I have fallen into acquaintance with a delicious book, in which I actually found the equally delicious expression “to fall into acquaintance.” University of East Anglia historian Emma Griffin writes, referring to the 1797 autobiography of a Glasgow shoemaker, “In early adulthood, M’Kaen had ‘fallen into acquaintance’ with a young woman and wished to marry her” (Emma Griffin, Liberty’s Dawn: A People’s History of the Industrial Revolution [Yale University Press, 2013]).
Griffin found her material in 350 autobiographies written by actual or former industrial workers starting in the late 18th century and often not meant for publication. The incipit of the Liberty’s Dawn says:
At the dawn of the nineteenth century, a subtle and little-noticed social change began to take place in Britain. As the industrial revolution picked up pace, a growing number of ordinary working people picked up pen and paper and wrote down their memories. … This book tells their story, an unexpected tale of working people carving out for themselves new levels of wealth, freedom and autonomy.
She describes the industrial revolution as follows:
It is clear that something momentous happened in Britain between the end of the eighteenth century and the middle of the nineteenth. ‘Revolution’ is an unavoidable and apt description of these events. At some point, the nation stopped trying to make all its goods by hand, and started to burn fossil fuels to drive machinery to do the work instead. In the process, large numbers of families gave up working the land, and moved to towns and cities to take up employment in factories, mills, and mines. …
By the end of the eighteenth century, the economic growth associated with industrialization began to ripple to society.
The steady incomes provided by these industrial occupations radically changed lives. For example, as one chapter explains, the new wealth reduced the age at which marriage was possible:
Skilled work, or access to relatively well-paid unskilled work in industrial areas, helped to encourage younger marriage; the absence of these opportunities in rural areas had the opposite effect. … Without access to the brighter opportunities provided by a skill, those working in agriculture, fishing, and other forms of rural day labor simply waited—their marriages were uniformly spread from their mid-twenties to their early thirties, and occasionally beyond. …
We are left then with a fairly sharp break in marriage customs around the 1890s, with almost complete social conformity before that decade and a sizeable minority of couples rejecting traditional values afterwards.
Griffin criticizes the opinion of “generations of historians” about the impact of the industrial revolution on workers’ lives:
It must be admitted that the suggestion that many of those who lived and worked their way through the industrial revolution believed their lives had been improved by that process jars with what we think we know. Generations of historians have painted the industrial revolution in relentlessly dark colors: a force which was wholly destructive for the poor, remorseless, unforgiving in its grinding down of the independent labourer of old. This, clearly, is not the assessment of those who lived through it. We have repeatedly seen that working men were extremely adept at grasping opportunities from the turbulent times in which they lived. And now we see them glorying in changes they witnessed. Surely it is time to reconsider the oft-repeated claims that the industrial revolution brought little but misery to those who did most to produce it.
The economist reader may sometime find her economic knowledge insufficient and judge a bit superficial her opinion that too much laissez-faire characterized the industrial revolution. Yet, as she admits—
Yet even with a government that did nothing, there is an uncomfortable truth that we should confront: industrialisation had remarkable power to put food on the table. And for the first generation, that generation which had expected the hunger of their own childhood to be experienced once more by their children and their grandchildren, food on the table was all that really mattered.
More than this, it was the manifestation, the effect of liberty’s dawn. Griffin writes:
Critics will argue that the material gains for most families were small. But they were just enough to drag wage-earners out of the servile submission that poverty had forced upon them since time immemorial.
Let me leave the last word to Noah Cooke, a weaver who became known as “the Weaver Poet.” In 1876, as the industrial revolution was at full speed, he wrote:
The working class never had better times than now.
READER COMMENTS
Jon Murphy
Aug 8 2023 at 6:26am
Those two sentences are very powerful. In it, she combines 1) a reminder to “check your privilege” (to use a popular phrase among the political Left) that these gains might be small for us but huge for them and 2) a description of how these small material gains represented more than just material gains but gaining freedom.
I find the story about marriage fascinating and Hayekian. We really don’t know how economic changes will manifest themselves in the daily lives of people. The Industrial Revolution both shattered the world and remade it anew.
Pierre Lemieux
Aug 8 2023 at 10:46am
Well said, Jon.
Craig
Aug 8 2023 at 11:18am
“Critics will argue that the material gains for most families were small”
And that of course understates the progress….
Ever walk through an older home and note how much smaller the door frames are? Have you ever visited a Civil War battlefield and see the hacksaw used to amputate limbs or read the account of George Washington’s ‘treatment’ on the final day of his life?
From 1800-1900 England sees life expectancies jump 10 years, heights increased 2″ and of course the improvements released labor from grinding subsistence poverty allowing further improvements, improvements that likely aren’t possible if 50%+ of the labor force is involved in agriculture.
