10.1 The Industrial Revolution

Since the eighteenth century, industrialisation has been a major force in the modern world. It has driven large-scale economic changes that have shaped relations between industrialised countries (such as in Europe) and other countries – often colonies – that the wealthier countries came to depend on as sources of raw materials and as markets for manufactured goods.

Mechanisation, mass production and new forms of energy such as steam and electricity transformed the production of goods, the market economy based on those goods, the standard of living of many people, and the way of life of even more. They also affected everyday aspects of life such as transportation, the structure of the household, and the nature of men and women’s work. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, households were relatively self-sufficient.

A wide variety of goods was produced on farms and in rural households, and most items consumed by households were produced within their region and sold locally at regional markets. With industrialisation from the eighteenth century, production became specialised. Whole factories, cities, regions and countries came to produce limited ranges of goods, and to be dependent on their ability to market those goods over distances in exchange for other goods or money.

The capability to market and trade goods over long distances has evolved gradually since the late eighteenth century, with improvements in transportation such as canals and better roads in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, railways and steamships in the nineteenth century, and cars and aeroplanes in the twentieth century. The invention of refrigeration and the introduction of refrigerated ships in the late nineteenth century made possible the marketing of fresh and frozen food over distances previously unimaginable.

For a country like Australia, refrigerated ships could send frozen meat to Britain and elsewhere.

Long-distance transportation also led to bigger markets, and bigger markets encouraged large-scale production. Changes in the production and distribution of goods have meant that more goods have become available to more people around the world, creating an appearance of a homogeneous Westernised culture based on materialism and consumerism. But inequalities of wealth and power between nations have continued, and there has not been a blanket effect of cultural change.

Indigenous cultures around the world have absorbed Western material goods in different ways, and have adapted them to their own ends.

In the period from 1750 to 1918, industrialisation in Europe, America and elsewhere was driven by a combination of technological, economic and social factors. It had broad-ranging consequences for European economies, political and social structures, and the daily lives of Europeans. The drive for raw materials, new markets and cheap labour was a major factor in European global imperialism from the eighteenth century, and the expansion of the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The social consequences of industrialisation included the large-scale migration of peoples: slaves, indentured labourers, settlers and migrants. European colonies around the world felt the impacts of these changes throughout the period, and by the twentieth century industrialisation had taken off in East Asia.

The Industrial Revolution in Australia

By the second half of the nineteenth century, most Australian colonies had gained self-government and were free settler societies with growing economies based largely on wheat, sheep (for both wool and meat) and cattle, and mining for gold, copper and other ores. Cities grew with a rapidity that astonished observers. Colonial governments oversaw the building of roads, railways, ports, gas lighting, the postal system, the telegraph and other utilities. But it was not only infrastructure that was quickly built; Australian cities and towns also soon came to boast theatres, sports grounds, parks, libraries, museums and art galleries.

By 1901, the capitals of the Australian states had become flourishing cities, and Australia as a newly federated nation needed a national capital.

Federal parliamentarians carefully selected an inland site between the two rival cities Sydney and Melbourne.

In 1913, American architect Walter Burley Griffin and his wife Marion Mahoney Griffin won the international competition for Canberra’s design with a plan for a city centred on a lake, with separate governmental and civic sections, garden suburbs, parks and trees.

Canberra’s planning and construction would continue to be a national project for the rest of the twentieth century.