Course number 8950.

Program contains 36 lectures; the length of each lecture is: approximately 30 minutes.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 261-273) in course guidebook.

Lecturer: Dr. Patrick N. Allitt, Emory University.

From the guidebook. Throughout most of world history, nearly everyone has been poor, life expectancy has been short, and famine has been a frequent visitor. Today, many parts of the world are so wealthy that they regard poverty not as normal but as a special problem that ought to be eliminated. The single great cause of this increase in wealth has been industrialization. We know now beyond question that industrial societies generate wealth, which eventually spreads widely to benefit all their people, even though inequalities increase and even though the early stages of industrialization are often dirty, exploitative, and painful. No other way out of collective poverty has yet been discovered. Britain was the first century to undertake industrialization. It began in the mid-18th century, by which time Britain had achieved political stability, acquired a colonial and commercial empire, founded banks and insurance systems, and discovered ways to increase its food output so that fewer farmers could feed more people than ever before. First in the cotton textile industry, then with improvements in coal mining, pottery manufacture, and iron smelting, new methods began to catch on, including the application of water and stream power to machinery, the concentration of large work forces in factories and mines, and the division of labor. When the economist Adam Smith wrote his classic work An Inquiry into the Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), all these processes were just getting underway. Part of Smith's genius was to recognize that they were not of merely local significance but had potentially world-changing implications. Industrialization also required good transport and good communications. In the late 18th century, British entrepreneurs began to build a canal system to link up the country's navigable rivers and to connect all its major cities so that bulk goods could be carried economically between them. No sooner was the canal network complete, by about 1830, than a newer and faster technology, railways, began to displace it. Traisn exploited improvements in steam-engine technology, which has been undertaken a century earlier to pump water out of flooded coal mines; when miniaturized, this technology proved adaptable to locomotives that could achieve high speeds running on smooth metal rails. This course of 36 lectures asks why Britain was the first country to industrialize, why the United States and many parts of Europe caught up in the 19th century, and how these changes affected the course of world history. The initiative had shifted to the United States by the later decades of the 19th century. Carnegie in steel and Rockefeller in oil built near-monopoly corporations of unprecedented size as they came to dominate entire industries. Henry Ford, borrowing from the bicycle and meat-packing industries, worked out how to mass-produce motor cars on a moving assembly line from fully interchangeable component parts. Orville and Wilbur Wright then achieved what had been regarded throughout most of world history as the impossible -- they made machines capable of controlled and sustained flight. Industrialization victimized some people even as it benefited others. This course will examine the lives of early industrial workers who suffered terrible working conditions in horribly polluted cities, frequent industrial accidents, reduced life expectancy, and the shattering of traditional ways of life. These were the conditions in which socialism drew the interest of such intellectuals as Karl Marx, who could simultaneously admire industry and deplore capitalism, the economic system to which it was linked. Industrial societies specialize in constant innovation, which can also mean constant insecurity for people trapped in its coils. Among the themes we will cover is the way industry changed the distribution of political power both within nations and between them. Warfare, once mechanized and industrialized, became more destructive and hideous than ever before, as the two world wars attested in the first half of the 20th century. The course ends with a survey of the globalization of industry; the Asian Tigers are now catching up with their Western rivals. One lecture late in the course considers the computer revolution and the phenomenal increase in knowledge-related technologies, all of which have been accompanied by great feats of miniaturization. Another considers the environmental costs of the Industrial Revolution. By the end of this series, you will be better placed to understand the processes that have enabled you to anticipate a long life of unprecedented comfort, surrounded by convenient devices, user-friendly technologies, and the prospect that more such conveniences will arise to help you and your descendants in the coming decades (pages 1-3).

DVD.

In English.