2. Describe the social, economic, and environmental impact of the Industrial Revolution and make connections between the impact of the Industrial Revolution and the ideological and political responses?
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Social and Political Impact of the First Phase of the Industrial Revolution
From 1800 to 1850, the population of England and Wales doubled, from nine million to eighteen million. During the same period, the proportion of people living in cities rose from 10 percent to 50 percent. Put together, the population of the cities of England and Wales rose from about nine hundred thousand to nine million, a 1,000-percent increase, in fifty years.
The increase in population shocked people at the time. As early as 1798, the English economist Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) wrote an essay, "The Principles of Population," predicting widespread famine on the grounds that while population seemed to be proceeding at a geometrical rate (2, 4, 8, 16), food production was only growing at an arithmetical rate (2, 4, 6, 8). Malthus, and many others, feared that the population would rapidly outstrip England's ability to produce enough food to feed the millions of new people. Malthus blamed the lower classes for having too many children and proposed that laws be passed limiting the number of children people were allowed to have.
Although the catastrophe predicted by Malthus never occurred (partly because there was a huge increase in productivity in agriculture, partly because the rate of increase in population slowed), his opinions were widely accepted at the time, particularly his conclusion that poor people were to blame for the profound social changes that accompanied the Industrial Revolution. The jump in population cannot be attributed to industrialization, but industrialization certainly added to the impact of England's shift from a rural, agrarian society to an urban, industrial society as the nineteenth century unfolded