AP European History Unit 6 Essentials: Key Terms & Big Ideas

ECD — Economic Development

Industrialization fundamentally transformed production methods and economic organization across Europe

Britain's advantages in coal, iron, and capital launched the factory system and railroads, replacing artisanal and agricultural production with mechanized manufacturing. A Second Industrial Revolution later added steel, chemicals, and electricity, deepening this transformation as it spread to Belgium, France, and Germany.

Factory System Railroads Second Industrial Revolution

SOC — Social Organization & Development

Industrialization created new social classes and reshaped family and work life, especially for women and children

A growing industrial working class and an expanding bourgeoisie emerged alongside rapid urbanization. Work increasingly separated from home life, generating new gender roles, while child labor and unsafe factory conditions exposed the human costs of rapid industrial growth.

Urbanization Child Labor Middle Class

CID — Cultural & Intellectual Developments

Responses to industrialization's inequalities produced new ideologies like socialism and Marxism that challenged classical liberalism

Classical liberals defended laissez-faire capitalism, but Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels' Communist Manifesto reframed industrial society as class struggle, while utopian socialists and Social Darwinists offered competing explanations for — and responses to — industrial inequality.

Karl Marx Laissez-Faire Social Darwinism

SP — States & Other Institutions of Power

Industrial-era social problems prompted early government intervention and reform legislation

Public outcry over child labor and dangerous working conditions led Britain to pass a series of Factory Acts, while movements like Chartism pushed for expanded political rights — early signs of the state taking a more active role in regulating industrial society.

Factory Acts Chartism Trade Unions

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Industrial Revolution

A fundamental shift from agricultural and artisanal production to mechanized factory manufacturing, beginning in Britain in the late 18th century with textiles, coal, iron, and the steam engine, then spreading across Europe.

Origins

Factory System

A mode of production that concentrated workers, machinery, and raw materials in centralized buildings under strict schedules and supervision, replacing the older cottage industry model of production in the home.

Origins

Second Industrial Revolution

A later wave of industrialization beginning around the 1870s, marked by new industries — steel, chemicals, and electricity — that further transformed production, transportation, and daily life.

Origins

Classical Liberalism (Laissez-Faire)

An economic philosophy, building on Adam Smith, holding that free markets with minimal government interference would produce the greatest prosperity — the dominant ideology defending industrial capitalism.

Ideology

Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels & the Communist Manifesto

Marx and Engels co-authored the 1848 Communist Manifesto, arguing that history is driven by class struggle and predicting that the industrial proletariat would overthrow the capitalist bourgeoisie to create a classless society.

Ideology

Utopian Socialism

An early socialist movement, associated with thinkers like Robert Owen and Charles Fourier, proposing small, cooperative model communities as peaceful alternatives to industrial capitalism rather than revolutionary class struggle.

Ideology

Trade Unions

Organizations of workers formed to bargain collectively for better wages, hours, and working conditions, emerging in response to the harsh conditions and low pay of early industrial factory work.

Labor

Urbanization

The rapid growth of cities as rural workers moved to industrial centers for factory jobs, producing severe overcrowding, poor sanitation, disease outbreaks, and dismal housing in working-class districts.

Society

Child Labor & the Factory Acts

Factories widely employed children for long hours in dangerous conditions because they were cheap labor; growing public outcry led Britain to pass a series of Factory Acts gradually restricting child labor and improving safety.

Reform

Chartism

A British working-class movement (1830s–1850s) that petitioned Parliament for political reforms, especially universal male suffrage, reflecting industrial workers' demand for political power to match their economic importance.

Reform

Bourgeoisie (Middle Class) & Consumer Culture

Industrialization created a growing class of factory owners, merchants, and professionals who accumulated wealth, embraced new consumer goods, and promoted ideals of domesticity and separate gender roles.

Society

Social Darwinism

A theory applying Charles Darwin's concept of natural selection to human society, used by some thinkers to argue that industrial inequality and poverty reflected natural, even desirable, "survival of the fittest" competition.

Ideology