Inventors and Entrepreneurs
The industrial revolution has rapidly evolved throughout the past decades by new innovations appearing on the market which has positively affected the swift progress of the industrial revolution. During the 1730s, an English man called John Kays invented the flying shuttle, allowing cloth pieces to become woven much faster than the time it took originally. As a result, the textiles industry flourished from the quick production of cloth, enabling the goods to become in a higher demand, thus earning the entrepreneurs money. When there is an excessive supply of products, demand will arise. The flying shuttle permitted the swelling income for the entrepreneurs, which meant that they were wealthy from the money developed …show more content…
These people were exploited, by factory owners, in order to produce a higher supply of goods, which is expressed through David Key’s article ‘Revealed: Industrial Revolution was powered by child slaves’, when he quotes Professor Jane Humphries opinion on how child slavery was utilised since they are ‘cheap and malleable’. This demonstrates the exploitation of poor people, specifically children, as the factory owners capitalised on their naivety and manipulate them to perform unethical actions. Due to the low socio-economic condition, children were also desperate in seeking money to support themselves and their families. These factors enabled the steep influx of young employees looking for a job, which heavily influenced the progression of the industrial revolution, as it meant that more goods could become produced since there was a large pool of labours. By employing desperate low-income earners, factory owners benefited from this as they were able to produce a high volume of products with low cost of labours. Hence, the industrial revolution wouldn’t have prospered if a vast stream of poor people were not exploited, thus allowing the cost of managing a factory subside and a higher stock of goods to be …show more content…
An answer by Sowser on a Reddit forum states that the African American slave trade ‘was a source of finance’ and that ‘the plantations of the South and the Caribbean...produce raw materials...help fuel [industrial revolution]’. The African American slaves worked on the plantations situated in Southern America and the Caribbean and were compelled to harvest the raw materials to meet the soaring demand for goods like cotton and so forth. From this, the idea of the Triangular Trade proceeded to emerge as a way to exchange raw materials. Cotton is a popular example to display this idea of trading goods for additional profit and extra workers for functioning the plantations due to the accumulated demand for cotton. According to the information stated above, the African American slavery contributed to the discovery of new sources for crops which generated more profit due to the unfamiliarity of the sources. However, it also spawned the idea of brutally enslaving the Africans into operating strenuous tasks to trade for the unfamiliar raw materials found. If this whole concept of slavery didn’t exist, the unknown sources of raw materials that were unearthed would’ve been left alone, therefore halting the what progression the industrial revolution had so