The conditions of the English working classes after the Industrial Revolution were appalling, and their situation did not improve for a long time. Indeed, when I toured Europe in the sixties, as a young man just out of college, I was shocked by the English people I saw on the ferry across the English Channel. They were the unhealthiest people I had ever seen.
But the conditions at the beginning of the 19th Century were almost beyond belief. Before the revolution, the English countryside was populated by self-reliant farmers who also had cottage industries, quite often weaving businesses. There were a still large oak forests were they could hunt, fish and graze their livestock. Wildlife was abundant.
But the enclosure movement changed that forever. From 1770 to 1830, 3,280 bills were passed by Parliament by which 6 million acres of open field, meadows, wetlands, and forests were put into private hands and improved, which made their owners wealthy. But evicted farmers could no longer make a living.
They moved to the industrial cities and lived in slums where “the loss of life from filth and bad ventilation are greater than the loss of life from death or wounds in which the country has been engaged in modern times.” People (including small children) worked 14 to 16 hours a day, in horrible, dangerous conditions for wages that were not enough to buy food. Life expectancy for all of England was 40, for the laborers it was no more than 18. Fifty-seven percent died before the age of five.
The defining achievement of the Industrial Revolution was the creation of a society in which people were reduced to a choice between wage labor and starvation.
Taken from Rebels Against the Future, a history of the Luddites, by Kirkpatrick Sale.
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