MAPS OF HISTORY · IB HISTORY · THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
IB HISTORY · 1750 – 1914 · 12 CHAPTERS
IB History: The Industrial Revolution — notes, maps and essay plans
Why machines driven by coal first changed work in Britain, how they spread to Europe, the United States and Japan, how people resisted them, and who paid — from Lancashire’s mill children to the enslaved growers of its cotton.
This page gathers the atlas’s IB notes: where each of its 12 chapters fits the syllabus, the concepts and evidence it supports, practice questions with model essay plans, primary sources, and starting points for the Internal Assessment.
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Where it fits the course
Every chapter’s IB notes name the parts of the course it serves. Across the atlas they add up to this:
- Paper 1 · Political and Economic Transitions · 1 CHAPTER
- Paper 2 · Innovation and Transformation · 12 CHAPTERS
- Paper 3 · The Americas, section 11.4 · 1 CHAPTER
- Paper 3 · Asia and Oceania, section 12.6 · 1 CHAPTER
- Paper 3 · Europe, section 13.5 · 1 CHAPTER
- Paper 3 · Europe, section 13.7 · 1 CHAPTER
- Old course · World history topic 7: Origins, development and impact of industrialization (1750–2005) · 12 CHAPTERS
Chapter by chapter
The atlas holds 70 points of evidence and 30 primary sources across 12 chapters. Chapters 1 and 2 are free, so their evidence is shown here in full; for the others you get one point and the practice question, and the rest waits in the atlas. Each chapter title opens the chapter’s free page, with the full explanation.
1. Why Britain?
CHAPTER 1 · c. 1750 · CONCEPTS: CAUSATION, PERSPECTIVES, SIGNIFICANCE
EVIDENCE TO USE · ALL 6 POINTS (A FREE CHAPTER)
- In 1750, by Paul Bairoch’s estimates, China made about 33 per cent of the world’s manufactured goods and India about 25 per cent, while Britain made under 2 per cent, so Britain’s later lead cannot be explained by an early manufacturing advantage.
- Robert Allen calculates that a spinning jenny earned a return of about 38 per cent a year in England but only 2.5 per cent in France, because English wages were high, which explains why the machine spread in Lancashire first.
- By 1700 London already received more than 460,000 tons of coal a year by sea from the Tyne, showing that Britain had a cheap mineral fuel, and the transport to move it, long before the steam engine.
- Kenneth Pomeranz estimates that by about 1830 Britain’s imports of cotton, sugar and timber replaced the produce of 25 to 30 million acres, more than all its farmland, so colonies relieved Britain’s shortage of land.
- About 12.5 million Africans were embarked on slave ships across the Atlantic, and in the late eighteenth century British ships, above all from Liverpool, carried more of them than the ships of any other nation.
- David Eltis and Stanley Engerman found that West Indian sugar added about £5.4 million to the British economy in 1805, against £10.5 million for cotton textiles, which suggests slavery’s direct profits were smaller than its indirect effects.
2. Cotton and the Factory
CHAPTER 2 · 1760–1830 · CONCEPTS: CHANGE, CONSEQUENCE, PERSPECTIVES
EVIDENCE TO USE · ALL 6 POINTS (A FREE CHAPTER)
- Richard Arkwright’s mill at Cromford, opened in 1771, combined water-powered spinning frames, shift work and company housing, creating a model of the factory system that was copied across Derbyshire, Lancashire and Scotland within twenty years.
- According to figures used by Robert Allen, spinning 100 pounds of cotton took an Indian hand spinner about 50,000 hours, Crompton’s mule about 2,000 and the self-acting mule of the 1820s only about 135.
- Britain’s imports of raw cotton rose from about 2.5 million pounds in 1760 to about 264 million pounds in 1830, and by the late 1820s more than 70 per cent came from the slave plantations of the United States.
- The factory returns of 1835 found that people under eighteen made up about 43 per cent of the workforce in the cotton mills surveyed, showing how heavily early mills relied on young workers.
- Liverpool ships carried between 1.3 and 1.5 million enslaved Africans across the Atlantic before 1807, and the same port then imported the slave-grown cotton that supplied Manchester’s mills.
- By 1830 cotton goods made up about half of all British domestic exports, which made cotton the leading sector of Britain’s first industrial economy and its largest employer of factory labour.
3. Steam, Coal and Iron
CHAPTER 3 · 1769–1830 · CONCEPTS: CAUSATION, CHANGE, SIGNIFICANCE
EVIDENCE TO USE · 1 OF 5
- James Watt’s separate condenser, conceived in 1765 and patented in 1769, let a steam engine use about a quarter of the coal of a Newcomen engine, which made steam power economic away from the coalfields.
