The Rest Is History - 108. The Industrial Revolution

Episode Date: October 14, 2021

Did the industrial revolution really improve people’s lives? And why was Britain first to industrialise? Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook are joined by Emma Griffin, professor of modern history and author of Liberty's Dawn: A People's History of the Industrial Revolution. *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Were we required to characterise this age of ours by any single epithet, we should be tempted to call it the mechanical age, the age of machinery. Nothing is now done directly or by hand, all is by rule and calculated contrivance. For the simplest operation, some helps and accompaniments, some cunning, abbreviating process is in readiness. On every hand, the living artisan is driven from his workshop

to make room for a speedier inanimate one. The shuttle drops from the fingers of the weaver and falls into iron fingers that ply it faster. Now that was the 19th century historian Thomas Carlyle writing in 1829. Tom Holland, the Industrial Revolution, even for somebody who spends all his time thinking about Christianity and the classical world, this is a pretty seismic subject, isn't it? Do you not think it's kind of the biggest?

I mean, I think it's certainly the biggest topic that we've covered so far which is why we're going to try and do it in 50 minutes but i mean in terms of the of its impact on us on the planets on the on us and on the planet and actually it's interesting because i remember uh 10 years ago listening to an in our time on the industrial revolution it was a two parter and the reason that i remember it is that um melvin bragg got into a tremendous row with one of the contributors and basically it was about whether the industrial revolution was was due to kind of vast impersonal forces or whether it was due to um great men inventing things the genius of the english inventor no but specifically the genius of northern working class people like Melvin Bragg. And he was very cross at any implication that it hadn't been down to them.

And at one point was smashing, bringing his face down on the table and shouting rubbish. We should do more of that in our own podcast. It's a fantastic listen. And I listened to it again last night in preparation for this. And it was just as entertaining as i remembered but the thing that struck me was that there wasn't a mention of of global warming or um yeah the kind of environmental impact of the industrial revolution so i think that that within the past decade our sense of how important the industrial revolution is has sped up so i'm very very very excited about having someone who can answer that question you know are we right in thinking that the industrial revolution probably since the agrarian revolution is the single

biggest event in human history do we have someone who can answer that question we need we need a top top we've had top historians before we need a top top historian so we need somebody who's professor of modern british history at uea who is editor of the historical journal who is the president of the royal historical so basically it doesn't get topper than that that of the historical journal who is the president of the royal historical so basically it doesn't get topper than that that's the no somebody who's won history and we have that person it's Emma Griffin Emma Griffin you are the victor of history welcome to the podcast hello so Tom you have a question don't you well I do basically it's it's a reformulation of the question that I was just asking I think it's Vessi Dutrois.

Dutrois. Dutrois. And he is quoting Hobsbawm, who said the Industrial Revolution was probably the most important event in world history. Was he right, Emma? Is he right? Well, I mean, I think all historians are going to try and make some big claims about the particular corner of the past that they study and claim it to be extremely important um is the i mean i think the industrial revolution is phenomenally important um and i do think it's i i think i'm like a lot of what any historian is looking at um you can you can truly say the industrial revolution is a turning point in human history it's it's even a

turning point um as you're saying i mean and that's enough i mean a turning point in human history. It's even a turning point, as you're saying, I mean, that's enough! I mean, a turning point in human, a genuine turning point in human history is amazing. It also is a turning point in planetary history, I think we're now understanding that in terms of the Earth it's also a turning point. I think it is the most important, you know, it's a huge significance. Why is it a huge significance before the industrial revolution most people in agricultural societies and let's not think about hunter-gatherer societies you've already mentioned there's the you know the switch to agriculture which is um you know the one

that's prior i mean nobody goes from hunter-gathering to industrial revolution so let's just compare ourselves with these agricultural societies that existed previous to the industrial revolution everybody's poor you have a few really rich people it doesn't matter whether you're looking at a rich state like uh you know renaissance italy or you're looking at the greeks the romans these hugely successful empires or if you're looking at a much less um developed nation even in these richest of pre-industrial nations, most people are poor. You have a few very rich people and everybody else has one set of clothes,

