125 Social Change
25.6: Social Change
25.6.1: The Factory System
The factory system, fueled by technological progress, made production much faster, cheaper, and more uniform, but also disconnected the workers from the means of production and placed them under the control of powerful industrialists.
Learning Objective
Describe the factory system and how it functioned
Key Points
- One of the earliest factories was John Lombe’s water-powered silk mill at Derby, operational by 1721. By 1746, an integrated brass mill was working at Warmley near Bristol. Matthew Boulton at his Soho Manufactory, which started operating in 1766, was among the pioneers of mass production on the assembly line principle, while Josiah Wedgwood in Staffordshire opened the first true ceramics factory in 1769.
- The factory system began to grow rapidly when cotton spinning was mechanized. Richard Arkwright, the founder of the first successful cotton spinning factory in the world, is credited with inventing the prototype of the modern factory. Other industrialists and industries followed, introducing novel practices that advanced the factory system, including mass production using interchangeable parts or modern materials such as cranes and rail tracks through the buildings for handling heavy items.
- The major characteristics of factory system are that is a capitalist form of production, where the labor does not own a significant share of the enterprise; the capitalist owners provide the means of production and are responsible for the sale; production relies on unskilled labor; products are produced on a much larger scale than in either the putting-out or crafts systems; the location of production is more flexible; precisely uniform components are produced thanks to machinery; workers are paid either daily wages or for piece work, either in the form of money or a combination of money, goods, and services.
- The factory system was a new way of organizing labor made necessary by the development of machines, which were too large to house in a worker’s cottage. Working hours were as long as they had been for the farmer: from dawn to dusk, six days per week. Factories also essentially reduced skilled and unskilled workers to replaceable commodities. Debate arose concerning the morality of the factory system, as workers complained about unfair working conditions.
- The transition to industrialization was not without difficulty. For example, a group of English textile workers known as Luddites protested against industrialization and sometimes sabotaged factories. They feared that the years workers spent learning a craft would go to waste and unskilled machine operators would rob them of their livelihood. However, in many industries the transition to factory production was not so divisive.
- One of the best-known accounts of factory worker’s living conditions during the Industrial Revolution is Friedrich Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844. Since then, the his