Urbanization - AP European History

Between 1750 and 1900, the nature of the family unit in European society changed dramatically. Far fewer people were staying in one community their whole lives, so they were removed from the constraints of social obligation. This led to more people having sex outside of marriage and led to a massive spike in the number of “illegitimate” children.

Georges-Eugene Haussmann is most widely remembered for the massive project of renovation that he undertook to reshape the urban layout of Paris. He was commissioned to do so by Napoleon III and set out a massive restructuring of Parisian avenues, public works, parks, and buildings. The modern city of Paris is still very much in his image.

Poor Laws had been common in British society since the fourteenth century and were generally designed to provide economic relief for the poorest members of British society; however, by the 1830s, the cost of maintaining Poor Laws had spiralled to the point where the elite of British society were no longer comfortable with them. The New Poor Laws were designed to dramatically reduce the cost of providing for the poor by making life in the workhouses so arduous that only the really desperate would seek aid. Unsurprisingly, they were met with widespread disdain.

The temperance movement spread around Britain in the nineteenth century as many religious leaders and middle-class women began to speak out against the evils of alcohol. Many women believed that alcohol was responsible for many of social ills such as the mistreatment of women, the idleness of some men, and the fact that so many young children were growing up on the streets or without a father. Despite early success of the temperance movement, prohibition movements never spread in Britain like they did in the United States.

Steam power was already being used in mining, heavy industry, and to power trains when in the 1830s innovators like Isambard Kingdom Brunel turned their attentions to powering ocean going ships. The Great Western Steamship Company was established and in 1838 made the first transatlantic steamship crossing from Bristol to New York. It is important to know that in the first half of the nineteenth century, Bristol was probably the biggest port city in England, but by the second half, it had been replaced by Liverpool and Manchester.

Manchester was a small, rural town in 1800 and a huge industrial metropolis by 1900. The largest cause of this growth was simply the Industrial Revolution, but more specifically, the urban area exploded in population first because of the technological advances in the cotton and textile industry that produced new factory jobs, advanced agricultural techniques that required less farm labor, the diversification of industry around the textile factories, and the ability to ship cotton and textiles all over the world. Remarkably for the time, Manchester grew despite not being on water that allowed it to be a port and was largely grown through railroads.

Louis Pasteur (1822-1895) is a renowned scientist famous for developing the germ theory of disease. Pasteur discovered that microorganisms could contaminate food and water, and that these contaminations could spread diseases to humans. This discovery was of particular importance to the process of urbanization, as many of the burgeoning cities of Pasteur's era had little infrastructure to deal with waste or food safety. Pasteur's ideas proved the need for the development of public health infrastructure to bring down the dizzying death rates of urban areas due to disease. Pasteur also developed many processes for dealing with microorganisms, such as some the earliest vaccines and the eponymous process of pasteurizing food and drink via heating, pasteurization.

Steel is simply iron without impurities, thus making it stronger and more useful in construction and heavy industry. By heating iron ore in a coal fire, the impurities can be removed. The realization of this fact contributed to the rise of heavy industry in the second half of the Industrial Revolution.

In the eighteenth century, some people began to realize that gas burned from coal could be used to power lights. As the technology was refined and improved in the second half of the eighteenth century, it was argued that it could be used to power street lamps in the big industrial centers of Britain. It was first widely used in London, beginning in the 1830s, and by the 1860s had spread all around Europe.

The process of curing rubber by mixing it with sulfur and heating it, called “vulcanization,” was developed in the 1830s by Charles Goodyear.

George Stephenson was an engineer and inventor who built the first railroad to connect two cities, the Liverpool-Manchester railroad. The railroad was completed in the 1830s and contributed to the growth of Manchester (in particular) and Liverpool as two of the industrial centers of the world.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, labor unions were furiously and energetically repressed and made illegal by the British government. The factory owners did not want the workers to be able to organize and demand better wages, and the government responded to the interests of the wealthy and powerful by making unions illegal. This trend changed over the course of the nineteenth century as reformers made the British population aware of the horrors of the factory system. By the twentieth century, strikes were legal and workers were keenly aware of their political power and their rights, at least collectively.

Jeremy Bentham is considered to be the founder of the philosophical tradition of utilitarianism. He was a philosopher of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who advocated for individual legal rights for all members of society. He also is often credited as being the earliest advocate for the welfare state. In the welfare state, the government takes care of the needs of those who cannot take care of themselves. This emerged first in Britain and France in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and is currently a feature of many European societies.

The Industrial Revolution began in England in the second half of the eighteenth century. It spread to the European continent to Belgium, the Netherlands, and France in the first two decades of the nineteenth century. By the middle of the nineteenth century, it had spread to Germany, Austria, Italy, and much of the rest of central Europe. It was not until the 1880s and 1890s that the Industrial Revolution really spread to Russia.

The cities of the early nineteenth century were extremely unsafe and unsanitary places to live. Too many people had arrived in too little time and the appropriate services had not been extended quickly enough to provide adequate relief to the multiplying masses. Sanitation and public health was appalling; sewage frequently ran through the streets and diseases like cholera were extremely common. There was too little housing, so people were forced to crowd together into slums, and there was little to no public transportation, meaning people had a very difficult time getting to work or wherever else they needed to go. Urban planners, inspired by Bentham and others, tried to tackle these issues by reforming the layout of cities. One problem they did not tackle, however, was insufficient nutrition. This was a problem to be remedied by increased agricultural production and by improvements to transportation (trains, canals, and later automobiles and refrigeration) that allowed more food to be delivered to the urban population.

The city of Manchester in the Northwest of England grew spectacularly during the Industrial Revolution. Much of this growth was caused by the construction of canals that connected Manchester directly to the ocean and to many other manufacturing centers in the country. This allowed Manchester to circumvent the city of Liverpool, causing widespread job loss in Liverpool and contributing to a rivalry that still exists to this day. Manchester became, for a time, the biggest industrial port in the world.

The process of curing rubber is called “vulcanization.” The purpose of vulcanization is to make rubber more durable and malleable, which allows it to be used for a wider variety of purposes. The technique of vulcanization, which involves the addition of sulfur, was developed in the nineteenth century by Charles Goodyear.

The nineteenth century in Britain witnessed the explosion of the Industrial Revolution, but it also witnessed the growth of a movement to reform political and social injustices exacerbated by the industrialization. The first successful attempt to regulate factory conditions was passed in 1819. It prohibited children younger than nine from working in factories and set a maximum twelve-hour work day for children aged between nine and sixteen.

In 1867 Alfred Nobel invented dynamite and in doing so revolutionized the nature and destructive capabilities of warfare. It was the first highly powerful explosive that could be safely contained and detonated when required. It allowed for rapid innovations in weaponry, particularly in artillery. Nobel is said to have been distraught at the realization of his invention and founded the Nobel Prize as a way to contribute some positive energy to the world.