Hacker News Reader

Comment by civilitty | Hacker News Reader

> But for almost all new factory workers their wealth, working conditions and working hours were a huge step up from their previous occupations as sheep herders, unskilled agri-labourers and subsistence farmers (with side hustles in proto-industrial home work).

That’s the exact opposite of reality. They worked 12-16 hour shifts for unlivable wages, crammed several families per room, and lived without any of the infrastructure that makes high densities livable like modern sewer systems. It was the age of cholera and truly awful living conditions.

People didn’t move into the cities because it was better for them but because industrialization forced them to. Peasants didn’t start asking for worker’s rights until the industrial revolution because it was so much worse than working conditions in subsistence farming.

View on HN

From what I recall reading, there was a grow in population during XIX century that to this day is still hard to explain by historians. A lot of that surplus population couldn't live off the land, since it was already at capacity in most of the Western Europe, so they moved to cities, hoping to find a living there. This resulted in "infernal cities" of XIX century, as described by Dickers, Zola etc - people dying of starvation of right on the streets of London or Paris, hordes of underage prostitutes roaming the streets etc.

> A lot of that surplus population couldn't live off the land, since it was already at capacity in most of the Western Europe, so they moved to cities, hoping to find a living there.

Weren't inclosure acts a big reason why people moved to the cities, at least in England?

A combination of enclosures (which had be going on for centuries and peaked in the 18th century with the Inclosure Act), and the Agricultural Revolution which greatly reduced the labour required in the fields (so if you had transitioned from working the commons to getting wages for working private land, you just stopped getting enough work).

So you had industrialists setting up factories needing cheap labour to run the machines, and a mass exodus of the countryside population to the cities desperate for work. Hello Dickens.

This is how you get an explosion in petty crime, disease, poverty, hulks, and eventually, transportation of the troublesome poor to Australia.

The industrial revolution was so destabilising to society that colonialism was a very convenient solution. Just go somewhere else, shoot the natives who resist, and the poors can have that land.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com