A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium (42 page)

‘In my establishment in New Lanark, mechanical power and operations superintended by about 2,000 young persons and adults…now complete as much work as 60 years before would have required the entire working population of Scotland,’ according to Robert Owen, the industrialist and future socialist, in 1815.
⁶⁹

He may have been exaggerating somewhat, but he was hammering home an important truth. Changes were occurring in the ways human beings produced things on a scale that had not occurred since hunter-gatherers first took up agriculture 10,000 years earlier. At first these changes were concentrated in the north of England, the Lowlands of Scotland and parts of Belgium. But they were soon to shape developments everywhere.

They involved a series of interconnected innovations: the employment of complex machines; the making of tools from hardened steel instead of wood, easily bent brass or easily broken cast iron; the smelting of steel in coal furnaces, not charcoal ones which had to be moved as local forests were chopped down; and the use of coal to provide, via the steam engine, a massive new source of motive power to turn machinery.

The combination of the new machines, the new metallurgy and the new energy source increased immeasurably what people could produce. It also cut to a fraction the time it took people and goods to move from one place to another.

In the late 18th century it still took two weeks to travel from Boston to Philadelphia, a ship could be stuck in harbour for a fortnight or more waiting for the wind to change, and famines regularly occurred because of the difficulty of moving foodstuffs from one area to another. Wheeled vehicles had been known in Eurasia and Africa for more than 3,000 years, but could not be used on rough or boggy terrain. The mule train was often a more important means of transporting goods than the cart. In Europe mud roads would often have a stone parapet down the middle to make movement easier for horses or mules but not for vehicles. In Mogul India bulk transport on land relied on vast herds of oxen, each with baggage on its back.
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Now vast armies of labourers using relatively cheap steel picks and shovels were put to work building canals and the first solid, smooth-surfaced roads to link major towns. Mine owners discovered that they could speed up the movement of coal by using vehicles with grooved wheels on rails—at first made of wood but soon of iron. Engineers applied the steam engine to powering ships and the rail vehicles as well as factories. In 1830 the first passenger train ran from Manchester to Liverpool.
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Human beings could suddenly move at a speed they had scarcely imagined. Goods made in one city could be in another in a couple of hours instead of a couple of days. There was the potential for armies to move from one end of a country to the other overnight.

There was also accelerating change in agriculture, with the final elimination of the peasantry in Britain through enclosures and with the near-universal adoption of the previous century’s new crops and new forms of cultivation—the turnip, the potato, wheat instead of oats or barley, new grasses, a more efficient plough and improved rotation of crops. The effect was to increase food output, but also to force unprecedented numbers of people to seek employment as wage labourers, either on the capitalist farms or in the new industries.

A class of a new sort

There was a transformation of the working and living conditions of millions of people. They began to crowd into towns and cities on a scale unknown in history. So long as industry relied upon charcoal as a fuel and water and wind for power, much of it was confined to rural areas. Coal and steam changed this. The modern factory with its giant chimneys began to dominate the landscape of the area around Manchester in Lancashire and Glasgow in Scotland. By the 1830s Britain was the most urban society humanity had known. In 1750 there had been only two cities with more than 50,000 inhabitants—London and Edinburgh. By 1851 there were 29 and the majority of people lived in towns.
⁷²

The transformation to modern industrial production was not instantaneous. As in many Third World countries today, the growth of major industry was accompanied by a massive growth of small industry based upon ‘sweated labour’. The industrial revolution in England took root first in textiles and mining. But in textiles it was cotton spinning that was concentrated in factories, employing mainly women and children, while weaving was still done by handloom workers in rural areas. Their numbers increased massively, as did the numbers employed in many pre-industrial urban trades. And there was a huge increase in the mining workforce, usually based in villages rather than towns, albeit villages located by rivers, canals or railway lines.

People had their lives transformed as they became increasingly dependent on cash relations with the capitalist class for a livelihood. The burgeoning number of independent handloom weavers in the 1790s was turned into a desperate mass of people barely able to scratch a livelihood in the 1840s by competition from new factories using power-looms.

There has been long discussion among economic historians on ‘the standard of living’ question—on whether people’s lives deteriorated on entering industry and the city. However, much of the discussion is beside the point. People moved to the city—as they move to Third World cities like Bombay or Jakarta today—because it seemed the only alternative to misery in the countryside. But the city could not provide a secure and comfortable future. People might have skills one day which, with luck, would enable them to sell their labour power, but they could find these skills redundant the next—as the handloom workers did. Change had usually been slow, if painful, in the rural economy of the early 18th century. In the urban economy of the 19th century it was often rapid and devastating. Production was for the markets, and markets could expand and contract at breathtaking speed. During booms people would abandon old occupations and village homes for the lure of seemingly ‘easy money’ in the city. During slumps they would find themselves stranded, no longer with a small piece of land to provide a supply of food, however meagre, if they lost their jobs.

Sections of the new workers did acquire skills to stabilise their situation for periods of time. But even they often had to struggle bitterly against attempts by employers to worsen their conditions, especially when trade slumped or new technologies were available. And there was always a sizeable section of the urban population living in ‘pauperdom’—too sick, too old or too unskilled to make it even into the world of semi-permanent work.

This new labour force was the source of massive wealth. But it was wealth for others. Even the statisticians who claim to show a rise in the living standards of the majority of the working population cannot pretend that it measured up to the advances which occurred in productivity. While the new working class had to cope somehow, living just above or below subsistence level, the sort of people who inhabit, say, a Jane Austen novel, wined, dined, hunted, courted each other and supped tea in beautiful surroundings. In the hungry years after 1815 some 12 percent of national output went as interest to holders of the national debt.