one pair of shoes, if they have any shoes, a lot of people won't have shoes, obviously, one set of clothes and a constant anxiety and struggle to put enough food on the table for everybody in the household. That is what changes when we have industrial revolutions. We go from situations of plentitude, which doesn't mean that every person, every household in every industrial nation has abundant food, because we know things like food banks exist and we know

there's a problem in getting food to people who need it, but as societies and as nations we do have abundance, we have switched this situation that humans have known since the beginning of time of scarcity and moved to one of abundance and plenitude and that's really a phenomenal change and one that's really worth talking about so if we go back to the absolute basics um i mean one of the weird things with industrial revolution is it seems so vague and such a sort of amorphous process. When does it start, would you say? What's the... 1700, 1600? You know, what's the kickoff?

That's brilliant. So, OK, so we've got this big shift in our human existence from this kind of experience of scarcity to an experience of more abundance. When does it happen? Well, it's not one of those revolutions that happens on the 27th of january in a particular year it's a very different kind of revolution that takes a long time to happen it starts in britain um so we can we can we can pinpoint it on the globe in a particular place it spreads out from britain out to other parts of Europe, to North America, Australia.

I mean, that is still accepted, is it? That Britain is the home of the Industrial Revolution? Because I know that revisionism claims every aspect of history. Is there any kind of move to say, well, actually, it's not really Britain? No, I think everyone's happy to accept that it starts not only in europe but that it actually does start in britain and that hasn't been revised i think what where the revisionism comes in is is is people saying um at that moment it could have been another part of the world that did industrialize there's always been this hypothetical

counterfact it could have been china could it could it have been could it have been china do you think well i think um it was rather unlikely to have been china because Could it have been? Could it have been China, do you think? Well, I think it was rather unlikely to have been China because I think actually Britain was different from other parts of Europe and certainly different from other parts of the world. So in terms of revisionism, I'm going to say no. I don't think there are many people claiming today that the Industrial Revolution might have happened, that the Industrial Revolution did actually happen somewhere else first.

I think everyone is happy to accept that. The debates are that it might have happened somewhere else. And we can come back to those if you like, Tom. I'm not entirely convinced that it could have happened somewhere else. But it's only a might have, not a it actually did. So we're looking at Britain when does it start I mean I think we're looking at the um by the very end of the 18th century it's clear that things in Britain Britain is developing and the economy is operating in slightly different ways to its European neighbors um so that's kind of there are clear signs by the end of the century by the 1820s and by the 1830s I think it's very clear that the British economy is operating in a different way. So I'd kind of, I'd want to put it somewhere between the late 18th and the early 19th century.

But it has very long routes. You've gone later than I was expecting. I thought you would say 1700 or even earlier, actually. Well, it depends what you think the Industrial Revolution is. So for me, the Industrial Revolution is, I mean, well, let's start with the pre-industrial societies how do they work well everybody needs something to eat so you you grow your food in addition we all need stuff particularly in the northern northern cold climates we need clothes we need shoes we need buildings we want bits of transport to get us around and about we want to ride horses so we

need saddles so we want the stuff as well and so it's that manufacturing is where the industrial revolution happens it's on making the stuff rather than on the food um but that stuff all the other things that also actually has to come out of the ground so if it if you want to wear a leather pair of shoes that's agriculture because you need you know get your leather off the animal skins if you want to wear woolen clothes that's sheep but you're getting your clothes off if you want to wear um any other kind of clothes linen linen is grown cotton is grown they're all exactly it all comes out of the soil so your buildings that's all comes out of wood that you've chopped down. Your fuel, that all comes from, again, the woods that you need, that you need to maintain woodland. So everything, everything comes back to the soil.

Everything comes back to the earth. And that's why everyone's poor, because there's never enough good things coming out of your local environment for everybody to be rich and have this life of plenitude so it's when we start to do things differently and we start to use other people's resources so cotton from all other parts of the world and we start to use things like coal and steam engines so we're no longer dependent on wood we can just shove coal in later in the society in the century people are using electricity from all sorts of different ways is when you start to kind of become far less dependent on your local environment and when you have these these kind of much more complex economies um with much bigger tentacles that stretch across the globe and you can use other people's resources for me that's what the industrial revolution is about