Practice question: Examine the reasons for the development and spread of steam power in Britain between 1769 and 1830.
4 more points of evidence, 3 primary sources and the model plan for this question are in the IB notes of chapter 3 in the atlas.
4. The Railway Age
CHAPTER 4 · 1825–1850 · CONCEPTS: CHANGE, CONSEQUENCE, SIGNIFICANCE
EVIDENCE TO USE · 1 OF 5
- The Liverpool and Manchester Railway, opened on 15 September 1830 after the Rainhill trials of 1829, was the first inter-city line worked entirely by steam locomotives to a timetable.
Practice question: To what extent did railways transform society in Britain between 1830 and 1850?
4 more points of evidence, 2 primary sources and the model plan for this question are in the IB notes of chapter 4 in the atlas.
5. Industrial Society
CHAPTER 5 · 1800–1850 · CONCEPTS: CONSEQUENCE, PERSPECTIVES, CHANGE
EVIDENCE TO USE · 1 OF 6
- The 1851 census found that just over half the population of England and Wales, about 9.2 million of 17.9 million people, lived in towns, making Britain the first predominantly urban society.
Practice question: Discuss the impact of industrialisation on living and working conditions in Britain between 1800 and 1850.
5 more points of evidence, 3 primary sources and the model plan for this question are in the IB notes of chapter 5 in the atlas.
6. Resistance
CHAPTER 6 · 1811–1848 · CONCEPTS: CAUSATION, PERSPECTIVES, CONSEQUENCE
EVIDENCE TO USE · 1 OF 6
- The Luddite rising began at Arnold near Nottingham on 11 March 1811, when framework knitters broke about sixty stocking frames, targeting employers who paid low rates while sparing others.
Practice question: Evaluate the reasons why industrial innovations met resistance in Britain between 1811 and 1848.
5 more points of evidence, 3 primary sources and the model plan for this question are in the IB notes of chapter 6 in the atlas.
7. The Continent Follows
CHAPTER 7 · 1815–1870 · CONCEPTS: CHANGE, CAUSATION, CONTINUITY
EVIDENCE TO USE · 1 OF 6
- John Cockerill, son of a Lancashire mechanic, founded a machine works and ironworks at Seraing near Liège in 1817, which became one of the largest industrial plants in the world and a school for continental engineers.
Practice question: Compare and contrast the role of the state in the industrialisation of Belgium and the German states before 1870.
5 more points of evidence, 2 primary sources and the model plan for this question are in the IB notes of chapter 7 in the atlas.
8. The Second Industrial Revolution
CHAPTER 8 · 1870–1914 · CONCEPTS: CAUSATION, CHANGE, SIGNIFICANCE
EVIDENCE TO USE · 1 OF 6
- In 1878–79 the cousins Sidney Gilchrist Thomas and Percy Gilchrist, testing at Blaenavon and proving at Middlesbrough, found a way to make steel from phosphoric ore, which turned Lorraine’s minette ores into Europe’s largest iron-ore field.
Practice question: To what extent did science-based innovation explain Germany’s industrial rise after 1870?
5 more points of evidence, 2 primary sources and the model plan for this question are in the IB notes of chapter 8 in the atlas.
9. America Industrialises
CHAPTER 9 · 1865–1914 · CONCEPTS: CHANGE, CONSEQUENCE, PERSPECTIVES
EVIDENCE TO USE · 1 OF 6
- The first transcontinental railroad was completed at Promontory Summit, Utah, on 10 May 1869; Chinese workers made up about 90 per cent of the Central Pacific’s workforce in 1867.
Practice question: Evaluate the impact of industrialisation on workers in the United States between 1865 and 1914.
5 more points of evidence, 3 primary sources and the model plan for this question are in the IB notes of chapter 9 in the atlas.
10. Japan: Industrialisation from Above
CHAPTER 10 · 1868–1914 · CONCEPTS: CHANGE, CAUSATION, PERSPECTIVES
EVIDENCE TO USE · 1 OF 6
- The Harris Treaty of 1858 opened Japanese ports including Yokohama, fixed Japan’s import tariffs at low rates (about 5 per cent from 1866) and gave foreigners their own courts until 1899.
Practice question: Compare and contrast the role of the state in the industrialisation of Japan and Britain before 1914.
5 more points of evidence, 3 primary sources and the model plan for this question are in the IB notes of chapter 10 in the atlas.
