The introduction of the Spinning Mule into cotton production processes helped to drastically increase industry consumption of cotton. This example is the only one in existence made by the inventor Samuel Crompton. / Boston Museum
By Dr. William A. Pelz / 05.20.2016
Professor of History
Elgin Community College
From A People’s History of Modern Europe
The Revolution in Production, or the Industrial Revolution,[1] as it is more commonly known, is typically presented as a dull series of inventions by a cast of male, mainly British geniuses. So we have a parade of names and inventions presented without substantial discussion of the human costs. James Hargreave invents the “spinning jenny” to allow an increased amount of cotton to be produced by the one worker (1764). James Watt creates the steam engine (1769). Cartwright patents the power loom (1785). The
first steam-powered textile factory is established in Nottingham, England (1790). And on the list goes. But what is more significant is that each new innovation destroyed the traditional artisan trades, which could no longer compete with cheaper machine-made goods.
In the typical version of history, these wonderful inventions may have caused some momentary discomfort as societies adjusted to the new systems, but they were part of the march of progress that made everyone’s life better. This sounds like a dry run for later commercials that attempt to convince the viewer that world civilization has just changed because of a new type of cleaning product. Although these inventions and their creators are an important part of the story, they are far from the most important components. What caused this revolution, apart from the oft-mentioned geniuses, is left unanswered, as are the results.
The Industrial Revolution changed people’s relationship to craftsmanship, time, community and their own role in society as a whole. For one thing, people in the twenty-first century have grown up in a world shaped by industrial capitalism, meaning it is difficult for most to imagine another type of world. People had fundamentally produced goods in the same manner for thousands of years. That is, they made products by using human labor with perhaps the assistance of animal muscle or running water. Of course, there was from time to time this or that noteworthy innovation in agricultural production: crop rotation, new methods of irrigation, and so on. And no doubt, the eighteenth-century shoemaker created a different style of footwear than the cobbler of ancient Rome. Yet in all, the basics were the same. Products of nature were raised and then made into products by human beings (living labor). Thus, an early modern shoemaker would easily have recognized the technique of someone making footwear centuries before the birth of Christ or Mohammed.
All of this changes with the rise of the machine: tools would no longer serve people, but rather people would serve machines. One noted historian argues that industrialism is on the same level as the change to settled agriculture and the domestication of animals. He contends that the Industrial Revolution is “one of those rare occasions in world history when the human species altered its framework of existence.”[2] One way to look at this transformation of European society is that the products of human labor (dead labor) became as important as actual people (living labor). That is to say that the machines (dead labor) created by human labor were quickly overwhelming actual living human beings. As more and more improved machines were created, dead labor grew in importance at the expense of living labor. Put differently, the human became an appendage to the machine. Or, the person was put in bondage within the industrial system. Whereas in pre-industrial Europe, individuals used tools to create things, under industrial capitalism the machines used (and still use) people to make products. What did this mean to the average person? First, the revolution in production ultimately reinvented society by increasing life spans and providing a greater quantity and variety of articles of consumption even for the average person. Still, without in any way denigrating the uplifting cultural importance of shopping malls, one might still ask, “What was the price? What was lost?”
Life in pre-industrial Europe was horrible in many ways. There was disease, hunger, poverty, oppression, ignorance, and the list could go on. It would be foolish to try and present the times before the machines as some type of golden age for the common folk. Still, there were things that made life bearable for most Europeans. Commoners, for examples, had a high degree of autonomy in their daily lives. They had little political say in the affairs of their country, were exploited by the powerful, deluded by the Church and often lived in poverty. All the same, they were left alone on most days that did not include church attendance, tax payment, or war. Feudal lords had far more interesting things to occupy their time than checking up on their serfs regularly. The ruling class saw no advantage in making a great effort to monitor the work habits of commoners. As long as the masses appeared appropriately subservient, followed the rules and did as they were told, they were left alone on a day-to-day basis. A woman in a seventeenth century village might go for weeks or months without anyone other than relatives and neighbors seeing her go about her labors.
