With the growth of factories and workhouses in the booming industrial cities, women and children were able to work, and were often prized above men by unethical employers because they could be treated less humanely, and their more delicate fingers were perfect for working the complicated machinery.

Adam Smith is widely held to be the 'father of modern capitalism'. His philosophical treatises on concepts such as the wealth of nations, personal self-interest, and trading laid the framework for the economic system that would become known as capitalism.

Largely due to its political independence, Japan was able to industrialize as early as some European countries. Subsaharan Africa was under the domination of the French and British, who orientated African economies towards the cultivation of natural resources for British and French industrial capital, rather than creating their own. Latin America, under the Spanish, was also barred from participating in the industrial revolution, as was Central Asia under Russian influence.

Smith believed that the economy should be driven by the market place with no outside interference. The idea was that people should push the economy to fill their needs while also determining what should not be in the economy. They would do this by buying the supplies they chose from the retailers they chose.

While corporations had existed in the past and had sold stock before, it had never been a widespread tool. It had also not been something available to the lower classes of society. Now, people had the chance to invest in stock with the hopes they could sell it later at a profit.

The factory system is where one central location houses the machinery of an industry and the workers come to the machinery to work it. This is the reason these places were called factories.

The Industrial Revolution originated in Great Britain in the late eighteenth century. The Industrial Revolution moved manufacturing from the home and into factories, where it became more efficient through the use of mass production and interchangeable parts. The revolution originated with textiles and food processing but soon moved to iron, steel, machine building, transportation, and communication. 

The so-called Congo Free State, under the initial personal control of King Leopold II of Belgium and later under the control of the Belgian government, was extremely profitable due to the lucrative rubber plantations and the use of forced native labor.

The Industrial Revolution contributed to the decline of slavery because it dramatically increased the profitability of businesses whilst allowing workers to be paid a tiny wage. Business owners realized that it was actually cheaper and less risky to pay workers than it was to buy and own slaves.

In the early years of the Industrial Revolution working conditions for the average individual were far worse than they had been before the revolution. Prior to the Industrial Revolution the average worker (in England) might have worked slightly less than eight hours a day tilling the fields and caring for crops and animals. In the early years of the Industrial Revolution workers were suddenly working fourteen or sixteen hour days, sometimes six or seven days a week, in horribly dangerous conditions. The relative autonomy of individuals also declined in the early years of the Industrial Revolution.