Those who lived off its sweat saw the new workforce as presenting a continual problem—how to make it work as they wished. Workers brought up in the countryside were used to the rhythm of the seasons, to short periods of intense labour interspersed with longer periods with opportunities for relaxation. They would not only take Sunday off but also, if they could, Monday (known as ‘Saint Monday’ in England and ‘Blue Monday’ in Germany). Breaking such habits became an obsession for the factory owners. The machines had to be worked from sunrise to sunset, and longer still once the invention of gaslights made night work possible. Clocks installed in factories were there to hammer home the new saying, ‘Time is money’.
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Human nature itself had to be changed so that people would come to think there was nothing strange about spending all their daylight hours in a closed room without seeing the sun, the trees and flowers or hearing the birds.

The propertied classes believed any attempt to alleviate poverty would undermine the new discipline. If poor people could obtain any sort of income without working, they would become ‘idle, lazy, fraudulent and worthless’, lose ‘all habits of prudence, of self respect and self restraint’ and develop a ‘spirit of laziness and insubordination’.
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Thomas Malthus had conveniently provided a ‘proof’ that the living standards of the poor could not be improved. They would simply have more children until they were worse off than before, he said. Jean-Baptiste Say, a populariser of Adam Smith’s ideas, had also ‘proved’ that unemployment was impossible in a genuinely free market. If people could not find work it was because they demanded wages higher than the market could bear. Poor relief, by offering a cushion against destitution, simply encouraged this disastrous practice. The only way to deal with poverty was to make the poor poorer! Conditions had to be such that the ‘able bodied’ unemployed would do virtually anything rather than apply for relief. The Poor Law Amendment Act, passed in Britain in 1834, set out to establish these conditions by limiting relief to those who were prepared to be confined in prison-like workhouses—nicknamed ‘Bastilles’ by those they threatened.

It was not only the physical lives of the workforce that changed with industrialisation. There was also a change in mentality. Life in crowded conurbations produced very different attitudes from those in isolated villages. It could lead to loneliness and despair as well as poverty. But it could also lead to new feelings of class community, as people found themselves living and working alongside unprecedented numbers of other people with the same problems and in the same conditions. What is more, it gave people a greater awareness of the wider world than was typical in the countryside. Workers were much more likely to be able to read and write than their peasant forebears, and through reading and writing to know about distant places and events.

The new world of work brought with it a new form of family and a radical change in the position of women. The peasant wife had always played a productive role, but it was usually one subordinated to her husband, who was responsible for most transactions with society outside the family. By contrast, in the first flood of the industrial revolution it was women (and children) who were concentrated in their hundreds and thousands in factories. Conditions were horrible—so horrible that many dreamed of finding a man who could free them from the double toil of sweated labour and childcare. But for the first time women also had money of their own and a degree of independence from husbands or lovers. The ‘millgirls’ of Lancashire were famed for standing up for themselves, as were the
grisettes
of the east end of Paris for taunting the police and challenging soldiers. In revolutionising production, capitalism was also beginning to overturn attitudes which had helped sustain the oppression of women for thousands of years.

Objects and subjects

The new class of industrial workers did not simply suffer. It soon showed it could fight back. In the 17th and 18th centuries the concentration of certain artisan trades in towns and cities had been expressed in the role played by apprentices and journeymen in the English Revolution, by the ‘mechanics’ of New York and Pennsylvania in the American Revolution, and, above all, by the
sans-culottes
in the French Revolution. Now people were being concentrated on a much greater scale, in huge workplaces grouped in conurbations of unprecedented size. It provided them with possibilities of resistance greater than those open to any previous exploited class—and it was resistance that could encourage the growth of ideas opposed to existing society in its entirety.

The radical agitator John Thelwell had observed in 1796 what the future might hold:

His prophecy was confirmed within two decades. A new wave of agitation began, fitfully, in Britain towards the end of the Napoleonic Wars. It was eventually to achieve greater dimensions and to be sustained over a longer period than any wave of protest before. It arose from various currents—the radical artisans of London who were heirs of the movement of the 1790s; the stocking maker and weaver ‘Luddites’ whose wages were being forced down by the introduction of machines; and the illegal trade unions of skilled workers, cotton spinners and farm labourers (whose ‘Tolpuddle Martyr’ leaders were transported to Australia). The struggle went through different phases—machine breaking, mass demonstrations like that attacked by the gentry militia at ‘Peterloo’ in Manchester in 1819, big strikes, agitation for the vote alongside the middle class in 1830-32, attacks on workhouses after 1834, protests at the establishment of the police forces designed to keep a grip on working class neighbourhoods. These struggles threw up a succession of leaders who organised, agitated, propagandised and began, in some cases, to turn certain of the ideas of Adam Smith and David Ricardo against the capitalists. The movement also had newspapers of its own like the
Black Dwarf
and the
Poor Man’s Guardian
—papers whose owners faced repeated arrest as they reported the agitation and challenged capitalists and landowners alike.

The Chartists

In the late 1830s these different streams of agitation flowed together to give rise to the Chartist movement. Here was something never before seen in history—a movement of the people whose labour kept society going, organised from below, not just as a one-off riot or revolt, but a permanent organisation, with its own democratic structures. Its principal paper, the
Northern Star
, founded in Leeds in 1837, soon had a circulation as great as the main ruling class paper, the
Times
, and its articles were read out loud for the illiterate in workshops and pubs in every industrial area.