that is all kind of happening around the 19th century. So, I mean, I'm sure this must be a naive question, but if that's the case, why does it not happen earlier? Why, for instance, does the Roman Empire not industrialise or the Chinese Empire? I mean, these are entities that have very, very kind of long tentacles. Why? I mean, is this a kind of inevitable process? Is it luck? What is it that lights the spark? Right. Well, that's it. So obviously, there have been other rich nations in the past, but they're still basically doing the same thing as I'm describing pre-industrial societies mostly do. do almost everything that is consumed or used comes out of the local environment in some way

probably because transport just even if you've got an empire you can't afford to get stuff from one part of the world to another using these primitive transport techniques so you're kind of dependent on your own little part of the world um and having an empire being rich doesn't necessarily change any of that so what's going on in brit And again, it probably comes back to the China question as well. Why was it in Britain rather than in China or somewhere else? Because Britain all through the 18th century is working really, really, really hard to do things differently, to make a little bit more money. It's a very commercial nation. It's a very commercial nation um it's a it's a very commercialized nation already

and so people are no longer we've moved a very long way away from a peasant society where most people have their little plot of land and they're literally growing and producing everything i mean you know in other parts of europe at this point people are growing the flax that will make their clothes so they're not just growing their own agriculture they're growing what they're going to dress themselves in and all their fuel is coming from their own local plot of land so this is not the case in England at this point we've got away from that kind of peasant manufacture that kind of everybody with their little plot producing what they need for the next winter the next 12 months kind of scenario and we've got people with much larger farms

they employ lots of workers the tasks have all been subdivided and Britain has got an empire it's pulling lots of raw resources raw materials in from other parts of the world it's got good woolen industry we don't have enough wool so it's importing lots of wool we're importing lots of flax and hemp because we want to produce linens but we don't grow enough material for that we're starting to import lots of cotton that's one of the big stories importing more and more cotton so it's already a very sophisticated it's a very sophisticated economy for what is still a traditional economy it's very sophisticated economy and it's it's traveled a long distance away from the kind of peasant origins of agricultural societies so we had a couple some questions from listeners about the origins of the industrial revolution so

um you mentioned the empire stephan jensen um friend of the show always asking questions asked uh too many questions on our watergate episodes according to be told off give him another one uh he's asked a question about concentration and scale um enabled by the empire i mean britain wasn't the only country with an empire i mean obviously spain had had a colossal empire tons of gold in the 16th century and had failed to industrialize. So what is it about, or is there anything about Britain's empire that makes it? Also, if I could just ask about the Netherlands, which is an even more sophisticated economy than Britain's.

Tom is obsessed with the Netherlands. That's a great name. Holland is obviously a fantastic name. So, I mean, that's what i'm really interested in is why does it happen in britain and not say in the netherlands which in the 17th century is a much more sophisticated economy is that you know and the spanish thing so so why does it not why is it not spain why is it not the netherlands why is it britain yes lovely all brilliant questions and hello stefan nice to, nice to get a question

from you, I'm glad the Industrial Revolution interests you as much as other topics that have been discussed on the programme I think it's a really empires abound world history is full of empires it's not full of nations that have industrial revolutions

particularly the world's first industrial revolution so empires in and of themselves are not causes of the industrial revolution but the empire does play a really big role in why britain is able to industrialize and i think it comes back again in some ways it does also link back to the why not Netherlands you know why not um why not Portugal and Spain they had these huge empires I mean you know what was going on there well empires provide raw materials and they you can flow these raw materials from other parts of the world into your country and that's what they've always done and the the Portuguese and the Spanish did that and the Romans were doing that

and the Chinese have done that with empires as well. You can bring raw materials back into your nation and that's useful and that's enriching. But it's not what an industrial revolution is. An industrial revolution is when you have a completely different approach to raw materials and to the things that you want so it's not just having the raw materials that's going to be significant it's something that's

innate in Britain and something that's kind of internal indigenous to Britain in that Britain doesn't want to have gold so that people can build a country house and then go and retire into the country and live a life of luxury and nobility and idleness. The whole point of being rich and having these trading networks that Britain has got in the 18th century is to grow rich and to make more money and to invest and to grow. And not to retire from business, but to develop the business and to enrich, to just carry on this process. And that kind of is up and down the economy at all levels. Everybody's kind of working, most people are working for wages. The point is to earn a bit more and to just to accumulate money, accumulate wealth, accumulate capital. And that's not true of imperial nations necessarily. Some people simply accumulate because they then want to put it on display,

not because they want to make it work. So I think that's part of the story. What's very interesting in the case of Britain is, I don't think it was having the empire that caused us to industrialise, but because we are this different kind of nation that wanted to make profit at all points through the 18th century, what we do with our empire is completely different. We don't just get gold and hoard it.