Along with the loss of their independence, normal Europeans lost control of time itself. Before the establishment of industrial capitalism, people had mainly been subject to task-work discipline. Like many college students today, they could do what they wanted when they wanted, so long as a given task was completed by a certain date. Take the case of the shoemaker: a person comes and orders a pair of shoes on Monday. The customer and the artisan agree on a style, price, leather type and that delivery will be on Friday. The shoemaker can set to work on the footwear the moment the customer leaves or the new order may sit unattended till late on Thursday. The person who ordered the shoes cares nothing for any of that as long as the promised product is completed by the agreed-upon time on Friday. When the shoe (or boot) factory comes into being, the competition will most likely drive the shoemaker out of business. It is run on quite different lines than the previous artisan producer. The shoe worker must appear at a certain hour and can neither take a break nor have a meal nor leave until the hour set by the factory management. If the owners want the factory run 16 hours a day with an hour for lunch, so be it. The factory owner is not purchasing the product of the workers’ labor but the laborers’ time. The industrial system ushers in the age of time-work discipline.[3]
This was not an easy transition for either craft worker or peasant entering the new industrial world. Rather than being master of their own time and working conditions, the industrial worker was left at the mercy of the factory owners. The workers now had to work at the pace set by the machines. They were now under the constant supervision of overseers, who badgered, threatened and on occasion even hit workers who appeared to be falling behind in their service to the machines. Raised in or with family memories of a different world, these first generations of newly industrialized workers were forced into a situation they held to be inhumane. In 1806, a commission of the British Parliament looked into the state of working conditions. They found one worker who testified that it was extremely difficult to get accustomed to being under time-work discipline. The workers hated having regular hours. They resented the fact that “they could not go in and out as they pleased, and have what holidays they pleased, and go on just as they had been used to do.”[4] It has been said that breaking in workers new to industrialism was difficult and often required physical force whereas those accustomed to the factory system were much easier to manage. Not only did the common people of Europe lose control of their time, they no longer had any say over their working conditions. Whether a workshop or factory was cold or hot was a matter over which the workers had little influence or control. Many pre-industrial Europeans may have enjoyed singing while working but the new industrial workers, or proletarians as they are sometimes called, would be told whether or not they could even talk with their colleagues during working hours. Before the turn to industry, peasants and craft workers sometimes drank beer or wine during the working day. Now, this liberty was in the hands of the bourgeois owner. On the other hand, the worker who rejected all drink on religious grounds might have the misfortune to be employed in a place where the owner decided to pay part of the wages in alcoholic beverages. Some mine owners, for example, believed that large amounts of rum or gin distributed at lunchtime would encourage more initiative on the part of the miners they hired.
Moreover, the average people lost the protection that their skills had previously afforded them. That is to say, the years of training that might have made it difficult to replace a skilled worker was eliminated as the machines required service by humans with relatively minimal training. With each new wave of technological advance, another group of people would find themselves as if naked before the Capital, as their old skills became irrelevant. The handloom worker was rendered unskilled by the power loom just as later on bookkeepers, who would add long columns of numbers, have been rendered obsolete by computer software. In fact, taken as a whole, the Industrial Revolution destroyed old social relations and people’s very way of existence. Although this certainly had positive aspects in breaking down centuries-old prejudices, it also eliminated centuries-old communities. As this happened, people felt more and more alienated from both their work and their fellow humans. When thinking about the impact of the Industrial Revolution, the historian certainly needs to examine data concerning wages, health and living conditions. Still, there are many losses that are less likely to appear on the ledger sheets. As British historian Eric Hobsbawm reminds us, it is vital to remember “that men do not live by bread alone.”[5]
Of course, some observers, like the economist Adam Smith, found the resulting developments of the Industrial Revolution as “natural.” The point is, however, the vast majority of workers at that moment in history did not. They felt the new industrial system was unnatural and even against the teachings of the Bible. Often the commandment, “Thou shall not steal” was used as an insult to the new capitalist owners. Likewise, supporters of industrial capitalism talked about how these new developments had created so much freedom. Now, people were free to sell their labor, free to move in search of work, free to choose their employers, free to make contracts and, of course, free to work hard and get ahead. To make sure they were free, the government at the behest of the capitalists ended any welfare measures or social safety net. According to a Report of the Poor Law Commissioners, any social assistance was
…a check to industry, a reward for improvident marriages, a stimulant to population, and a blind to its effects on wages; a national institution for discountenancing the industrious and honest, and for protecting the idle, the improvident and the vicious; the destroyer [of the bonds of family life]; a system for preventing the accumulation of capital, for destroying that which exists, and for reducing the rate-payer to pauperism; and a premium for illegitimate children in the provision of aliment.[6]
In reply, many average people said this freedom was an illusion, as the economic power of the bourgeoisie backed by the political power of supportive governments enabled employers to keep workers poorly paid and without any real power over their own lives. As Adam Smith himself noted:
… workmen desire to get as much, the masters to give as little as possible … it is not, however, difficult to see which of the two parties have the advantage in the dispute. The masters, being fewer in number can combine much more easily [and neither government actions nor laws prevent this] while it prohibits those of the workmen.[7]
All the same, defenders of the system chirped on that industry almost immediately raised the common people to a higher standard of living. This line of thinking is widely debated and often disputed by historians.[8] Without becoming too distracted by this seemingly endless debate, it is worthwhile to look at some facts about the generations caught up in the industrial juggernaut of the nineteenth century.
