• What is industrialization?
• Characteristics of industrialization
• Causes of industrialization
• Consequences of industrialization
• Industrialization and imperialism
• Industrialization in Mexico

We explain what industrialization is, its characteristics, causes and consequences. Also, its relationship with imperialism.

Industrialization allows the rapid and massive production of goods.

What is industrialization?

Industrialization is the transition to societies industrialized, that is, the process of construction of a socioeconomic order that revolves around the industry, and therefore whose main economic activity is the transformation of raw Materials in products elaborated, adding value to them in the process.

Industrialization was a central phenomenon in the entry of the West to modernity at the hand of the Industrial Revolution and the capitalism, at the end of the 18th century and throughout the 19th. It originated in Great Britain, through the increasing mechanization of handicrafts, allowing the rapid and massive production of goods that were previously made manually.

This model was later exported to the United States and the rest of Europe, and finally to the rest of the world, which managed to make the leap towards industrialization in a particularly uneven way.

On the other hand, industrialization is today associated with economic (and therefore political) power, so that nations The so-called First World are also usually industrialized nations. On the other hand, agricultural companies or companies that subsist on the sale of raw materialThey are the ones that make up the so-called Third World, the little industrialized nations.

Characteristics of industrialization

Industrialization is characterized by the following:

• It consists of incorporating industrial activity into the core of the countries' economic activity.
• It emerged in Great Britain between the 18th and 19th centuries, with the Industrial Revolution.
• It was driven by the nascent capitalism and by the accumulation of wealth as a result of mercantilism and Imperialism.
• It transformed the production relations of the world, since it gave rise to the factory and the working class.
• It caused a rural exodus to the cities, and thus an enormous growth of the cities.
• It was part of the end of society feudal that gave rise to modern society.

Causes of industrialization

With capitalism, jobs not linked to agriculture were created.

There are many explanations for how previously agricultural or rural societies entered the industrial world. The main one had to do with the end of feudal system that ruled in Europe during the Middle Ages, which released large amounts of workforce peasant, who had to join a free labor market.

Thus, instead of harvesting the lands of the feudal lord, these people could offer to the bourgeoisie his work force and participate in the goods market of consumption.

In this way, the emergence of capitalism as a system and of the bourgeoisie as class The dominant reordered the productive forces of the world, creating jobs not linked to land tenure and agriculture, but to technological advances and the transformation of matter, that is, manufacturing. In this, mining and heavy industries, and the commercial boom that occurred at the time.

As soon as it became known that such manufacturing or manufacturing could be done faster and more massively using machines, the first step was taken towards an unstoppable modernization process. Thus, in little more than two centuries, the world changed in a much more radical way than the entire Middle Ages.

Finally, the societies that still struggle to industrialize today do so in the spirit of competing on a more equal ground with respect to the powers industrial planet, and therefore must do so while dealing with their own economies dependency.

Consequences of industrialization

The consequences of industrialization changed the world forever. The main of them were:

• It transformed the peasant workforce (peasantry) that supported production during the Middle Ages, into a working class (proletariat) that sold its workforce to the system in exchange for a salary.
• It promoted a huge rural exodus in the West that overpopulated the cities and made them grow enormously, transforming them into the new scene of power and modern life.
• Exhausted most resources minerals Y natural of Europe, laying the foundations for imperialism and colonialism.
• It laid the foundations for the expansion of capitalism in the world, definitively establishing the bourgeoisie as the new ruling class.
• He introduced the machine as a working tool in the popular imagination, which also brought with it its resistance.
• It allowed the increase in world production, thus inaugurating the future consumer society.
• It gave rise to the exploitation of numerous natural resources, especially those fossils (Coal, gas, Petroleum), given that the energy needs of industrial society never stopped growing.

Industrialization and imperialism

By depleting resources, industrialization laid the foundation for colonialism.

The construction of an industrial society, whose factories grew and needed to be constantly fed with raw materials, had the consequence of rapidly depleting Europe's resources, thus creating the need to reach out to those of the rest of the planet.

But trading under those conditions would have meant the political weakening of the industrial nations. Therefore, the way to get raw materials was through the military and political domination of other nations and cultures, through colonialism and imperialism.

Thus, the European empires that had already had periods of colonial expansion in America Y Asia, they proceeded to distribute Africa too. They approached in an aggressive and dominant manner on the less industrialized countries, in order to be able to trade with them on terms more convenient for Europe.

This stage is known as Imperialism, and although it began at the hands of the European colonial empires (Great Britain, France, Holland, Spain, Portugal and to a lesser extent Germany), the United States later joined them.

Imperialism inevitably led to the clash of interests between the colonial empires, which laid the groundwork for a set of conflicts, among them the First Y Second World wars in the 20th century. After the latter, the European empires collapsed and the United States became the imperial power of the world, in competition with the socialist bloc led by the USSR.

Industrialization in Mexico

The Mexican textile industry was born with the industrialization of 1940.

The Mexican economy, like that of many countries colonized by Spain on the American continent, was fundamentally rural until the middle of the 20th century. For this reason, many of their struggles and conflicts were due to land tenure and the ways of life of the peasantry.

All this changed significantly after 1940, with the coming to power of Manuel Ávila Camacho (1897-1955), a time of transition in addition to the military leadership to the civilian. Then an ambitious industrialization plan was created that had the favor of the United States, with whom Mexico had had countless border conflicts.

Thus, they proceeded to establish and increase basic industries, exploit the oil reserves of the territory and satisfy the steel demand of the allied countries in war. This meant, among other things, the electrification of the country and the expansion of the existing rail network, as well as the set of highways.

The main industries born at that time were of the type textile, food, steel, chemistry, paper, oil, cement and paper, as well as the energy industry. Despite the important changes that this brought to society and the Mexican economy, the volume of production from 1947 began to decline.

This decrease was due in part to the absence of raw materials, and in part to the pressures that industrialization put on the weight, since the demand imported machinery and resources not produced locally led to a devaluation and a sustained increase in inflation.