Concepts and Terms

Industrial Revolution: the transformation in production methods beginning in Britain around 1750

Agricultural Revolution: agricultural changes that preceded and enabled industrialization

Enclosure movement: conversion of common lands into private fenced fields

Cottage industry: pre-industrial production in homes

Factory system: centralized production using powered machinery and wage labor

Mass production: production of standardized goods in large quantities, often using interchangeable parts and assembly lines

Urbanization: the growth of cities and movement of population from countryside to city

Bourgeoisie: the middle class, especially industrial capitalists who own the means of production

Proletariat: the urban working class who sell their labor for wages

Means of production: the factories, land, machinery, and capital used to produce goods

Class struggle: conflict between social classes, central to Marxist analysis

Surplus value: Marx's term for the difference between the value workers produce and what they are paid

Capitalism: economic system based on private ownership of the means of production and market competition

Laissez-faire: doctrine that government should leave the economy alone

Free market: an economy where prices and production are determined by supply and demand

Socialism: economic and political ideology advocating collective ownership of the means of production

Communism: Marxist version of socialism advocating revolutionary overthrow of capitalism and eventual classless society

Utopian socialism: early socialist movements that imagined ideal cooperative communities

Marxism: the body of theory developed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

Labor union: organization of workers who bargain collectively with employers

Collective bargaining: negotiation between employers and groups of workers

Strike: organized refusal to work as a labor-disputing tactic

Luddites: early nineteenth-century English workers who destroyed machinery

Suffrage: the right to vote

Factory Acts: British laws that regulated working conditions, hours, and child labor

Seneca Falls Convention: 1848 women's rights convention in the United States

Meiji Restoration: 1868 Japanese political revolution that launched rapid modernization

Sakoku: Tokugawa Japan's policy of national seclusion

Zaibatsu: Japanese family-owned industrial conglomerates

Bessemer process: steel-making process that enabled mass production of steel