Those who have focused exclusively on wages as indicative of an increased standard of living often overlook important nuances that other facts reveal. How could so many contemporary observers bemoan the housing that workers lived in if those same workers were making more in wages? Those who once lived in rural poverty amid fresh air, clean water and within a village community were now pushed into polluted cities with inferior housing stock. This could be because even with rising wages, “rents rose substantially relative to other costs during the industrial revolution … housing quality appears to have declined from 1760 to 1860.”[9] Most are at least somewhat familiar with the horrors associated with child labor during the early part of the industrialization process. Those children old and able enough to perform factory work were horribly exploited and brutally treated in many cases. Their young siblings were, if anything, more in harm’s way. A working-class mother thrown into public employment by economic necessity often had no choice but to leave these infants without quality care. The young children were frequently rendered manageable by narcotic-laced patent medicines with such grand names as “Atkins Patent Infant Preservative.” Under such desperate circumstances, the infant mortality rate may have been close to 70 percent.[10]
When discussing living standards during the Industrial Revolution, defenders of the system are wont to point to the drunkenness of many workers. The argument made is that wages were not too low but that the common people chose to drink rather than make better use of their income. The solution to the poverty of the masses in industrial society was, therefore, to convince workers not to waste their resources on drink. Thus, the temperance movement developed, intertwined with religion and a firm moralistic belief in the individual’s responsibility to take care of themselves. John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, preached: “You see the wine when it sparkles in the cup, and are going to drink of it. I tell you there is poison in it! And, therefore, beg you to throw it away.”[11]
This individualistic ethos flew in the face of centuries of communityoriented tradition. Of course, it is quite true that money spent on drink impacted negatively on living standards. Moreover, the taxes imposed on alcohol meant that drinking workers paid a greater part of their income to the state than non-drinkers.[12] It may be fair to say drinking posed a threat to the well-being of much of the industrial working class. The question that needs to be asked is, why did workers often drink excessively?
Nor was it just alcohol consumption that cut into the funds of the impoverished worker. A habit that was more morally acceptable but nonetheless had a high cost was the purchase of caffeinated drinks. That is, tea and coffee. The creation of a global market that took place before and continued during the period of industrialization targeted workers as consumers of tea or coffee. While arguably less problematic than gin or beer, tea and coffee became socially defined necessities and thereby another drain of proletarian resources.[13] Over time, caffeine became the world’s most popular drug.[14] This was no small matter when workers’ already low wages limited the number of calories they could afford to consume. The lack of sufficient calorie intake often reduced physical productivity and also caused depressed “learning skills, increasing diseases and absenteeism, inducing lethargy and low mental performance.”[15] During the early stages of industrialization, calorie consumption often declined and made the problem of poverty more acute.[16]
A detailed case study of Antwerp illustrates the decline in food consumption by the common people. Up until 1830, every resident ate an average of 40 to 50 kilograms of meat yearly. By the 1850s, this had dropped over 20 percent to barely 38 kilograms.[17] It would be a mistake to assume these numbers meant that the good people of Antwerp were turning instead to the products of the sea for their dining pleasure. With regard to fish, per capita annual consumption fell from 8 kilograms early in the nineteenth century to 4.3 by the middle. In the same period, grain consumption also declined albeit not as dramatically.[18] The authors of this study conclude that this reduced consumption resulted in, “the absolute pauperization of large sectors of the Belgian population … [and] the explanation must be sought in the definite breakthrough of the capitalist mode of production, causing widespread social dislocation.”[19]
Within factories, workers were subject to hitherto little-known ailments like silicosis, a disease that poisons and ultimately destroys the lymphatic system. This disease not only killed many miners but also other workers exposed to the dangerous by-products of industry.[20] All the varied changes associated with the Industrial Revolution put immense strain on family life. There is evidence that suggests an increase in family violence. A study of northern France found that before industrialization, murder had largely been an anonymous affair. As the pressures of the industrial system mounted, so too did violence among family members. By the 1870s, fatal violence “in intimate relationships increased to become the single most frequent type of murder.”[21]
