The beginning of the industrial revolution is a very convenient point in time: the readers can associate the industrial revolution with poverty and guess that everyone lived a happy life before that. I think everyone knows that the conditions for the workers were bad - but guess why they became workers in the first place? Why didn’t the people stay on their farms and lived a good life there? Of course because they didn’t own farms, and their lives were already miserable before the industrial revolution.
People didn‘t stay on their farms because there were big land reforms in the late 18th and early 19th century. In places serfdom was abolished, in England common land was privatised. The were loads of people who suddenly had no means of surviving and capitalists suddenly had a lot of desperate workers ready to be exploited.
The beginning of the industrial revolution is a very convenient point in time: the readers can associate the industrial revolution with poverty and guess that everyone lived a happy life before that. I think everyone knows that the conditions for the workers were bad - but guess why they became workers in the first place? Why didn’t the people stay on their farms and lived a good life there? Of course because they didn’t own farms, and their lives were already miserable before the industrial revolution.
maybe wanna brush up on history.
People didn‘t stay on their farms because there were big land reforms in the late 18th and early 19th century. In places serfdom was abolished, in England common land was privatised. The were loads of people who suddenly had no means of surviving and capitalists suddenly had a lot of desperate workers ready to be exploited.