Chapter 18: Revolutions of Industrialization, 1750-1914

Whenever I think about the Industrial Revolution, I always think about the bad stuff like the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, children being exploited as labor, people losing limbs due to dangerous work, and The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. The idea of the laboring classes doing the physical work in order for the higher classes to benefit when the poor won't benefit much is difficult for me. That idea is somewhat prevalent today, but more along the lines of the poor being unable to rise in class structure (at least easily) rather than in the Industrial age where kids were put to work and the employees were subject to whatever abuse their employers desired like endless work hours and extremely low wages. I believe it's because I don't know a world outside of a country industrialized and how it is now, so I forget the true importance of the Industrial Revolution. Because of this revolution, the world was been blessed (or not depending on your stance) with beginning technologies of efficient transportation, fast/cheap clothing production and distribution, and the start of modern medicine. Most people correlate the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions with Europe, and therefore, any other continents being lesser and primitive. Those people forget how in their history classes, their instructors do mention how, for example, the Chinese invented paper in 105 AD and print making in 610 AD. However, it is true that Great Britain was one of the most powerful countries in the world after the Renaissance due to exploiting different peoples and natural resources due to colonization.

When I think about the Scientific Revolution, I think of positive things such as logical reasoning, the separation of church and state, and general inventions that have attributed directly to the technology we have today. The Scientific Revolution is a larger turning point than the Industrial Revolution since the Industrial Revolution was born because of the Scientific Revolution.

I believe the idea of socialism is quite nice, but overall it hasn't shown to effect societies positively when put to use. Over the last century, we've seen governments like the USSR implement their own version of socialism that ultimately ended. The key words in that sentence are "own version" because a general form of any government would not automatically work in each country given their politics, cultures, and locations. It's unfortunate that forms of socialist countries like Norway aren't publicized. The Norwegian government seems to be working well with mostly content citizens.

I refuse to give into American Exceptionalism, but the US clearly became the world's leading industrialized power in 1914. I feel that people believe that now, but it's untrue. Other countries, such as China, presently are more wealthy than the US and more technologically advanced.