IB MYP Individuals and Societies – Industrialization and Technological Developments Study Guide

This study guide is for IB MYP Individuals and Societies and follows the International Baccalaureate Organization, Middle Years Programme Subject Brief – Individuals and societies, from 2014. It teaches industrialization and technological developments, the last topic in the brief’s list of topics explored in the individuals and societies on-screen examinations, and it suits MYP years 4 and 5. MYP has no SL/HL split, so everything here applies to every student, and the page is written with the on-screen examinations at the end of MYP year 5 in mind.

MYP has no prescribed content list – schools design their own units. This page covers a topic the IB’s brief lists, using standard history, geography and economics, and it also trains the planning skill that criterion B (Investigating) names. Your teacher will share the task-specific clarifications.

Use it with the industrialization revision notes and the industrialization practice questions. For the course as a whole, see the MYP Individuals and Societies hub and the printable checklist.

What this unit covers

Area	What you must be able to do	Criterion it mainly trains
The Industrial Revolution in Britain	Explain why it began in Britain; date and describe the key inventions	A
Later industrialisation	Compare how the USA, Germany, Japan, the USSR and East Asia industrialised	A and D
Impacts on work	Explain the change from domestic work to factories, and the reforms that followed	A and D
Impacts on cities	Link industry to urbanisation, housing and public health	A and B
Impacts on the environment	Explain pollution and emissions, and responses to them	A and D
Technology today	Explain automation, digital technology and the shift to services	A, C and D
Investigation planning	Write a research question, justify it and plan an investigation	B

The brief names four equally weighted criteria – A Knowing and understanding, B Investigating, C Communicating, D Thinking critically – each with eight achievement levels (1–8) in four bands. Its Investigating task (26 marks, criteria A and B) asks you to evaluate an investigation and plan your own. This unit gives you a topic to practise that on.

Key terms and concepts

• Industrialisation: the change from an economy based on farming and hand production to one based on machines, factories and mass production.
• Urbanisation: the increase in the share of a population living in towns and cities.
• Mechanisation: using machines to do work once done by hand or by animals.
• Deindustrialisation: the long-term fall in manufacturing jobs and output in a place.
• Employment sectors: primary (farming, mining), secondary (manufacturing), tertiary (services) and quaternary (research and information).

The brief gives change, global interactions, time, place and space and systems as key concepts, and causality, globalization, culture and sustainability as example related concepts. Industrialisation fits all of them: it is a change with causes, it spread through global interactions, and it raises questions of sustainability that are still open.

Why the Industrial Revolution began in Britain

Historians usually date the first Industrial Revolution to roughly 1760–1840, starting in Britain. Several factors worked together, so explain how they link rather than listing them.

• Resources: large coal and iron-ore deposits, often close together, plus fast rivers for water power.
• Agricultural change: enclosure and new farming methods raised food output, fed a growing population and released labour for towns.
• Capital: profits from trade, including the Atlantic trade in which enslaved Africans were forced to work on plantations, gave merchants money to invest. Banks helped them borrow.
• Markets and empire: colonies supplied raw cotton and bought manufactured goods.
• Transport: navigable rivers, a long coastline and, from the 1760s, canals.
• Political stability: no invasion, and a Parliament that protected property and patents.

Key inventions, with dates

Learn these accurately. A wrong date weakens a criterion A answer.

Date	Invention or development	Why it mattered
1709	Abraham Darby smelts iron with coke at Coalbrookdale	Cheaper iron, no longer limited by charcoal
1712	Thomas Newcomen’s steam engine	Pumped water out of mines
1733	John Kay’s flying shuttle	Faster weaving; more demand for yarn
1761	Bridgewater Canal opens	Halved the cost of coal in Manchester
c. 1764	James Hargreaves’s spinning jenny	One worker spun several threads at once
1769	Richard Arkwright’s water frame (patent)	Strong yarn from water-powered machines; Cromford Mill followed in 1771
1769	James Watt’s separate condenser (patent)	Much more efficient steam engine; partnership with Matthew Boulton from 1775
1779	Samuel Crompton’s spinning mule	Fine, strong yarn in large quantities
1785	Edmund Cartwright’s power loom	Mechanised weaving
1825	Stockton and Darlington Railway	First public railway to use steam locomotives
1830	Liverpool and Manchester Railway	First inter-city line run fully by steam; Stephenson’s Rocket won the Rainhill trials in 1829

Notice the pattern of challenge and response: faster weaving created demand for yarn, so spinning was mechanised, which then required faster weaving. Machines needed power, so water gave way to steam, which needed coal, which needed better transport. Using this chain shows causality, which scores better than a list.

Later industrialisation

A second industrial revolution, from about 1870 to 1914, was driven by steel (the Bessemer process, 1856), electricity (Edison’s Pearl Street power station in New York, 1882), chemicals, the telephone (Bell’s patent, 1876) and the internal combustion engine (Karl Benz’s motor car, patented 1886). Henry Ford’s moving assembly line (1913) made the Model T cheap enough for mass ownership.

Country	When	How it differed from Britain
USA	Mainly after the Civil War (1861–1865)	Huge domestic market, immigrant labour, railways across the continent
Germany	Fast after unification in 1871	Led in steel, chemicals and electrical goods; strong technical education
Japan	After the Meiji Restoration (1868)	The state copied Western technology deliberately and built railways and factories
USSR	Five-Year Plans from 1928	State-planned heavy industry; forced collectivisation of farms, with great loss of life
South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong	From the 1960s	Export-led manufacturing; cheap labour at first, then high technology
China	Economic reforms from 1978	Special Economic Zones such as Shenzhen (1980) attracted foreign investment

The key comparison: later industrialisers could borrow technology and often relied on the state far more than Britain did, so they changed faster.