During the early period of industrialization, 1790–1850, the use of child labor increased greatly and in many cases the work of children as young as ten was essential for the growth of new industries. A particularly vulnerable demographic of children has often been overlooked by those historians examining the period through the lens of the family. That is, children without adult guardians would often find themselves thrown into factories at very young ages.[22] As one such person, a Robert Collyer, explained that when the local labor supply could not satisfy the demands of industry in Yorkshire, the industry owners scoured orphanages “where children were to be found in swarms [and] set them to work as apprentices who [were kept] until the girls were eighteen and the boys twenty-one.”[23] Beside the lack of available adult labor, children as laborers appealed to owners because they were cheap; in addition to room and board such as these were, a young child would make perhaps 10–20 percent of an adult male’s wage. One might ask, what would motivate these children, sometimes called “white slaves,” to be productive factory workers? Both violence and discipline were important factors, but it appears that hunger was the prime motivation.[24]
The transfer of labor from kinship-based food production to the larger industrial society created a new need for family labor. After 1850, factories became more sophisticated and required workers with at least a minimum level of education. Now, we are not talking about courses in philosophy. Education in basic maths and literacy was needed, as adjusting machines and reading instructions became more important. The change from a peasant society to an industrial wage-labor one changed family structures
and dynamics. Before, the family unit had been focused on food production, tasks to which children as young as five could make a contribution. In the new wage-labor economy, the family’s
… primary function was to socialize and educate labourers for an industrial labour market … [what put a special burden on the family was] the extension of childhood from age five or six to age fifteen or sixteen … whereas previously children worked when they became old enough to do so, now their parents found themselves supporting adolescents.[25]
While few would argue against education for children, the result of this shift for the family was enormous. The family was now given the added burden of providing for their offspring for as long as an additional decade.
Another way to approach this whirlwind of arguments and counterarguments is to examine directly the physical condition of proletarianized Europeans. At least in Britain, the first industrial nation, it would appear that the common people were worse off, if physical stature is any indication. One study found that both rural and urban laborers became shorter after 1780, that is, once the Industrial Revolution had begun. The evidence indicates that, “urban Englishmen were over 1.5 inches shorter in 1802 than
cohorts born in the late 1770s.”[26] As usual, if things were bad for men, they were worse for women. English women in this period saw their height fall even further than their male counterparts. This was not mere accident but rather part of the increasing pressure placed on women by the emerging industrial wage-labor system. Two scholars note the “fall in heights of English women relative to men is consistent with the increasing gender inequality in intra-household food allocation.”[27] Aside from physical changes, the number of English females unable to read increased during this same period.[28] One should be clear, industrialization was a, maybe the, fundamental transformation within European society. The change from an agriculturally based society to one rooted in industrial production was certain to cause disruptions and extensive changes in community and family life, as well as in the situation of individuals.[29]
The question remaining is: what caused the Industrial Revolution to take place? Although we find their statues littering the Western world, we can set aside the typical and unsatisfying idea that industrialism was merely the result of the inspired genius of great men. Even if one were to grant that this or that individual had a good idea, the conditions must have been ripe for the idea to be realized. The ancient slave state of Athens had its fair share of original thinkers, but they produced relatively few technological breakthroughs that could compare with the inventions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The other contributing factors—aside from individual “genius”—that allowed industrialization to take hold and fundamentally alter the way of life was the convergence of new wealth and new forms of handling this Capital. One development that allowed Britain to become the first industrial nation was the shift from wood to coal as an energy source. In the two hundred years preceding industrialization, beginning in 1560, there was ever-increasing replacement of wood with coal. The latter is a great advance over the former as a fuel: Britain had an abundance of coal and a relative shortage of wood after many centuries of turning trees into charcoal. It can be argued that each “successive industry which acquired a coal base was free to expand to a degree previously impossible—salt, paper, glass, non-ferrous metals, brewing, brick-making, and iron to name only the most prominent.”[30]
By way of contrast, Sweden’s reluctance to replace wood with coal due to its abundant expanses of forests may explain why Sweden industrialized after Britain. Yet, this Scandinavian nation went from one of the very poorest places in Europe to one of the richest in the course of the nineteenth century. In Sweden, it was not abundant coal, although they did have tremendous wood resources, but a highly educated common people that made the difference. It was, one might say, not energy resources but human
capital that transformed Sweden into a successful industrial society.[31] So, if Britain accumulated capital for industrialization by seizing the common land from the average citizen, profiting from the transatlantic slave trade and exploiting coal deposits, Swedish capitalism exploited the fact that their version of Lutheranism had produced a largely literate population. Still, Sweden would never become the industrial world leader that Britain was, partly because the country lacked overseas colonies and their markets, that is, raw material as well as the capital raised in Britain by its expropriation of domestic land and foreign bodies.
