![]() Other Western European lands such as France, the Netherlands, and Germany also experienced an increase in urban populations, albeit, more slowly. By the middle of the nineteenth century, that proportion had risen to 50 percent. In 1800, about 20 percent of the British population lived in urban areas. Industrial cities like Manchester and Leeds grew dramatically over the course of a few short decades. Advances in industry and the growth of factory production accelerated the trend toward urbanization in Britain. Many left their agrarian lives behind and headed for towns and cities to find employment. The population increase added to the number of people facing difficulties making a living on the land. The enclosure movement, which converted commonly held grazing lands into fenced-off private property, added to the new pressures facing the poor, rural majority. Gradually, large-scale mechanized agriculture to serve the market began to overtake the kinds of subsistence farming most peasants had practiced for generations. The combination of these factors led to profound changes in how rural people lived. Among the first signs of economic transformation was an increase in agricultural productivity, making it possible to feed this rising population. During the 18th century, the population of Britain and other European countries began rising significantly. People rarely traveled far beyond their home village. In the British Isles and most of Europe at this time, most social activity took place in small and medium-sized villages. Most historians place the origin of the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain in the middle decades of the 18th century. The changes set in motion by industrialization ushered Europe, the United States of America, and much of the world into the modern era. The advent of industrial development revamped patterns of human settlement, labor, and family life. Before industrialization, when the most significant economic activities in most European countries were small-scale farming and artisan handicrafts, social structures remained essentially as they had been during the Middle Ages. It brought about thorough and lasting transformations, not just in business and economics but in the basic structures of society. The Industrial Revolution deserves the name with which historians have tagged it.
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