, though not in Paris. It granted them full civil rights and established a special court, the Chambre de l’Édit, composed of both Protestants and Catholics, to deal with disputes arising from the edict. Protestant pastors were to be paid by the state and released from certain obligations; finally, the Protestants could keep the places they were still holding in August 1597 as strongholds, or places de sûreté, for eight years, the expenses of garrisoning them being met by the king.

The edict also restored Catholicism in all areas where Catholic practice had been interrupted; and it made any extension of Protestant worship in France legally impossible. Nevertheless, it was much resented by Pope Clement VIII, by the Roman Catholic clergy in France, and by the parlements. Catholics tended to interpret the edict in its most restrictive sense. The Cardinal de Richelieu, who regarded its political clauses as a danger to the state, annulled them by the Peace of Alès (1629). On Oct. 18, 1685, Louis XIV revoked (отозвал) the Edict of Nantes and deprived (отобрал) the French Protestants of all religious and civil liberties. Within a few years, more than 400,000 Huguenots emigrated— to England, Prussia, Holland, and America—depriving France of its most industrious commercial class.