But these factors alone are insufficient to explain the genesis of the Capital that made industry successful. The evidence suggests that in every case, this wealth came from two sources, internal exploitation and overseas pillage. Internally, Capital came from cannibalizing the wealth of dying feudalism. In Britain, Church land was seized and sold by King Henry VIII. In Sweden, Lutheranism provided pretence for the confiscation of Roman Catholic Church property, while in France it was a popular revolution that seized church/feudal holdings. These massive seizures had two notable aspects. First, the tremendous shift of wealth (and power) from feudal institutions to people with money, be they merchants, bankers or well-off peasants, changed all those areas that underwent this transition to industrialism. Pushing rural people off small self-sufficient farms and establishing large estates for raising sheep for the wool trade released a huge amount of labor from their traditional obligations, forcing them to look for other work. These people were suddenly and unexpectedly free from centuries of bondage, oppression and exploitation. They were often, at least in the short run, out of a job. All of this made the new industrial enterprises more of a physical necessity rather than an attractive alternative. That is, the people may or may not have been happy with pre-industrial society, but it did not matter: they had to join the brave new world of industrial capitalism regardless of their feelings about the matter.
It is important to remember that the European common people were dispossessed, thus providing both capital and an abundant supply of landless and desperate potential workers. While the details are still being debated, the fact that peasants were forced from the land their families had farmed for centuries is not in dispute.[32] Many of the dispossessed would doubtlessly have agreed with E.P. Thompson when he argued that the enclosure movement was “a plain enough case of class robbery.”[33]
Externally, Capital would flow into Western Europe as a result of the conquest and colonization of the Americas. The gold and silver looted from the once mighty Native American empires of the Aztec and Inca flowed into Europe from the sixteenth century onwards. With weak bourgeois classes, Spain and Portugal saw their wealth fly off to more developed centers of trade like London, Amsterdam and Paris. This historic influx of precious metal would have, in and of itself, been insufficient to finance the revolution in production. The European powers did not, however, simply loot the Western Hemisphere and leave. They set up colonies that served as sources of raw material on the one hand, and markets for finished goods on the other. There was, however, a significant obstacle to this model of exploitation. While the land mass conquered was extremely large, the amount of available labor was not.
Enslaved natives and colonists from Europe were too few in number to take full advantage of the territory conquered. The European elites sought to solve this problem by importing Africans to the new world. At first, some of these Africans were free but the transportation of these people quickly became the slave trade. As important as slavery was to the economic development of the Industrial Revolution, “it did not by itself cause the British industrial revolution.”[34] Nonetheless, it is hard to envision a way the Industrial Revolution could have developed without the slave trade. This is because both the capital for industrial growth, markets for industrial production and raw materials for the new machines were boundup with slavery, where profit rates could reach 30 percent.[35] Of course, some scholars have disputed this figure, but the larger and more significant fact is that the slave trade made European colonies successful. Regardless of what profit rate came from the slave trade, the key point is that the American colonies were built by and dependent on slave labor.