11. A Global Transformation
CHAPTER 11 · 1850–1914 · CONCEPTS: CONSEQUENCE, PERSPECTIVES, SIGNIFICANCE
EVIDENCE TO USE · 1 OF 6
- The Suez Canal, opened on 17 November 1869, cut the sea route from London to Bombay from about 10,700 to 6,300 nautical miles, a saving of about 41 per cent.
Practice question: Discuss the view that industrialisation in Britain caused the economic decline of India in the nineteenth century.
5 more points of evidence, 3 primary sources and the model plan for this question are in the IB notes of chapter 11 in the atlas.
12. Who Won and Who Lost
EPILOGUE · 1750–1914 · CONCEPTS: CONSEQUENCE, PERSPECTIVES, SIGNIFICANCE
EVIDENCE TO USE · 1 OF 6
- By Paul Bairoch’s estimates, Europe and the United States made about 23 per cent of the world’s manufactured goods in 1750 and about 85 per cent in 1900, while China’s share fell from about 33 to about 6 per cent.
Practice question: With reference to two countries from different regions, evaluate who benefited most from industrialisation before 1914.
5 more points of evidence, 2 primary sources and the model plan for this question are in the IB notes of chapter 12 in the atlas.
Practice questions and essay plans
Every chapter ends with a practice question and a model plan: a thesis, three points with evidence and a link back to the question, a counter-argument and a judgement. The plan for chapter 1 is shown in full; for the others, here is the outline, and the rest is in the atlas.
PAPER 2 · THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION · CHAPTER 1
To what extent were economic factors the main reason why industrialisation began in Britain?
Economic factors were the most important reason, because high wages and cheap coal made labour-saving machines profitable in Britain before anywhere else. They worked in combination with an Atlantic economy built on enslaved labour and with a culture of practical science, so economics explains the incentive to invent, while empire and knowledge explain the scale and speed of the response.
Relative prices made British invention pay.
EVIDENCEAllen shows London wages roughly twice those of Vienna or Beijing and coal near Newcastle the cheapest energy anywhere; a jenny returned about 38 per cent a year in England and 2.5 per cent in France.
LINKThis answers why innovations emerged in Britain first: inventors followed the returns, and the returns were highest there.
Coal removed the land ceiling of the organic economy.
EVIDENCEBritain mined about 5 million tons of coal in 1750 and 15 million by 1800, and Wrigley shows that its coal supplied energy equal to the yearly growth of millions of acres of woodland.
LINKWithout coal, high wages would have produced a rich trading economy like the Dutch Republic’s, so geology turned the incentive into lasting growth.
Knowledge and institutions shaped the response.
EVIDENCEMokyr’s Industrial Enlightenment, the Lunar Society’s mixture of science and business, and the Calico Acts of 1700 and 1721, which protected a home market for imitations of Indian cloth.
LINKIdeas and laws decided whether the economic incentives were acted upon, which qualifies a purely economic answer.
Historians who stress empire argue that the Atlantic slave economy mattered as much as prices. Williams and Inikori see slave-grown sugar and cotton, Atlantic markets and Liverpool’s capital as central, and Pomeranz treats colonies as one of the two windfalls that separated England from the Yangzi delta.
Economic factors were the main reason in the sense that prices created the incentive to invent, but the strongest explanation is cumulative. Coal, wages, empire and knowledge reinforced one another, and removing any one of them would have slowed Britain’s lead considerably.
Read the chapter behind this plan: Why Britain?.
PAPER 2 · THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION · CHAPTER 3
Examine the reasons for the development and spread of steam power in Britain between 1769 and 1830.
Steam power developed because an existing coal industry needed to pump deep mines and because Watt’s condenser made engines efficient enough for places where coal was dear. It spread slowly, however, since water power remained cheaper for many mills until about 1830, so demand from mining and urban industry, more than the invention alone, governed its diffusion.
Coal mining created the first demand.
Watt’s improvement and Boulton’s business made engines viable elsewhere.
Urban industry drove the later spread.
The evidence for each point, the counter-argument and the judgement are in the IB notes of chapter 3 in the atlas. Read the chapter first: Steam, Coal and Iron.
PAPER 2 · THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION · CHAPTER 12
With reference to two countries from different regions, evaluate who benefited most from industrialisation before 1914.
In both Britain and Japan the owners of capital and the state benefited most, while the gains for workers came later and less evenly. Britain’s workers shared in rising real wages after 1850, whereas Japan’s mill girls and colonised Koreans bore heavy costs before 1914, so the distribution of benefits depended on timing and political power.
