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Industrial Revolution — English
The huge cultural shift in which manual labour was being replaced by mechanised processes. It started in England in the mid-1700s and spread to the (then) Northern Americas in the 1800s. By about 1850–1860 the (now) United States of America (despite of – and as a result of – the American Civil War), the United Kingdom and parts of Western Europe were all gripped in this massive conversion to industrialised manufacturing. The industrial revolution had irreversibly changed the world and the entire global ecosystem. It spelled the end of the age of a rural, localised, independent, subsistence and low-production commercial lifestyles and hand-made tools in the (now) developed countries, and the emergence of the reliance on non-renewable fossil fuels and machine-made goods in the largest economies of the developed world. The environment was seriously degraded by this dependence on coal, oil and gas to drive the machines in the centralised factories in the industrialised towns especially those that quickly grew into large cities. In the (now) developed countries, people moved from the rural areas to the cities to find employment in the factories. This changed the provision of services since all these newly urbanised people required religious, educational and medical services. And – unfortunately – the concerning environmental issues of air pollution, water pollution, waste management, infrastructure construction, and many more, were created. In order to secure the necessary raw materials for the manufacturing industry, the rural regions were also affected by increased mining, infrastructure, telecommunication networks, water provision to the cities, industrial pollution in water sources and in the atmosphere, acid rain, and many more. The developing countries were also affected since many of the raw materials and the labour for the industries were obtained from the (then) underdeveloped countries.