We get cotton, which is just a raw plant. And we're importing masses of... It would be useless if you didn't have anything you could do with it. What the British are doing are importing that raw material and then manufacturing it and then selling it across the rest of the globe and making a really healthy profit. And that form of behaviour is very different to the Empire. So the Empire is massively useful for Britain.

It wasn't the cause. Britain turns around the idea of what you do with an empire and just uses it in a very different way. I would say that's how I see it. So you're sort of saying it comes back to, I mean, we had a couple of questions, for example, Etienne Caswell asks about government policy. Are you basically saying it's a question of political

and cultural kind of climate that drives the... So that's quite old-fashioned, right? It's quite kind of, I don't want to say Weberian, but you're sort of saying... Well, it's Braggian. You're not going to... It's our top inventors. Stop citing our rival, Tom.

That's not right. So are you saying it's kind of Protestant work ethic, polite and commercial people, that kind of stuff, basically? Well, that's an interesting way of thinking about it. I think it is political and cultural. I think Britain is culturally different and behaving in a culturally different way um i think that a lot of those arguments in the past about the protestant worth ethic and the polite and commercial people um i think a lot of those are very approving um of this particular ethic and very unquestioning and very uncritical

and historically taken as a natural good that if you were innovating and if you were profit-making, then you were on the side of progress in some kind of way and these are good things. And I think part of our understanding over the past decade or more with global warming and the kind of the environmental impacts is I don't think we've got such an easy and relaxed attitude now that industrialization is naturally a good thing. And therefore that the people who are driving forward are naturally heroes and benefactors and good people in some kind of way. I think we have much, I would, I probably have a much more ambivalent interpretation of whether this is a good or a bad thing.

But I do think it is cultural. I do think, I mean, another alternative way of putting it is capitalism, is that we're a very capital, and again, I mean, do you think capitalism is a good thing or a bad thing? I mean, some people like it, some people don't. But we are very capital oriented, wage oriented, money oriented, accumulating. I mean, I don't know if these are good things or bad things, but we were doing more commercial money-making activity across the board than other parts of Europe at this time.

But Emma just just to go back to the netherlands because he's obsessed i told you i did fudge it i didn't answer you about the netherlands they are protestant they are a commercial people they have an empire with raw materials they're very keen on getting richer in reinvesting so why why do they not have the industrial i mean is it is it down to raw materials is it about coal they don't have coal yeah so is it is it basically is is is that the the key do you think okay so i i would yes yes so let's go back to the netherlands so it is something to do with i mean i guess the coal is like the empire um lots of people have coal

having coal is not enough to give you an industrial revolution and in our own case the coal had always been there i mean it had literally been there for millions of years um so having coal and china has coal and india has coal and russia has coal other places have coal and they didn't industrialize at this time so um it's not the having of the coal i think that's important um what we're doing in britain at this particular time is trying to get the coal out of the ground which is technically really difficult so you need a fairly skilled workforce you need a capitalized economy you need people with deep pockets who can take risky investments. You need skilled workers who will put their lives at risk trying to do this. You need entrepreneurs.

You need inventors who will risk trying to come up with a new way of doing this. That's just to get the coal out of the ground. Then you've got to make the coal do something useful, which means inventing some kind of steam engine and making the steam engine do what you do. So there are these thousands and thousands and thousands of intermediate intermediary steps there's the coal over there we had it other people had it too what we also had was this additional thing this desire to make a profit which meant we worked really hard to do something useful with that coal so let's go back to the Netherlands what's going on in the Netherlands well they don't have the coal so it was always

going to be more of a challenge but I'm never entirely convinced by arguments that suggest you need this resource or that resource because the whole point is every prior to industrialization every economy is really working with the resources that it does have and if you're really ready to do things in a different way you'll usually there'll be something there I mean it doesn't hold it doesn't hold the netherlands back today the fact that it doesn't have any coal there are other routes there are other routes and if the netherlands had really been at that moment in the 17th century where it could have done things differently it would have done we would have had a completely different industrial revolution which didn't involve coal but involved something else instead.

