From the second half of the 18th century, first in Britain, machine power began to replace production based on muscle and water. The steam engine freed energy from place and season; textile machinery, coal, and iron production accelerated by feeding one another. This was not a single invention but a long chain of interlinked technical, economic, and social changes; there is no single start date.

The change was qualitative, not merely quantitative. Production moved from workshop scale to factory scale; people moved from the field to the city and to wage labor. Population, transport, and energy use grew at a rate unseen in all prior history. The same process brought heavy costs: child labor, urban poverty, working conditions, and, over the long term, environmental impact.

Industrialization also produced a global inequality: the gap in power and income between early-industrializing regions and the rest shaped the world order of the following two centuries. The framework of today's economic, urban, and energy-based life was largely set here.