← 🏛️ World history · usually met in Std 8-12
From the late 1700s, production moved from hand and home to machine and factory — and changed work, cities, class and the climate.
Steam power, coal, iron and mechanised textile production transformed Britain first and then much of Europe and North America. Output rose enormously. So did the number of people living in cities, working fixed hours to a machine's rhythm rather than daylight's, often in dangerous conditions and often as children, until labour movements and legislation changed it.
For India the same period ran the other way. Indian textiles had been exported worldwide; under colonial trade policy the subcontinent increasingly supplied raw cotton and bought back finished cloth. That reversal is central to the economic argument of the freedom movement, and it is why khadi and the spinning wheel became symbols rather than merely clothing.
Want to see it moving? Search YouTube for “The Industrial Revolution” ↗ — we send you to the search rather than to one video, because a link to one video eventually rots.
This entry was written for Star Student in our own words — it is a summary, not a source. Here is where the people who actually hold these facts keep them. Go and check.
Your own textbook ↗Balbharati publishes the textbooks free to read online. Your chapter is the thing to check first — an encyclopedia is a summary, and the syllabus is the syllabus.Last gone through: 1 October 2026 · How these entries are written
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