Capital owners gained most in both countries.
British workers gained after 1850.
Japanese workers and colonised peoples paid heavily.
The evidence for each point, the counter-argument and the judgement are in the IB notes of chapter 12 in the atlas. Read the chapter first: Who Won and Who Lost.
PAPER 2 · THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION · CHAPTER 4
To what extent did railways transform society in Britain between 1830 and 1850?
Railways transformed British society to a great extent by 1850, creating a national market, national time, new towns and a mass public of travellers and investors. Their economic effect, measured in cheaper freight alone, was more modest, so the transformation was as much social and cultural as economic.
Railways created a national market.
Railways changed time and travel.
Railways drew the middle classes into a capital market.
The evidence for each point, the counter-argument and the judgement are in the IB notes of chapter 4 in the atlas. Read the chapter first: The Railway Age.
Primary sources
Each chapter’s IB notes carry primary sources with their origin and the context you need before reading them. The sources of chapter 1 are shown in full here.
TEXT · CHAPTER 1
The Wealth of Nations, Book I, chapter 1, “Of the Division of Labour”
- CREATOR
- Adam Smith
- DATE
- 9 March 1776
- ORIGIN
- An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1776)
Context. Smith, a Scottish moral philosopher, argued that splitting work into simple repeated tasks raised output. Here he claims that the same division of labour produced many of the machines that mechanised industry, an early version of the idea that workers’ tinkering drove invention.
Public domain (author d. 1790). Text: Project Gutenberg eBook #3300 · original ↗
TEXT · CHAPTER 1
The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, volume I, chapter 2
- CREATOR
- Olaudah Equiano
- DATE
- 1789
- ORIGIN
- London: printed for and sold by the author, 1789
Context. Equiano, kidnapped as a child in West Africa and later freed, describes the hold of a slave ship on the Middle Passage, the Atlantic crossing. His book became a key text of the British campaign against the slave trade, and it records the human cost of the Atlantic economy that supplied Britain’s raw materials and markets.
Public domain (author d. 1797). Text: Project Gutenberg eBook #15399 · original ↗
Every other source in the atlas (28)
- Chapter 2: Cotton and the Factory
- The Philosophy of Manufactures, Book I, chapter 1 Andrew Ure · 1835
- History of the Cotton Manufacture in Great Britain, Preface Edward Baines (junior) · 1835
- Chapter 3: Steam, Coal and Iron
- Specification of James Watt’s patent No. 913, “A new invented method of lessening the consumption of steam and fuel in fire engines” James Watt · Patent granted 5 January 1769; specification enrolled 29 April 1769
- Letter from Matthew Boulton to James Watt Matthew Boulton · 7 February 1769
- “Tour to Shropshire”, Annals of Agriculture, vol. IV Arthur Young · Published 1785; the visit is usually dated 1776
- Chapter 4: The Railway Age
- Letter from Liverpool, 26 August 1830, in Record of a Girlhood, vol. II Frances Anne (Fanny) Kemble · Letter 26 August 1830; published 1878
- Dombey and Son, chapter 6 Charles Dickens · Monthly part, November 1846; book edition 1848
- Chapter 5: Industrial Society
- Speech in the House of Commons on the employment of women and children in mines and collieries Lord Ashley (later the 7th Earl of Shaftesbury) · 7 June 1842
- The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, “The Great Towns” Friedrich Engels · German original 1845; English translation 1887
- Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain, “Recapitulation of the conclusions” Edwin Chadwick, for the Poor Law Commissioners · July 1842
- Chapter 6: Resistance
- “Ned Lud’s Proclamation” Anonymous Luddites in Nottingham, writing as “Ned Lud” · 23 December 1811
- Passages in the Life of a Radical, on 16 August 1819 Samuel Bamford · First published 1844
- The People’s Charter London Working Men’s Association (drafted chiefly by William Lovett) · 8 May 1838
- Chapter 7: The Continent Follows
- The National System of Political Economy, Book IV, chapter 33 Friedrich List · German original 1841; English translation 1885
- “The Silesian Weavers” Heinrich Heine · German original 10 July 1844; English translation 1884
- Chapter 8: The Second Industrial Revolution
- “Made in Germany”, chapter 1 Ernest Edwin Williams · 1896
- “Wealth” Andrew Carnegie · June 1889
- Chapter 9: America Industrialises
- Speech in the US Senate on the Lecompton Constitution (“Cotton is King”) James Henry Hammond, Senator for South Carolina · 4 March 1858
- Proclamation of the Lowell mill women, “Union is Power” The striking women workers of the Lowell mills · 15 February 1834
