Stated by Stephen Gardiner, a professor at Cornell University, "the Industrial Revolution was another of those extraordinary jumps forward in the story of civilization." The Industrial Revolution got its name due to the movement in which machines changed people's ways of life as well as their methods of manufacturing (Hackett). The machines and factories replaced agriculture and the works of craftsmen, and soon caused industrial towns and cities to blossom as well as making Britain the workshop of the world. Because of the Industrial Revolution, the role of the working class and their jobs changed completely. Workers went from agricultural life or jobs as artisans to work as factory workers (Sherman and Salisbury). With the change of jobs, the working class also experienced a very drastic change in their working conditions. The working conditions that these people experienced were often very awful and resulted in poor health, unfair treatment, and low pay.
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For one to fully understand how much the Industrial Revolution changed the lives of people in England and especially the working class, they need to understand what life was like before this movement and how and why this revolution even started. Most British people had lived in the countryside and did the work themselves. They spun fibers of thread and yarn into cloth, smelted iron from wood to forge metal, and they transported their goods to markets from coaches drawn by horses or wooden ships (Sherman and Salisbury). This slowly started to change as England became Europe's leading commercial and colonial power during the eighteenth century because of Britain being able to turn out goods for export and access to expanding markets. This is in part due to their method of shipping and transportation, raw materials such as cotton and coal that came from their American colonies, and the demand in industrial labor from the cities that would come from their expanding population of skilled and unskilled workers (Sherman and Salisbury).