Without the raw materials and markets the colonies provided, industrialism would have been hindered. It was the slave system that made exploitation of the new world such an economic success. The French government understood this when they gave a subsidy to French traders to provide African slave labor for their colonies. As one Nigerian scholar has concluded, “the expansion of the Atlantic system provided adequate opportunities for the launching of industrial capitalism in Britain from the late eighteenth century, thanks to the Atlantic slave trade and African slavery in the New World.”[36] As profitable as the slave trade and colonialism were, it would be wrong to think that industrial capitalism was financed only from external plunder. It should be understood that this experience was in no way unique to Britain. In Sweden, the nineteenth century and industrial capitalism profoundly changed the common peoples’ relation to the land. As agrarian capitalism grew, the Swedish people saw two important changes: “the creation of large farms and the emergence of a new landless working class.”[37] It is also important to remember that most advances in industrialization were due to “helpful government intervention.”[38] As a recent, detailed study of the rise of industrial capitalism found, “the fact that the artisan-led resistance to the conversion of British manufacturing to capitalism was only overcome through the direct application of state power demonstrates that the state played a very active and central role in the Industrial Revolution.”[39]
The common person did not just accept all these changes without a murmur of dissent. Some fled across the Atlantic to where the promise, if not always the reality, of cheap land seemed to offer an alternative to being crushed by the ever-growing industrial machine. Some protested against the very idea of mechanization and hoped they could hold back technological change. To cite only one example from France, in the decade after the fall of Napoleon, hundreds of workers gathered in front of the Mayor of Vienne shouting, “Down with the shearing-machine! Down with all machines!”[40] Further, it is vital to point out that (all often repeated libels to the contrary), there was no connection between protest or even collective violence and crime or criminals.[41]
To show another more significant example of resistance, it is useful to look at the revolt of the Silesian weavers. These workers had been relatively well-off and had a fair amount of control over their lives because of the protection afforded by their skill. With the introduction of machinery, the weavers’ skill was rendered unimportant. This rapidly drove those in the trade into poverty. In 1844, with their wages posed to dip below subsistence, masses of weavers in Silesia rose up, broke into factories and destroyed the equipment. At first glance, this would appear to be a mere repeat, albeit on a larger scale, of the so-called Luddite protests that had already seen machine breaking in Britain and France.
Karl Marx noted a major difference between the protests in an article appearing on August 10, 1844, in which he pointed out that this time
… [not] only were machines destroyed, those competitors of the
workers, but also account books, the titles of ownership, and whereas
all other movements had directed their attacks primarily at the visible
enemy, namely the industrialists, the Silesian workers turned also against
the hidden enemy, the bankers.”[42] [emphasis in original]
This and other revolts have often been portrayed as mindless rebellion against technology and progress. The facts point in another direction. The weavers only decided to storm the mills after negotiation, mediation and appeal had each failed. Also, in the short term, the “tactic of ‘collective bargaining by riot’ had indeed paid off in the case of the Silesian weavers’ revolt.”[43] They were able to slow down the inevitable destruction of their craft. Of course, in the long run they were doomed. Still, one should neither assume that mass action is merely the result of a “mob” nor that mass action damages the interests of those resisting … and in the nineteenth century there would be far more people resisting than just the weavers.
Notes
1. There is some dispute as to when this term came into general use. While the expression was used very early on, some credit Friedrich Engels for popularizing the term in his 1845 book, The Condition of the Working Class in England. For more on this discussion, see Anna Bezanson, ”“The early use of the term Industrial Revolution,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 36(2), February 1922: 343–9.
2. Peter N. Stearns, The Industrial Revolution in World History, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993: 5.
3. E.P. Thompson, “Time, work-discipline and industrial capitalism,” Past & Present, 38, December 1967: 56–97.
4. Sidney Pollard, “Factory discipline in the Industrial Revolution,” The Economic History Review, 16(2), 1963: 255.
5. E.J. Hobsbawm, “The standard of living during the Industrial Revolution: A discussion,” The Economic History Review, 16(1), 1963: 131.
6. Frederick Engels, “The attitude of the bourgeoisie toward the proletariat,” in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Collected Works, Vol. 4, New York: International Publishers, 1975: 571.
7. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Dublin: N. Kelly, 1801: 67.
8. Hobsbawm, “The Standard of Living,” 119–34.
9. Gregory Clark, “Shelter from the storm: Housing and the Industrial Revolution, 1550–1909,” The Journal of Economic History, 62(2), June 2002: 489.
