Over at Liberty Classroom, my new site, a student writes:
Hi everyone,
I’m 17 years old and need to prepare a counterattack against my history teacher. Today she portrayed the Industrial Revolution from a typical Marxist perspective. I’ve already watched your lectures on this topic and read the articles. What I need are more facts to persuade my teacher, I believe. Did the number of working hours really increase? Did the number of diseases increase or decreased during that time? Did the number of work accidents increase or decrease? What about deaths? Did real wages increase or decrease? Did real prices fall? Did child labor increase? Did the number of people who starved from hunger increase or decrease?
If I had good charts and statistics on the issues above I might be able to convince some friends and more importantly my teacher! Perhaps you as a historian know where to look for this stuff and/or can post some links.
Thank you so much!!
Our replies:
Jason Jewell:
I commend your desire to set the record straight on this topic!
When you ask about all these things and whether they increased or decreased, my immediate response is, “Compared to what?” Before the Industrial Revolution, there was no child labor in factories because . . . there were no factories! However, there was lots and lots of child labor on farms, probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 100%! The same can be said concerning working hours. Farmers often worked from sunrise to sunset before (and after) the Industrial Revolution. But no government statistician was walking around in 1750 collecting data on how long farmers worked every day, so you’re not going to be able to just show your teacher a number.
I suspect that if your teacher employs any documents to support the case that the Industrial Revolution was bad, it will be the investigations sponsored by the British Parliament in the first half of the 19th century. These are often cherry picked to put urban life in the worst possible light and not viewed in the context of life in general in that period.
The key thing to remember is that it is illegitimate to compare life in the early Industrial Revolution to life today, note that people were poor then compared to us today, and then conclude that the Industrial Revolution was bad for most people. People were poor compared to us 200 years ago because there was very little capital then compared to today, not because they were working in factories. Child labor and 16-hour work days only ended when capital accumulation made the ending of them possible.
I did link to some sources in the lecture notes that build on these points, and I encourage to read them carefully and employ the same reasoning used there in your conversations with your teacher and classmates.
Tom Woods:
I’ve written a little bit on this, on pp. 169-174 of my book The Church and the Market. And this link has a pretty good discussion of the literature.
Your teacher may not realize it, but the standard-of-living debate has essentially been won by the so-called optimists. Even outright Marxists, like E.P. Thompson, finally began to concede that no one any longer argued that everything got worse during the Industrial Revolution.
Historian Ralph Raico is also very good on this:
Be a part of our discussions. Join us at Liberty Classroom!