“check your privilege”
Indeed I can’t fully fathom it and I would suggest the result is an underappreciation for the poverty of yesteryear which leads to a taking for granting for the relative prosperity of today. Fortunately my love for the topic of history gives me at least some little insight into the past to see how they dealt with things that today are dealt with much more efficiently. In fact I’d suggest my 1800 doppelgänger would be dead at my age or would have been seriously disabled by gall stones/two herniated discs.
JFA
Aug 8 2023 at 7:44am
That sounds like a fascinating look into lives of certain people, but I wonder whether you can actually extrapolate from that sample to the entire population. I’d heard of the autobiography trend before, and from what I remember just because the books weren’t meant for publication doesn’t mean they weren’t meant to be read (so the goals of the writers need to be examined when interpreting their works). Also, I imagine that those writing autobiographies are different in important ways from those not writing them. At the very least, it suggests if not some amount of disposable income used for things other than survival, then at least some amount of free time that others might not have had. So while these 350 autobiographies might give some info about how a slice of the population experienced the Industrial Revolution, I’d be wary about extrapolating too broadly.
Pierre Lemieux
Aug 8 2023 at 10:45am
JFA: Yours is of course a valid and important question. Griffin tries to answer it and provides some evidence that incomes in the working class were generally increasing: the capacity to pay for very expensive paper, the general drop in the marriage age, the liberation of sexual mores (measured by the rate of out-of-wedlock births), the fact that between half and two-thirds of the biographies’ authors remained manual workers (indicating that many of them were ordinary individuals, the other ones often becoming businessmen and rich), the poor language of many biographies, and so forth. Remember that we have other evidence too: population growth, increase in life expectancy and literacy, etc. And we have seen the same phenomenon in many of today’s undeveloped countries during the past three decades. I am sure you also know Hayek’s edited book, Capitalism and the Historians.
Roger McKinney
Aug 8 2023 at 11:34am
Thanks for the review! Can’t wait to read it. The great Angus Maddison proved the lie of tge dark industrial revolution with his superb stats. How could the IR be so dark when standards of living were rising?
Hayek wrote in Capitalism abd the Historians that the IR did increase the number of the poor because for the first time most if them didn’t starve to death.
The poor before the IR were mostly rural day laborers. They never entered big cities until the factory jobs came. Those who complained about the poor didn’t know the rural poor existed, let alone how poor they wwere. Naturally the discovery was shocking. Their ignorance and bias made them attribute the wrong causes to it.
Ghost
Aug 8 2023 at 12:35pm
The aggregate UK numbers have been researched intensively over many years. They show a clear if slow acceleration in the trend growth rate of average real earnings after about 1785.
https://www.measuringworth.com/
is a useful resource.
Mark Brady
Aug 8 2023 at 2:42pm
Three thoughts.
One of the two required books for my course on the Economic History of Europe is Emma Griffin’s A Short History of the British Industrial Revolution (2nd ed., Palgrave, 2018). I strongly recommend the book as the best introduction to the subject.
The ninth and final chapter, “Winners and Losers: Living through the Industrial Revolution” presents a very nuanced account of the progress of living standards. “Industrialisation certainly had the power to raise living standard[s], but working-class experiences were not uniform. Instead, they followed diverse patterns driven by an individual’s gender, age and occupation.”
Emma Griffin’s most recent book is Bread Winner: An Intimate History of the Victorian Economy (Yale University Press, 2020). https://reviews.history.ac.uk/review/2429 Check out this extended review!
Pierre Lemieux
Aug 8 2023 at 7:40pm
Thanks, Mark, for this recommendation. Since I fell into acquaintance with Liberty’s Dawn, Griffin’s A Short History of the British Industrial Revolution has been on my radar.
Monte
Aug 8 2023 at 5:12pm
I can’t imagine that the experience of the working class in Britain at the height of the IR was radically different from America’s. Yet, in stark contrast to the upbeat accounts we read about in Liberty’s Dawn and that of Noah Cooke, we find a completely different narrative in The Voice of Industry, “the longest running labor newspaper published during the American Industrial Revolution, and one of the most widely read of the many lively worker-run journals of the period.”
Many in the Voice spoke not only to the “tired, physically debased worker forced to endure long hours in overheated factories for a pittance”, they also bemoaned the “dramatic loss of status and independence, as control over economic life passed to large corporations.”
Did the wealth resulting from industrialization balance the losses suffered by the laboring masses, who “expressed alarm at how the profit motive directed technological change, as new ‘labor-saving’ machinery that might have been used to reduce toil was instead deployed to increase output”?
