Industrial Revolution

The IndustrialRevolution is the term given to a period of (primarily) English history during which the first factories, the first railways and the first mass-production economy was created stretching from roughly 1750 to 1850.

At the same time the Agricultural Revolution was also under way, changing farming from a small subsistence process into a method of mass production. The large common usage fields were enclosed, and the leaving of 1/3 of the land fallow abandoned in favour of growing nitrogen fixing crops and using fertilizer under the control of large landowners. The rural populations displaced from this moved to cities to work in the new factories. It was the beginning of urbanisation. Iron and steel production became industrialised to provide materials for other machinery and tools.

The railways and canals network was largely constructed during this time to move raw materials and finished goods around the country and trade with other countries - particularly import of materials - increased massively, providing growth to the trading city of Birmingham at the centre of the transport network, the ports of Bristol, Southampton and also London - both a port and the financial centre of the revolution. The vast wealth and manufacturing capacity this brought together with a hunger for the world's raw materials to feed that provided the basis for Britain's Imperial expansion in the 19th century and early 20th centuries.

By the end of the two revolutions, systematic stock breeding and crop rotations had massively increased the yields of farming, mass produced crockery and tools had appeared. The cost of woollen cloth fell by half and required only a fifth the number of workers - more than 100,000 power looms were now in service in Britain and the country had become the first manufacturing based economy.

--KatieLucas

Perhaps we could move this to WikiPedia. See http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Industrial+Revolution.

See RobertTheobald for work on future PostIndustrialEra?.