There were several preconditions that laid the ground work for the industrial revolution. One of these factors was increased population growth. From the end of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century, the world population increased by about 700 million, from 950 million in 1800 to 1.6 billion in 1900. This increase in population led to an increase in the demand for food and energy sources. Improved whaling techniques and technologies, allowing whalers to hunt more efficiently and to hunt previously untouchable species of whale, began to meet the additional energy demands. Improvements in agriculture allowed for a massive increase in food output without giving over a large amount of land specifically to the production of food. Finally, improvements and new developments in food preservation technologies allowed food to transported over larger areas, and allowed the foods to be preserved for a much longer amount of time. These improvements paved the way for the industrial revolution, since improvements in food and energy production without an increased demand for manpower to maintain those high outputs allowed a large amount of the new population to work in other areas. The most important factor was probably the new developments in agricultural technology, since it allowed many of the new population to work somewhere other than the fields to produce goods other than food.
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