- An Act to execute certain treaty stipulations relating to Chinese (the Chinese Exclusion Act) 47th United States Congress · 6 May 1882
- Chapter 10: Japan: Industrialisation from Above
- Letter of the President of the United States to the Emperor of Japan Millard Fillmore · Dated 13 November 1852; delivered by Commodore Perry on 14 July 1853
- The Charter Oath (Oath of Five Articles) Emperor Meiji · 6 April 1868
- A Handbook for Travellers in Japan (7th edition), on the Ashio copper mines Basil Hall Chamberlain and W. B. Mason · 1903
- Chapter 11: A Global Transformation
- The History of British India from 1805 to 1835, Book I, chapter 8, footnote on the cotton trade of 1813 Horace Hayman Wilson · Edition of 1858 (the continuation first appeared in 1845–48)
- Poverty and Un-British Rule in India Dadabhai Naoroji · 1901, collecting papers from 1876 onward
- Report of the British Consul at Boma on the administration of the Congo Free State Roger Casement · Dated 11 December 1903; presented to Parliament in February 1904
- Chapter 12: Who Won and Who Lost
- Labour and Life of the People, vol. II, “Statistics of Poverty” Charles Booth · 1891
- “On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the Temperature of the Ground” Svante Arrhenius · April 1896
Internal Assessment starting points
Each starting point is an idea for an investigation: a question, the concept it tests, the kinds of sources you could use and where they are held, and one caution. The investigation must be your own work, and your teacher approves the question.
How far did the Factory Act of 1833 change children’s working hours in one mill or district?
CONCEPTChange
SOURCESFactory inspectors’ reports, mill wage books and apprentice registers, the 1841 and 1851 census enumerators’ books, local newspapers.
CAUTIONInspectors recorded what they chose to see and mills could evade the Act, so compare inspectors’ claims with the mill’s own records.
Why did the Luddites of 1812 target particular mills in the West Riding?
CONCEPTCausation
SOURCESHome Office disturbance papers, the Leeds Mercury and other newspapers, York trial records of 1813, Luddite letters.
CAUTIONMuch of the evidence comes from magistrates and paid informers whose reports exaggerated conspiracy.
To what extent did the arrival of the railway change the economy of a named British town between 1840 and 1870?
CONCEPTConsequence
SOURCESTrade directories, census returns, railway company minutes and timetables, local newspapers, Ordnance Survey maps.
CAUTIONMany changes happened at the same time, so be careful not to credit the railway with everything that followed its arrival.
How did Lancashire cotton workers experience and respond to the cotton famine of 1861–65?
CONCEPTPerspectives
SOURCESRelief committee records, Hansard debates, local newspapers, John Watts’s Facts of the Cotton Famine (1866), workers’ letters and meetings.
CAUTIONThe popular story that Lancashire workers united behind the Union is debated; look for evidence on both sides.
How did young women experience work in Japan’s silk mills before 1914?
CONCEPTPerspectives
SOURCESThe government survey Shokkō jijō (1903) in translated excerpts, Tomioka mill records, the workers’ songs collected by historians, contemporary reports.
CAUTIONMost sources were written by officials or later historians, and translations shape meaning, so the workers’ own voices are scarce and must be read carefully.
To what extent did the Suez Canal change British trade with India between 1860 and 1890?
CONCEPTSignificance
SOURCESBoard of Trade statistics, Suez Canal Company annual reports, shipping registers, P&O company records.
CAUTIONSteamships, the telegraph and the cotton famine changed trade at the same time, so separating the canal’s effect needs careful comparison.
How did contemporaries in a named town explain the cholera epidemic of 1832 or 1849?
CONCEPTPerspectives
SOURCESLocal board of health reports, sermons, newspapers, medical pamphlets, burial registers.
CAUTIONAvoid judging past explanations by modern germ theory; ask why each explanation made sense to the people who held it.
Revision tools
The atlas ends with a map quiz that asks you to find places and moments on the map itself (part of membership and of the Exam Sprint). The quick quiz and the discussion questions with our answers are free pages on this site, and the printable study guide gathers every chapter’s notes into one document for revision.
Read next
- Meiji Japan’s remaking of the state · REMAKING THE STATE
- The political revolutions of the same age · THE AGE OF REVOLUTIONS
Maps of History is independent and is not affiliated with or endorsed by the International Baccalaureate Organization. IB course names describe alignment only; paper, theme and section names follow the new course outline and may change when the final guide is published.
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