Giving witness to all accounts, we have a tale of two perspectives. We can then conclude (borrowing from Dickens) “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”
In either case, we owe a debt of gratitude not only to industry’s uncommon men and women (Micheal Farady, Thomas Edison, Mary Walton), but also to the common men and women (Eugene Debs, Terrence Powderly, Sarah Bagley) who advocated for higher wages, safer working conditions, and shorter work days.
Pierre Lemieux
Aug 8 2023 at 7:36pm
Monte: I think that, other things being equal, the testimony of a working man is more valuable than the opinion of an activist intellectual who thinks he knows what the working man should want (and is willing to give it to him good and hard, to paraphrase Mencken). Even more so, of course, if the activist intellectual hasn’t studied economics!
Monte
Aug 8 2023 at 11:39pm
Pierre,
I agree, although we can hardly refer to Sarah Bagley, a textile worker, or Terence Powderly, a machinist (who was eventually appointed to Commissioner General of Immigration by President McKinley), as activist intellectuals. For the most part, both were common laborers who petitioned for higher wages and safer working conditions on behalf of the common man.
Mark Brady
Aug 8 2023 at 9:01pm
Monte, thank you for the link to The Voice of Industry website. I suggest we have to be careful before drawing conclusions about the consequences of the industrial revolution from the pages of one periodical that was published for less than four years (1845-1848) in Lowell, Massachusetts. It would appear that this particular time and place was characterized by a labor surplus and monopsonist employers that reduced wages. I can well believe it, but in the course of the industrial revolution in both the UK and the USA, living standards rose, not fell, for most families.
Monte
Aug 9 2023 at 12:19am
Mark,
Sure. However, it’s also reasonable to conclude that the Voice reflected the general sentiments of working class men and women at the time. We know that factory jobs were grueling, hours were long, and working conditions often unsafe, leading to deadly accidents. Many of these jobs were exhaustingly repetitive and monotonous:
Craig
Aug 9 2023 at 9:33am
“We know that factory jobs were grueling, hours were long, and working conditions often unsafe, leading to deadly accidents.”
But for Lowell, MA to pop up and in the nascent stages of industrialization in the US, this employment had to beat the alternative.
Monte
Aug 9 2023 at 10:34am
Without question. I agree that the many positive effects of the IR far outweigh the hardships experienced by working class Americans. It set the stage for the 2nd Industrial Revolution and what has come to be known as the Gilded Age, a period of unparalleled economic growth in wealth and technology:
The middle and upper classes benefited immediately, but it took much longer for the common worker. It was only by organizing labor unions that they were able to gain higher wages and safer working conditions and enjoy the benefits of the IR, as well.
Mark Brady
Aug 9 2023 at 11:04pm
Monte writes, “The middle and upper classes benefited immediately, but it took much longer for the common worker. It was only by organizing labor unions that they were able to gain higher wages and safer working conditions and enjoy the benefits of the IR, as well.”
It would seem that Monte is asserting that without labor unions, the common worker would not have gained higher wages and safer working conditions? Period. But would he consider modifying his statement to assert that labor unions secured higher wages and safer working conditions for their members than they would otherwise have enjoyed?
Monte
Aug 10 2023 at 2:44am
Of course. Not only did unions secure those things for their members, the labor movement, in general, opened the country’s eyes to “the excesses of American business and the need for reform” and marked a major turning point in employee relations for all workers, union and non-union. Enter Uncle Sam:
I’m opposed to unions and government intervention per se, but I think they served their purpose during the early stages of the IR, which was to improve the overall well-being of the average worker.
Richard W Fulmer
Aug 10 2023 at 12:11pm
As I’ve written elsewhere, I believe that the source of America’s worst disgraces – slavery, the mistreatment of Native Americans, Jim Crow, eugenics – was not difference of opinion, race, sex, class, talent, wealth, or religion. Rather, it was that people divided along such lines were able to subvert government’s coercive power to advance their own ideas and interests.
Corporations’ ability to use government force to suppress union strikes is one more example.
Pierre Lemieux
Aug 10 2023 at 10:44pm
Monte: From whom/where are your quotes?
By the way, trade unions were not all pure. Let me quote from my book Who Needs Jobs:
Also interesting was the combat of trade unions against women’s work: see Sarah Skwire, “Look for the Union Label, not the Gender Role.”
Monte
Aug 10 2023 at 11:40pm
Pierre.
All of my quotes can be found in each of the links I provided in earlier comments (Voice of Industry, Wikipedia – Criticism of The Industrial Revolution, Library of Congress – America at Work).
Yes, excluding blacks from employment is an embarrassing part of their history trade unions like to sweep under the rug. Thomas Sowell, in this piece from 2016, explains:
Again, I’m no union apologist, but their intentions during the early stages of the IR were good. Of course, the road to hell and all that. Lets just say they were a necessary evil.
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