They just didn't want it. They just didn't want it enough. Didn't want it enough. So actually going back to the Melvin Bragg point about, you know, great inventors and entrepreneurs and all that kind of thing. Actually thinking that we did an episode on Silicon Valley and I was thinking about you know Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs and all these kind of guys who were would those kind of cluster of people who were just into that kind of thing they were just it was what you did and I wonder was it was there something about Britain in the 18th century that people just like kind of tinkering with machines and I mean was it kind of for

the fun of it I think there i mean it's really interesting the question of invention is really interesting there definitely is a culture of tinkering with machines but when you look closely and i spend a lot of time looking closely at individuals although we've been talking really generally about this massive shift in world history and playing a tutor you know actually what i do most of the time is look at the lives of individuals one person here and one person there just really small scale when you look at the lives of people who are doing inventing for example yes they like tinkering um but tinkering is really expensive it's really expensive and steve jobs if he was still with us would i'm

sure say exactly the same thing you have to devote a huge part of your life to putting in a massive amount of time and effort to doing this thing that may not make you any profit and often doesn't make any profit for a really long time because even if you manage to crack it with your invention your invention is not going to work very well in the first instance and it's going to be really expensive and it's going to be much cheaper for most people to just carry on employing a secretary than it is to install a computer and i suppose also somebody might nick it somebody exactly to say nothing of the fact somebody might nick it i mean it just goes on and on and on and on and on. It's really expensive and there's no guarantee of reward. So some societies and places can support people mucking around with this kind of activity and some can't. A peasant economy cannot afford to have people upsetting themselves from the

labour market for a few years on end and not being economically productive i mean it just doesn't it just isn't it just can't sustain that kind of activity um and there's no investors even if you come up with a great idea there'll be no investor because investors don't want to invest money in risky um inventions because that's not how things are done in that part of you know in that particular community that society so where were we um i think you know what i'm saying yes yeah yes so do we have to have the scientific revolution first then do you think as well um yeah it's sort of so there's lots of things there's lots of things coming into it so certainly having a kind of educated but you know a relatively educated society a scientifically inclined society one that's interested in

research and investment but you also just need a fairly rich society with money with cash flowing around you need a society where cash is present and people can earn relatively good wages maybe they could save a bit of money they can take some risks they can find some pals who also got a bit of money who's also willing to take some risks you just need a society which has some money around so i don't think it's i mean you you kind of seem to think i want to say something about um well let's well you don't let's think about the bragging idea of the kind of the noble entrepreneur um with the with the genius um i'm not really saying that's what it is i'm just saying uh we like luca we like the we like the

money i mean i'm not saying this is good or bad this is just how it was yes you've got to have a certain degree of income to be able to that's how this podcast works how does the podcast work is it ingenuity is it genius just tom's desire for money that's all it is that's what drives it so emma just i i think we should have a break in a minute and come back and look at the kind of some of the individual lives, the lived experience, all that kind of thing, how life changed for people who lived through the Industrial Revolution. Can I just ask one further macro question, which is the role that's played by war, because the Industrial Revolution is coinciding with war between Britain and revolutionary France. And two questions really, does that have an impact on the industrialization of Britain? So I'm guessing the Royal Navy is a kind of a massive center for innovation. And the second question is,

say had Britain lost, had the French occupied Britain, would that have cramped the process of the industrial revolution? So I think, think yeah there's a lot to unpack there sorry that's a very unfulfilled no i love it i love it i'm just thinking how can i how can i respond to this if we think about what industrialization is doing the part of it is is very i mean what's happening you're just outgrowing your own resources and

that's what's happening in britain and a lot of europe is outgrowing its own resources and that's what's happening in Britain and a lot of Europe is outgrowing its own resources it wants more stuff because if you're going to have factories and if you're going to make profit and you're you're going to have successful businesses you need lots of raw materials and these small we're with these all these nations in northern Europe we're very small geographically um there's just not a lot of resources and a lot of stuff to work with so you're going to need other people's stuff and that means uh you're probably going to get drawn into conflict in other parts of the world because a lot of what's going on through the um late 18th early 19th century is kind of struggle over trade routes and access to resources um so i think warfare is part of the story of industrialization it's hard to see how you could have had harmonious happy everybody just

