The Industrial Revolution, which began in roughly the second half of the 1700s and extended through the early 1800s, was a time of enormous change in Europe and America. The invention of new technologies, from mechanized looms for weaving and the steam locomotive to improvements in smelting iron, transformed what had largely been rural societies of farmers and artisans who made handmade products. Many people moved from the countryside to fast-growing towns, where they worked in factories full of machines.
While the industrial revolution created economic growth and offered new opportunities, this progress came with significant drawbacks, ranging from damage to the environment and risks to health and safety to the squalid living conditions of the people. workers and their families. Historians say many of these problems persisted and developed during the Second Industrial Revolution, another period of rapid change that began in the late 1800s.
Here are some of the most important negative effects of the industrial revolution.
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1. Horrible living conditions for workers
As cities developed during the Industrial Revolution, there was not enough housing for all the new residents, who were stuck in squalid inner city neighborhoods as more affluent residents fled to the suburbs. In the 1830s, Dr William Henry Duncan, a public health official in Liverpool, England, studied living conditions and discovered that a third of the town’s population lived in cellars in houses, in dirt floor and without ventilation or sanitation. Up to 16 people lived in one room and shared a single powder room. Lack of clean water and gutters overflowing with sewage from basement cesspools have left workers and their families vulnerable to infectious diseases such as cholera.
2. Poor nutrition
In his 1832 study entitled “Moral and physical condition of the working classes employed in the manufacture of cotton in Manchester,” Physician and social reformer James Phillips Kay described the meager diet of low-wage workers in the British industrial city, who subsisted on a breakfast of tea or coffee with a little bread and a meal of noon usually consisting of boiled potatoes, melted lard and butter, sometimes with a few pieces of fried fatty bacon mixed in. After completing the work, workers could still have some tea, “often mixed with alcohol” and some bread, or oatmeal and potatoes. Due to malnutrition, Kay wrote, the workers frequently suffered from stomach and bowel problems, lost weight, and had “pale, leaden-colored or yellow-colored” skin.
3. A stressful and unsatisfying lifestyle
The workers who came from the countryside to the cities had to adapt to a very different rhythm of existence, with little personal autonomy. They had to arrive at the factory’s whistle, or else they would be locked out and lose their wages, or even be forced to pay fines.
Once at work, they could not move freely or take a break if they needed to, as it might require stopping a machine. Unlike artisans in rural towns, their days often consisted of doing repetitive tasks and under continuous pressure to keep pace – “a faster pace, more supervision, less pride,” as Peter N. Stearns explains. , historian at George Mason University. As Stearns describes in his 2013 book The industrial revolution in the history of the world, when the day’s work was over, they didn’t have much time or energy left for entertainment. To make matters worse, city officials often banned festivals and other activities they once enjoyed in rural villages. Instead, workers often spent their free time at the neighborhood tavern, where alcohol allowed them to escape the boredom of their lives.
4. Dangerous workplaces
Without a lot of safety regulations, industrial revolution factories could be horribly dangerous. As Peter Capuano details in his 2015 book Changing hands: industry, evolution and reconfiguration of the Victorian body, workers ran the constant risk of losing a hand in the machine. A contemporary newspaper article described the grisly injuries suffered in 1830 by carpenter Daniel Buckley, whose left hand was “caught and lacerated, and his fingers crushed” before his colleagues could shut down the equipment. He eventually died from the trauma.
The mines of the time, which supplied the coal necessary for the operation of the steam engines, also suffered terrible accidents. The 2018 book by David M. Turner and Daniel Blackie Disability in the industrial revolution describes a gas explosion at a coal mine that left 36-year-old James Jackson with severe burns to his face, neck, chest, hands and arms, as well as internal injuries. He was in such a horrible condition that he needed opium to cope with the excruciating pain. After six weeks of recovery, remarkably, a doctor decided he was fit to return to work, but probably with permanent scars from the ordeal.
5. Child labor
While children worked before the Industrial Revolution, rapid factor growth created such demand that poor youth and orphans were torn from London hospices and housed in factory dormitories, while they worked long hours. hours and were deprived of education. Forced to perform dangerous adult jobs, children often suffered horrific fates.
John Brown’s exhibition A memoir by Robert Blincoe, an orphan boy, published in 1832, describes a 10-year-old girl named Mary Richards whose apron got stuck in the machinery of a textile factory. “In an instant, the poor girl was drawn by an overwhelming force and rushed to the ground,” Brown wrote. “She uttered the most heartbreaking cries.”
Beverly Lemire, professor of history at the University of Alberta, sees “the systematic and sustained exploitation of child labor, the use of which catalyzed industrial production” as the revolution’s worst negative effect. industrial.
6. Discrimination against women
The Industrial Revolution helped establish patterns of gender inequality in the workplace that lasted into the eras that followed. Laura L. Frader, retired professor of history at Northeastern University and author of The Industrial Revolution: A Documented History, notes that factory owners often paid women only half of what men received for the same job, based on the flawed assumption that women did not need to support families and worked only for “pocket money” that a husband could give them to pay for non-essential personal items.
Discrimination and stereotypes against female workers continued during the Second Industrial Revolution. “The myth that women had ‘nimble fingers’ and that they could handle repetitive, mindless work better than men resulted in the displacement of men into white collar jobs such as office work, and assigning these jobs to women after the 1870s, when the typewriter was introduced, ”says Frader.
While office work was less dangerous and better paid, “it locked women into another category of ‘female work’ that was hard to escape,” says Frader.
7. Environmental damage
Pollution from copper factories in Cornwall, England, as shown in an 1887 engraving.
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The industrial revolution was fueled by the burning of coal, and large industrial cities began to pump large amounts of pollution into the atmosphere. The concentration of airborne particles in London increased dramatically between 1760 and 1830, as this graph from Our World In Data illustrates. The pollution in Manchester was so horrendous that writer Hugh Miller noted “the sordid gloom of the atmosphere above it” and described “the countless chimneys [that] appear tall and pale in the brown haze, each carrying their own pennant of darkness.
Air pollution continued to increase in the 1800s, causing respiratory illness and higher death rates in areas that burned more coal. Worse yet, the burning of fossil fuels pumped carbon into the atmosphere. A study published in 2016 in Nature suggests that human-induced climate change began as early as the 1830s.
Despite all these ills, the Industrial Revolution had positive effects, such as creating economic growth and increasing the availability of goods. It also contributed to the rise of a thriving middle class that seized some of the economic power once held by the aristocrats, and led to the rise of skilled jobs in industry.
