From the workshop to the factory, by Diana García Fidago

1. FROM WORKSHOP TO FACTORY
First of all, the vast majority of the products before the Industrial Revolution were
made by skilled craftsmen who worked in small workshops using very simple tools.
However, in the Industrial Revolution, the people involved in the creation of goods
were non-skilled factory workers (which is why child labour existed) working in
large factories and they required the use of machinery to carry out all the processes.
On the one hand, in the preindustrial system all products were elaborated by hand,
so the main source of energy was that of human beings. On the other hand, the
industrial system involved goods created using machines and steam and coal as the
main sources of energy. Furthermore, the goods manufactured before the Industrial
Revolution were unique, due to the differences that making everything by hand
could cause, and a single person was in charge of creating the goods from start to
finish, whereas in the industrial system all the products were identical and each
person specialized in a particular task in the production process, that is to say,
division of labour. In the preindustrial system, the job was creative, given that the
craftsman could make decisions during the process of creation and, as I have
already mentioned, they had to make the product in question from start to finish.
Unlike in this system, in the industrial one the job was alienating, as employees
weren’t allowed to make decisions and many of them never actually got to see the
final result. Before the Industrial Revolution, only a few goods were produced in a
long period of time, thus causing the productivity to be quite low. On the contrary,
the industrial system was able to produce a large quantity of goods in a really short
time, hence the increase in productivity. Moreover, the preindustrial system
involved high manufacturing costs, therefore making prices higher, whilst in the
industrial system the manufacturing costs were lower and so the prices decreased,
making everything way more affordable. In spite of that, the wages before the
Industrial Revolution were slightly higher than those in the industrial system.
Regarding the areas in which the working places were located, workshops were
usually placed in rural areas, while factories were built in urban areas. Finally, the
main economic activity before the Industrial Revolution was agriculture and there
was a subsistence economy, but then, in the Industrial Revolution, industry and
services became the main activities and the economy was based on market economy
and capitalism.
Diana García Fidalgo, ESO 4C