industrializes because everybody wants more stuff they want to take it from other people and there's going to be kind of lots of conflict and so we see that we see that building up the Navy. Well, that obviously is quite expensive in and of itself. I don't want to say there's no way that Britain could have lost the French Revolutionary Wars. It could have lost the Revolutionary Wars. happening in terms of the British government very astutely all through the 18th century taking a very active role in supporting British business by keeping an eye open on what's happening in other parts of the world and investing in the navy. Britain was the British economy was more developed in the 18th century by the end of the 18th century than the french economy was which was still mostly agricultural still had a lot of big pockets of mostly peasant farming and peasant agriculture and was just generally much less capitalized and much less money uh sloshing

around france and france is a bigger country it's got a bigger population which is why it can kind of partly why it can be successful in quite a lot of wars because it's got a lot of people um and that's that's really useful and and bigger bigger bigger populations tend to be richer before industrial revolutions and then of course that breaks down in modern societies so um what am i saying we're always going to win i can't win we weren't always going to win that's not quite what we're, but it's not entirely accidental that we win. It's not a fluke of history. It wasn't a turn of a dice. That's what I'm saying. There's a lot underneath these stories.

And if you look more closely inside Britain and inside France in the late 18th century, you actually see very different kinds of economies, very different kinds of societies, ones that were going to be very helpful for Britain to streak ahead, both industrially and on the kind of the global power stage. And we're going to make it very hard for France to do that. This is great. OK, So there's been no... You haven't given Tom a chance to do his Melvin Bragg shouting, which is good.

So we're going to take a break and then we'll come back and we'll go a bit granular and we'll talk about ordinary people and how the Industrial Revolution changed their lives. So see you after the break. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman and together we host The Rest Is Entertainment

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Time, I think, for a bit of Dickens. On every side and as far as the eye could see into the heavy distance, tall chimneys crowding on each other and presenting that endless repetition of the same dull ugly form which is the horror of oppressive dreams, poured out their plague of smoke, obscured the light and made foul the melancholy air. On mounds of ashes the strange engines spun and writhed like tortured creatures clanking their iron chains, shrieking in their rapid whirl as though in torment unendurable and making the ground tremble with their agonies.

So that's Charles Dickens in the old curiosity shop in 1841. And shockingly, he's talking about the black country from which my forebears come. Very, very sad scenes to see in this. And mine too, Dominic. About the West Midlands. But that's why we speak in these kind of very strong kind of West Bromwich accents, isn't it, Tom?

Right, so Emma, Emma Griffin, top historian, the top historian, president of the Royal Historical Society, is with us talking about the Industrial Revolution. Emma, Eric Mercer has a question, and he says, was Dickens' portrayal of English society in the Industrial Revolution,

specifically, I suppose, the poverty and the costs of the industrial revolution was it accurate and i suppose that goes to dickens to some extent has created our image certainly the 19th century as kind of extremes of wealth and poverty you know clanking machines chimneys misery urchins all this stuffness in the air soot yeah but is that but you said right at the beginning that it was the industrial revolution is about going from scarcity to plenitude so is the is the dickens view unfair would you say well lovely question eric and thank you very much for it what um what do i make of dickens and his interpretation of the industrial revolution okay so there's lots there's there's lots to say. I always have a lot to say, and I guess this is no exception.

Let's think about some of the things that's going on there. Well, one of the depictions that Dickens gives us is of pollution and dirt and smoke and grime. I'm happy with that. I think that's right. These Victorian cities were dirty and smoky and dark in some respects. And what was our industrial revolution about? Our industrial revolution was all about coal. Coal is dirty, it is smoky.