10. Wanda Minge-Kalman, “The Industrial Revolution and the European family: The institutionalization of ‘childhood’ as a market for family labor,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 20(3), July 1978: 456.
11. Wesley, John. “Sermon 140, On Public Diversions,” Sermons of John Wesley: http://wesley.nnu.edu/john-wesley/the-sermons-of-john-wesley-1872-edition/sermon-140-on-public-diversions–.
12. A.E. Dinge, “Drink and working-class living standards in Britain, 1870–1914,” The Economic History Review, 25(4), November 1972: 621.
13. Anne E.C. McCants, “Poor consumers as global consumers: The diffusion of tea and coffee drinking in the eighteenth century,” The Economic History Review, 61(51), August 2008: 172–200.
14. Steven Topik, “Coffee as a social drug,” Cultural Critique, 71, Winter 2009: 81.
15. Geert Bekaert, “Calorie consumption in industrializing Belgium,” The Journal of Economic History, 51(3), September 1991: 651–2.
16. Ibid., 653.
17. C. Lis and H. Soly, “Food consumption in Antwerp between 1807 and 1859: A contribution to the standard of living debate,” The Economic History Review, 30(3), August 1977: 465.
18 Ibid., 466–8.
19. Ibid., 481.
20. Janet Siskind, “An axe to grind: Class relations and silicosis in a 19th-century factory,” Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 2(3), September 1988: 199–214.
21. Anne Parrella, “Industrialization and murder: Northern France, 1815–1904,” The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 22(4), Spring 1992: 653.
22. Jane Humphries, Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010: 10.
23. Ibid., 200.
24. Ibid., 370.
25. Minge-Kalman, “The Industrial Revolution and the European family,” 462.
26. Stephen Nicholas and Richard H. Stecker, “Heights and living standards of English workers during the early years of industrialization, 1770–1815,” Journal of Economic History, 51(4), December 1991: 955.
27. Stephen Nicholas and Deborah Oxley, “The living standards of women during the Industrial Revolution, 1795–1820,” The Economic History Review, 46(4), November 1993: 739.
28. Ibid., 746.
29. E.J. Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire, London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1968.
30. P.A. [Philip Abrams], “The origins of the Industrial Revolution,” Past & Present, 17, April, 1960: 76.
31. Lars G. Sandberg, “The case of the impoverished sophisticate: Human capital and Swedish economic growth before World War I,” The Journal of Economic History, 39(1), March 1979: 225–41.
32. John Chapman, “The chronology of English enclosure,” The Economic History Review, 37(4), November 1984: 557–9.
33. E.P. Thomson, The Making of the English Working Class, New York: Pantheon Books, 1964: 218.
34. David Eltis and Stanley L. Engerman, “The importance of slavery and the slave trade to industrializing Britain,” The Journal of Economic History, 60(1), March 2000: 141.
35. Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, London: Russel & Russel, 1961: 36.
36. Joseph E. Inikor, “Slavery and the development of industrial capitalism in England,” The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 17(4), Spring, 1987: 793.
37. Jens Möller, “Towards Agrarian Capitalism: The Case of Southern Sweden during the 19th Century,” Geografiska Annalez, 72(213), 1990: 60.
38. Desmond Reilly, “Salts, Acids and Alkalis in the 19th Century. A Comparison between Advances in France, England and Germany,” ISIS, 42(4), December, 1951: 293.
39. Michael Andrew Zmolek, Rethinking the Industrial Revolution: Five Centuries of Transition From Agrarian to Industrial Capitalism in England, Leiden: Brill, 2013:839.
40. Frank E. Manuel, “The Luddite movement in France,” The Journal of Modern History, 10(2), January 1938: 197.
41. Abdul Qaiyum Lodhi and Charles Tilly, “Urbanization, crime and collective violence in 19th-century France,” American Journal of Sociology, 79(2), September 1973: 296–318.
42. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 3, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1975: 202, original emphasis.
43. “Christina von Hodenburg, “Weaving survival in the tapestry of village life: Strategies and status in the Silesian weaver revolt of 1844,” in Jan Kok (ed.), Rebellious Families: Household Strategies and Collective Action in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, New York: Berghahn Books, 2002: 53.