What the industrial revolution left behind

Before the industrial revolution the air held about 280 parts per million of carbon dioxide. In 2024 the global average was 422.8.

More goods, and a long wait for better lives

The industrial revolution changed how much a person could make in a day. A spinner at a mule or a worker on Ford’s line turned out many times what a hand worker could. Over the long run that meant cheaper cloth, iron, soap, books and food, and in the countries that industrialised first, people today live far longer and more comfortably than their ancestors of 1750. But the gains were slow to reach ordinary workers. Historians have argued for decades about the “standard of living debate”: whether British workers’ lives got better or worse between about 1780 and 1850. Wages rose slowly, if at all, in the early decades, while hours were long, towns were unhealthy and children worked in mills. Most historians agree that clear improvements for most working families came only in the second half of the 19th century.

Industry spreads, unevenly

From Britain, industry spread to Belgium, France, Germany and the United States in the 19th century, and to Japan from the 1870s, when the Meiji government built model factories such as the Tomioka silk mill. Elsewhere the story was different. Colonies were often kept as suppliers of raw materials and buyers of factory goods. In India, cheap machine-made cotton cloth from Lancashire undercut the hand weavers whose cloth had once been sold around the world. The gap in wealth between the industrial countries and the rest of the world grew wide in the 19th century, and much of it is still with us.

Laws, unions and votes

The problems of the industrial towns also produced many of the institutions that we now take for granted. The Factory and Mines Acts (unit 5) were the start of labour law: rules about working hours, minimum ages and safety, enforced by public inspectors. Trade unions, once illegal in Britain, became a normal part of working life. Public health laws, sewers and clean water supplies followed the cholera years. Free schooling spread, partly because a factory economy needed workers who could read. And the Chartists’ demand for votes for all men, rejected in the 1840s, was largely met over the following decades, with votes for women following in the 20th century.

Carbon in the air

Coal powered Newcomen’s pump and the steam engines driving the Pearl Street dynamos. Petroleum fuels later powered internal-combustion engines. Burning them releases carbon dioxide. By studying bubbles of old air trapped in the ice of Antarctica, scientists know that before the industrial revolution the atmosphere held about 280 parts per million of carbon dioxide, a level that had changed little for thousands of years. Continuous measurements began at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii in 1958, when the level was already about 315. According to NOAA, the global average in 2024 was 422.8 parts per million, a new record, and the rise during 2024 alone, 3.75 parts per million, was the largest one-year increase on record. Carbon dioxide traps heat, and the warming of the climate since the 19th century is the longest-lasting legacy of the industrial age.