The industrial revolution began first of all in England ( in the middle of the 18th century ) where it developed in its clearest form . In the 19th century the industrial revolution spread to other capitalist countries . It was not a mere accident that the industrial revolution began precisely in England . Prerequisites for a rapid development of industry were being created there over a period of several centuries . The early abolition of serfdom and dispossession of the peasants of their land led to the appearance of a mass of free labour hands and development of capitalist methods of agriculture . Both stimulated the growth of the internal market . The colonial seizures gave England guaranteed foreign markets and served as the source of creation of enormous wealth . Lastly , the bourgeois revolution of the 17th century eliminated many survivals of feudalism . The industrial revolution began in the branch of industry where the guild restrictions were felt the least , i.e. , in the cotton industry . Feudal England , as feudal Europe in general , did not have this branch of industry for it lacked raw material . England received cotton only as the result of seizing colonies , particularly India . Cotton fabrics soon began successfully to compete with woollen and linen fabrics . They had a greater mass of consumers and , consequently , a more stable market . This stimulated the development of the cotton industry to such an extent that the manufactories could no longer satisfy the continuously growing demand . Any innovations fostering an increase in production of cotton fabrics brought enormous profits . The invention of machinery began in the spinning industry . A mechanical spinning wheel – spinning jenny – was invented in 1765 , the water frame was invented in 1767 , and the mule was invented in 1779. The appearance of these machines radically altered the technology of cotton – spinning . Spinning factories employing hundreds of workers came into existence in the 1770s . By 1780 England had 20 such facto ries and 10 years later 150 of them . The development of machine technology in cotton – spinning resulted in a lag in weaving . Attempts to invent weaving machines were made and after long efforts succeeded .The first machines were driven by water wheels , which made them usable only near rivers . The need for a general purpose engine that could be used anywhere made itself felt increasingly more insistently . In the 1780s the cotton industry began to use Watt’s steam engine . That made it possible considerably to increase the volume of factory production , ensured the spread of factories over the country and the growth of industrial centres . The increase in the production of machines stimulated a greater need for metal , but the lack of charcoal limited the development of metallurgy . The production of metal began to grow rapidly only after Henry Cort invented the puddling furnace in 1784. Between 1785 and 1797 the production of iron in England was thus doubled . The use of coke instead of charcoal in the smelting of pig iron fostered an increase in coal mining : in 100 years it increased fourfold and by the end of the century amounted to 10 million tons . The introduction of machinery , which began in cotton spinning , subsequently spread to other branches of industry and led to the development of a number of associated branches , particularly the heavy industry . The development of heavy industry was consummated by the creation of the engineering industry . At first machines were produced in manufactories manually . They were very expensive and their production lagged behind the growing demand of industry . Only when mechanical engineering came into existence as a separate branch of industry was it possible to make the machines cheaper and hasten their production . The produc tion of machinery increased at so fast a rate that already in 1824 Parliament allowed machines to be exported from England . The first railway was built in England in 1825 and railway communication between Manchester and Liverpool was opened in 1830 , but by the middle of the 19th century England already had 10,000 kilometres of railways . The machine industry finally supplanted manual produc tion in England in the 1840s . Those were the years of con summation of the industrial revolution . England became the leading industrial country , the ” workshop of the world ” . In 1839 England mined four times as much coal as did France , Belgium and Prussia taken together . From 1826 to 1846 the export of iron and cast iron from England increased 7.5 – fold .