Having said this, canals did bring about important changes. The ‘Canal Age’ employed technology such as aqueducts, locks and sluices that were all known and mostly imported from continental Europe, and should therefore be seen as an evolution of river transportation rather than a significant technological breakthrough. The latter being made up of a third naturally navigable river, a third improved rivers and a third canals. The continuation of river improvements during the eighteenth century, coupled with the construction of a canal network, gradually removed most of these impediments.īy 1724, as a result of improvement, around 1160 miles of English rivers were navigable and by the end of the eighteenth century there were around 2000 miles of navigable waterway. Apart from natural disruptions caused by flooding and drought, rivers were littered with man made obstacles such as fishermen’s nets, sluices and weirs and delays could be considerable. River barges, however, had their disadvantages. Transportation by water was between three and four times less expensive than transport by land before the development of the railways. Transportīefore the eighteenth century, rivers carried much of the inland cargo traffic in England, particularly for bulky or heavy goods. This would ultimately mean that the country would be able to support a population that largely did not produce food and cheaper cotton and other manufactured goods for all. However, what they did have was highly centralized management and control by those providing the capital.Īmong the first was Lombe’s silk-throwing mill on the river Derwent in Derbyshire in 1719 from the 1760s there was Boulton and Watt’s great Soho works on the edge of Birmingham from the 1770s Arkwright’s spinning-mills in Derbyshire, Lancashire and other counties. They might be powered by water or horse power, or they might not. The early manufacturing industries might contain modern machinery or they might not. This process reduced the need for large amounts of labour on the land and the intensification of enclosures in the second half of the eighteenth century not only increased rental incomes, it also forced people off common land, or off the land altogether to make way for sheep and created larger fields more suited to the new machinery than the old open field systems. It involved changes in improved animal husbandry, the introduction of root crops and early mechanization such as Jethro Tull’s seed drill. This process had begun in the previous century but continued in the first half of the eighteenth. When pre-industrialization began a few decades later it gave rise to British industry and a British working class but first came the ongoing Agricultural Revolution. One of the immediate and most important effects of the Act of Union in 1707 was the creation of a united free trade area managed from London.
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