I think there's a lot of truth in that. And other nations, even when they industrialise with cleaner fuels, it always upsets the environment. There's always environmental damage. When you start producing much, much more stuff than you actually just need to keep you fed and clothed and shod, you're going to make a lot of mess. And that's kind of a feature of industrial industrialisations, industrial revolutions. So I'm happy with that. Take that from Dickens. What else? What he's saying, the other thing I think we get out of Dickens is this sense of loss, that it was kind of nice before it was clean and pleasant and it was nice I mean I

think he he very much buys into like a lot of Victorian commentators buys into the fact that the modern world is difficult and dirty and hard and the old world was cleaner and purer and happier that I don't buy partly because I actually um pre-industrial life is really really really hard and that's never fully acknowledged it's really hard um it's back breaking work I mean none of us want to go back to living in that kind of world there's very little um intellectual um fulfillment or interest in that kind of for most people you have to go hungry a lot of the time you don't have shoes or your children certainly don't have shoes even if you manage to have shoes it's

uncomfortable um it's cold in a place like this a lot so so i i don't buy i don't buy that it was nice and clean um before it was really difficult before and then it was difficult with the industrial revolution but it was a different kind of difficult um would you rather have been a peasant or a member of the proletariat exactly who has it better exactly so that's the question to ask and dickens isn't very well placed to ask ask or answer that question because he was neither peasant nor proletariat. Like almost all of the commentators who wrote about the experience of living during the Industrial Revolution that got published and who now form part of our kind of cultural understanding

of the period, he was not actually a worker himself. I mean, I know he had his own case. He had experienced some child labour, but certainly he had experienced some child labour, but he's not exactly, he's not really, by the time he's writing his novels, he's, you know, and even as, I mean, the reasons for him experiencing the child labour were slightly unusual compared to those for the kind of the rank and file. Yeah, it's only because his dad's in debt, right? It's not because he's born into a family that are doing that all the time exactly slightly different story so um so

that's the question to ask which was better well for me i think um i would strongly suggest that i think being a member of the politera is better than being um and we want peasants just to clarify as well the grandparents of children working and the adults working in the um factories in the 19th century hadn't been peasants they'd been agricultural laborers so they'd been workers children working and the adults working in the factories in the 19th century hadn't been peasants they'd been agricultural laborers so they'd been workers but they'd worked on somebody's farm instead of working in somebody's factory maybe the peasant life is better but we have to go in England we have to go hundreds of years back to find lots of peasants we just you had the choice

of working for a farmer outdoors in the cold, in the rain, digging up fields and laying turnips is not thrilling work or going and working in the factory. And so those are your options. And when you look at the life stories, the autobiographies of men, mostly who have done one or the other, the answer is very, very clear. It's much better to go and work in the factory. And there are lots of reasons for that. Which is presumably why people go and do it. The evidence speaks for itself. People go and they don't tend to go back. They don't go, discover what it's like, and then head straight back as fast as they can.

They go and they stay. They go, they get higher wages. And a lot of people like earning more money. So there's the higher wages, which is a real draw. But it's not just the higher wages. I think that's not the real lure of urban life it's just life in the city is more varied it's more interesting it's got more opportunities um and having that bit of extra wage is quite empowering for the men who earn it so you can actually start to make decisions with your life you can decide to learn to read and write you can take yourself off to night school you can get involved in politics

you can be a somebody in your community you can be a leader in the union you not everybody does this but you you have opportunities that are just not open to you when you are employed on the land emma you mentioned men there we've got a question from Flea how did the industrial revolution change women's lives did they gain more independence? I mentioned men because most of the sources that we have written about the industrial revolution have been written by men and I've looked at a lot of them and i think that story is quite clear and quite strong and it stands out you know it kind of it stands stands up to scrutiny we don't have women telling us what it was like for them so it's much harder to write that story and to be sensible there what do i

think going on well i think i used to be a bit more positive about how it impacted on women's lives because young women certainly do start working in the factories and if women are working in the factories they earn quite a good wage and that's quite empowering for them with respect to their family whether it's their parents or their siblings or their husband if they can earn a decent wage that is quite empowering for them however women sooner or later are likely to get married and to get pregnant. And then you've got the responsibility of raising children, which isn't something that you can do in this world where you haven't got electricity and you haven't got that much money and do a 12 or 14 hour day in the factory as well. So most women, even if they have this little window in their life where they have high wages and a bit of autonomy that comes with that, it is just a really small window. And then before long, they're back in the home and they're doing unpaid work.

