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An industrial factory located in Ilmenau, Germany around 1860
Industrialisation (also spelled Industrialization) is a process of social and economic change whereby a human group is transformed from a pre-industrial society (an economy where the amount of capital accumulated per capita is low) into an industrial one (a fully developed capitalist economy). It is a part of a wider modernization process, where social and economic change is closely related with technological innovation, particularly with the development of large-scale energy and metallurgy production. Industrialization also introduces a form of philosophical change, where people obtain a different attitude towards the perception of nature.
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According to the original sector classification of Jean Fourastié, an economy consists of a "Primary sector" of commodity production (farming, livestock breeding, exploitation of mineral resources), a "secondary sector" of manufacturing and processing, and a "Tertiary Sector" of service industries. The industrialization process is historically based on the expansion of the secondary sector in an economy dominated by primary activities.
The first ever transformation to an industrial economy from an agrarian one was called the Industrial Revolution and this took place in the late 18th and early 19th centuries in a few countries of Western Europe and North America, beginning in Great Britain. This was the first industrialization in the world\'s history.
The Second Industrial Revolution describes a later, somewhat less dramatic change which came about in the late 19th century with the widespread availability of electric power, internal-combustion engines, and assembly lines to the already industrialized nations.
The lack of an industrial sector in a country is widely seen as a major handicap in improving a country\'s economy, and power, pushing many governments to encourage or enforce industrialization.
Most pre-industrial economies had standards of living not much above subsistence, meaning that the majority of the population were focused on producing their means of survival. For example, in medieval Europe, 80% of the labour force was employed in subsistence agriculture.
Some pre-industrial economies, such as Ancient Athens, have had trade and commerce as significant factors, enjoying wealth far beyond a sustenance standard of living. Famines were frequent in most pre-industrial societies, although some, such as the Netherlands and England of the 17th and 18th centuries, the Italian city states of the 15th century and the ancient Greek and Roman civilizations were able to escape the famine cycle through increasing trade and commercialization of the agricultural sector. It is estimated that during the 17th century Netherlands imported nearly 70% of its grain supply and in the 5th century BC Athens imported 75% of its total food supply.
Industrialization through innovation in manufacturing processes first started with the Industrial Revolution in the northwest and midlands of England, around the 18th century.The Origins of the Industrial Revolution in England It spread first to Europe and North America during the 18th and 19th centuries, and it later spread to the rest of the world.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, Great Britain experienced a massive increase in agricultural productivity known as the British Agricultural Revolution, which enabled an unprecedented population growth, freeing up a significant percentage of the workforce from farming, and helping to drive the Industrial Revolution.
The new manpower couldn\'t dedicate to agriculture due to the lack of land; besides, this was not needed either because the higher productivity mechanized farming granted allowed a single peasant to feed a bigger number of otherwise employed workers. On the other hand, new agriculture techniques increased the demand for machines and other hardware, traditionally provided by the urban artisans. Artisans, collectively called bourgeoisie, employed rural exodus\' workers to increase their output and meet the country\'s needs. The growth of their business coupled with the lack of experience of the new workers pushed to a rationalization and standardization of the duties the in workshops, thus leading to a division of work, that is, a primitive form of Fordism. The process of creating a good was divided into simple tasks, each one of them being gradually mechanized in order to boost the productivity, therefore the income. The accumulation of capital allowed investments in the conception and application of new technologies, enabling the industrialization process to self-sustain.
The mechanization of production spread to the countries surrounding England in western and northern Europe and to British settling colonies, making those areas the wealthiest since, and shaping what is now know as the Western world.
Incidentally, the possession of exploitation colonies eased the accumulation of capital to the countries that possessed them, speeding up their development. The consequence was that the subject country integrated a bigger economic system in a subaltern position, emulating the countryside who demands manufactured goods and offers raw materials, while the metropole stressed its urban posture, providing goods and importing food. A classical example of this mechanism is the triangular trade, who involved England, southern United States and western Africa. This polarity still affects the world, and deeply retarded the industrialization of what is now known as the Third world.
Some have stressed the importance of natural or financial resources that Britain received from its many overseas colonies or that profits from the British slave trade between Africa and the Caribbean helped fuel industrial investment. It has been pointed out, however, that slave trade and the West Indian plantations provided less than 5% of the British national income during the years of the Industrial Revolution.Was slavery the engine of economic growth?
After the Convention of Kanagawa, which was issued by Commodore Matthew C. Perry, had forced Japan to open the ports of Shimoda and Hakodate to American trade, the Japanese government realized that drastic reforms were necessary in order to stave off Western influence. The Tokugawa shogunate abolished the feudal system. The government instituted military reforms to modernize the Japanese army and also constructed the base for industrialization. The government vigorously promoted technological and industrial development which eventually brought Japan to become a powerful modern country.