Impacts on work

Before industrialisation much textile work was domestic (the putting-out system): families spun and wove at home. Factories changed this.

• Work was set by the clock and the machine, often 12–14 hours a day, with fines for lateness.
• Women and children were employed widely because they were cheaper. Children crawled under machines to clean them.
• Skilled hand workers lost income. The Luddites (1811–1816) broke machines in protest.
• Workers organised. Trade unions grew, and the Chartists (1838–1848) demanded the vote for working men.

Reform came slowly. The Factory Act of 1833 banned children under nine from textile mills, limited hours for older children and appointed factory inspectors. The Mines Act of 1842 banned women and girls, and boys under ten, from working underground.

Impacts on cities

Industry pulled people from the countryside to towns near coal, water and railways. By the 1851 census, over half the population of England and Wales lived in towns.

Worked example: Harrowby (fictional data)

A fictional mill town, Harrowby, had 12,000 people in 1801, 39,000 in 1831 and 96,000 in 1861.

Change 1801–1831 = (39,000 − 12,000) ÷ 12,000 × 100 = 225%
Change 1831–1861 = (96,000 − 39,000) ÷ 39,000 × 100 = 146.2%
Change 1801–1861 = (96,000 − 12,000) ÷ 12,000 × 100 = 700%

The population grew eightfold in 60 years. The percentage growth was smaller after 1831, but the number of extra people was larger (57,000 against 27,000). Always say which measure you mean.

Growth this fast brought overcrowded back-to-back housing, shared privies and polluted water. Cholera struck British cities repeatedly. In 1854 John Snow traced a London outbreak to the Broad Street water pump, which helped show that cholera spread through water. The Public Health Act of 1848 let towns set up boards of health; later sewers and clean water supplies cut death rates.

Impacts on the environment

• Air: coal smoke caused smog. London’s Great Smog of December 1952 killed thousands and led to the Clean Air Act of 1956.
• Water and land: factory waste polluted rivers; mining left spoil heaps.
• Climate: burning fossil fuels releases carbon dioxide. Measurements at Mauna Loa in Hawaii since 1958 show carbon dioxide rising year after year. The Paris Agreement (2015) aims to hold warming well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels.

A strong criterion D answer notes that newly industrialising countries often argue they should be allowed to grow as richer countries once did. Set out both sides.

Technology today

• Automation and robotics replace routine tasks in factories and warehouses.
• Digital technology: ARPANET (1969) led to the internet; Tim Berners-Lee proposed the World Wide Web at CERN in 1989. Smartphones, cloud computing and artificial intelligence now change how people work, shop and learn.
• Shift to services: in most rich countries manufacturing jobs have fallen while service and knowledge jobs have grown.
• Global supply chains: goods are designed in one country, made from parts from many others and sold worldwide.
• The digital divide: access to fast internet and devices is unequal between and within countries.

Some writers call this a “fourth industrial revolution”. Whether it is truly new, or a continuation of earlier change, is a debatable question you can argue both ways.

Worked example: Norland’s employment (fictional data)

Year	Primary (%)	Secondary (%)	Tertiary (%)
1800	62	22	16
1900	18	46	36
2020	2	17	81

From 1800 to 1900 secondary employment rose by 24 percentage points as Norland industrialised. From 1900 to 2020 it fell by 29 percentage points (deindustrialisation), while tertiary employment rose by 45 points. Use “percentage points” for the difference between two percentages.

Planning an investigation (criterion B)

The brief says criterion B develops systematic research skills. For a plan, work through these steps.

1. Research question: focused, answerable and open. Weak: “What was the Industrial Revolution?” Better: “How far did the 1833 Factory Act improve conditions for child workers in textile mills?”
2. Justify it: why it matters and how it links to a concept, such as causality or change.
3. Method: primary sources (factory reports, census tables, letters) and secondary sources (historians, textbooks); data you will collect and how.
4. Action plan: steps with dates, so the work is manageable.
5. Recording and referencing: note every source in one consistent format.
6. Evaluation: judge the source range, what went well and what you would change.

For judging sources by origin, purpose, value and limitation, read source-evaluation exam preparation.

Common errors

• Dating the Industrial Revolution to a single year, or muddling Watt with the first steam engine (Newcomen’s came first).
• Listing causes without linking them.
• Treating all workers as equally affected: skilled hand workers, children and factory owners had very different experiences.
• Calling a change from 22% to 46% a “24% increase”. It is 24 percentage points.
• Writing a research question that is too broad or cannot be answered with sources you can reach.

Next steps

Test yourself with the revision notes and practice questions. For the criteria, read the four criteria in practice, the MYP Individuals and Societies subject guide and the disciplines in MYP Individuals and Societies. Related units: settlement and urban morphology and demographics and human movements.

Official syllabus

This page is aligned to the International Baccalaureate Organization, Middle Years Programme Subject Brief – Individuals and societies, from 2014. The brief lists “industrialization and technological developments” among the topics explored in the individuals and societies on-screen examinations. The full MYP individuals and societies guide is available to schools through the IB.