New Developments in Western Societies

Changes in the industrial economies of western Europe and the United States were not as decisive as those surrounding the advent of industrialization in Russia and Japan between the 1880s and the 1950s. To speak of a second industrial revolution in the West may be misleading, for it downplays the unique significance of the initial conversion from an agricultural to an industrial economy that had already occurred. Instead, a number of developments simply completed the basic revolution in countries like the United States and Germany. (Only Britain had fully converted to an industrial economy in any real sense before the 1880s.) It was only around 1900 that Germany became half urbanized (the marker Britain had achieved in 1850); the United States and France reached this crude measurement of extensive industrialization by 1920. Rapid growth of the industrial labor force through immigration ended in the United States only during the 1920s, and even then rural movement, including the great migration of African Americans from the South, continued to provide newcomers to the basic experience of factory work. Thus, the overlap between the essential industrial revolution and new trends surfacing in the early twentieth century was considerable.