In a similar way, Russia suffered during the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War. The Soviet Union\'s centrally controlled economy decided to invest a big part of its resources to enhance its industrial production and infrastructures in order to assure its own survival, thus becoming a world superpower.
The other European communist countries followed the same developing scheme, albeit with a less emphasis on heavy industry.
Southern European countries saw a moderate industrialization during the 1850s-1870s, caused by a healthy integration of the European economy, though their level of development, as well as those of eastern countries, doesn\'t match the western standards.[citation needed]
A totally different pattern of industrialization followed in East Asia, where there was an acceleration in industrialization. In the 1960s, a network of small privately-owned factories spread across four small countries known as the Asian tigers, focusing their activities on the exportation of low value added goods to rich countries.[citation needed] This specialization, allowed by the existence of stable governments and well structured societies, was favored by a low cost workforce, a favorable exchange rate, and low custom duties. Because of the success of those initial policies, the Asian tigers have recently been trying to step forward in this stage and diversify their economies.
This starting model was afterwards successfully copied in all eastern and Southern Asian countries, including communist ones.[citation needed] The success of this phenomenon has led to a huge wave of offshoring, that is, western factories or tertiary corporations choosing to move their activities to poor countries where the workforce is less expensive and less collectively organized.
China and India, while roughly following this development pattern, were forced to adopt, because of their weight specific policies. China\'s government is actively investing in expanding its own infrastructures and securing the required energy and raw materials supply channels, is supporting its exports by financing the United States balance payment deficit through the purchase of U.S. treasury bonds, and is strengthening its military in order to endorse a major geopolitical role.[citation needed]
India\'s government is investing in specific vanguard economic sectors such as bioengineering, nuclear technology, pharmaceutics, informatics, and technologically-oriented higher education, openly overpassing its needs, with the goal of creating several specialization poles able to conquer foreign markets.[citation needed]
Both China and India has also started to make huge investments in third countries, making them active actors of today\'s world economy.
A similar state-led developing program was pursued in virtually all the third world countries during the Cold War, including the socialist ones, but especially in Sub-Saharan Africa after the decolonization period.[citation needed] The primary scope of those projects was to achieve self-sufficiency through the local production of previously imported goods, the mechanization of agriculture and the spread of education and health care. However, all those experiences failed bitterly due to lack of realism: most countries didn\'t have a pre-industrial bourgeoisie able to carry on a capitalistic development or even a stable and peaceful state. Those aborted experiences left huge debts toward western countries and fueled public corruption.
Oil-rich countries saw similar failures in their economic choices. Because oil is both important and expensive, regions that had big reserves of oil had huge liquidity incomes. However, this was rarely followed by economic development. Experience shows that local elites were unable to re-invest the petrodollars obtained through oil export, and currency is wasted in luxury goods.[citation needed] This is particularly evident in the Persian Gulf states, where the per capita income is comparable to those of western nations, but where no industrialization has started. Apart from two little countries (Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates), Arab states have not diversified their economies, and no replacement for the upcoming end of oil reserves is envisaged.[citation needed]
In recent years, countries like Mexico, Brazil, and Turkey have experienced moderate industrial growth, fueled by exportations going to countries that have bigger economies: the United States, China, and the European Union, respectively.[citation needed] They are sometimes called newly-industrialized countries. Most African and Latin American nations seem to follow a similar scheme.[citation needed] Despite this trend being artificially influenced by the oil price increases since 2003, the phenomenon is not entirely new nor totally speculative (for instance see: Maquiladora). Most analysts conclude in the next few decades the whole world will experience industrialization, and international inequality will be replaced with social inequality.[citation needed]
Industrialisation has spawned its own health problems. Modern stressors include noise, air, water pollution, poor nutrition, dangerous machinery, impersonal work, isolation, poverty, homelessness, and substance abuse. Health problems in industrial nations are as much caused by economic, social, political, and cultural factors as by pathogens. Industrialisation has become a major medical issue world wide.
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All or part of this article may be confusing or unclear. Please help clarify the article. Suggestions may be on the talk page. (March 2008) |
GDP composition of sector and labor force by occupation. The green, red, and blue components of the colors of the countries represent the percentages for the agriculture, industry, and services sectors, respectively.
In 2005, the USA was the largest producer of industrial output followed by Japan and China, according to International Monetary Fund.[citation needed]
Currently the "international development community" (World Bank, OECD, many United Nations departments, and some other organizations)[citation needed] endorses development policies based on merely poverty reduction, and giving poor populations access to basic services like water purification or primary education.[citation needed] The community does not recognize traditional industrialization policies as being adecuated to the Third world or beneficial in the longer term, with the perception that it could only create inefficient local industries unable to compete in a free-trade dominated world.
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