And there's nothing very liberating. Am I right in thinking that the process of industrialisation in the early stages destroys a lot of the work that women had in kind of cottage industries? I think it does destroy women's work, or it can do. I mean, it certainly is, you know, it's undermining women's work. But for me, I think it's more, it's not so much that it's undermining the work opportunities that are available for women, because the work opportunities that had been available i mean i would say the same about those as i would about the work that was available to men it was pretty rubbish really really long hours really low pay uh repetitive not particularly enjoyable not very empowering so i don't think it's the loss of those opportunities

you know i don't think they're devastating for women i mean okay so you could have spun at your wheel and made a little bit of money but it was pretty boring spinning at wheels and you didn't make a lot of money anyway so whatever what what is significant about those earlier households is the work that you did had value within the household and that gave you a little bit of a gave you some a space inside the family hierarchy it gives some importance inside the family and when we move to kind of the modern world where men go out and earn a good wage and quite a big wage and an improving wage then the work that women does becomes less value but becomes of less value within the household so for me that's really the switch that's happening more than the loss of work it's the lot of it's the loss of status inside the family let me ask you about a different group Emma that you talk about

in your because you've got your brilliant book Liberty's Dawn which is the sort of story of the industrial revolution through ordinary people who've written memoirs and things and you have a section in that if I remember right about children and am I right in thinking you say the industrial revolution was a disaster for children or something like that and you talk about people there's some story about a guy who's working you know 14 hour days on saturdays or something like i can't remember the exact details it's some i mean it is a brilliant book but i have to confess it is some years since i read it so children i mean they're the that that goes back to dickens it's the image we have in the industrial revolution

kids i mean horrible histories. When they sing their song about the whole of world history, they say kids in factories and down mines. That's a pretty big cost, isn't it? I mean, of the industrial... Pretty big downside? Yes. I know I'm very happy to...

I'll give you the children. I'm not going to point you on the children okay i couldn't agree more um children tended not to work before the industrial revolution very much because there wasn't very much work around for them and children also tended to go hungry a lot because non-working people couldn't you know in many you know many parts of society couldn't really be fed properly either so there's a lot of child hunger there's a lot of extreme poverty and there's not much work so work is viewed as the solution out of the problem of raising children and it wasn't really available in rural England most of the time as much as people wanted it to factories come along great

you could put your children in the factory you You've got long hours, steady wages. And what these families are doing are feeding their children much better. I don't think I don't know which is better and which is worse. I mean, neither is good. Going hungry is not good. Working in factories is dreadful and is awful as well. I don't know. You know, so it's all bad. It's all really bad. But when it comes to it, the long hours in the factory seem to be, seem to me to be even worse than not having enough food,

more damaging to a child's wellbeing, more damaging to their health, their wellbeing, their development in every single way. So I think this is an unmitigated disaster. I do think it's not a mitigated disaster for children the lesson from dickens is you need to find a benevolent patriarch don't you to kind of take you under his wing and yeah or a convict if you plumb like you got convicts to go to australia and leave you loads of money but it is i mean it is kind of guess telling that so many plots revolve around a hungry, starving child who then gets adopted by magic, taken into the kind of the world of the bourgeoisie. And I guess that the bourgeoisie are the other side of the coin. So presumably they are getting rich in a way. I mean, you know, I think even you look at your average

middle class family in the Victorian period, they have extraordinarily little compared to what we expect to have today. They never waste food. If you look at the size of the plates they're eating off, they're just slightly bigger than a side plate. Tapas. Yeah, it is. That's how they're eating um but they're doing better they're definitely doing definitely doing better and so far as we could tell if you look at kind of economic growth and wage growth in the 19th century it seems to suggest that the economy is getting richer and wages are improving but not as much as the economy is

growing so that does suggest that those at the top element the top echelons of society are enjoying more of the profits that are being made than working people okay well this is a question that that dominic i'm amazed dominic hasn't brought up as as our leading left-wing historian um and it's a question from diogo morgado who asked could marxism have arisen without the industrial revolution concepts like class struggle don't necessarily require industrialization the proletariat is a 19th century concept is it not so actually quite a lot of the isms that emerge over the course of the 19th century presumably you know we trace them back to the French revolution but we could

equally trace them back to the industrial revolution would that be right oh I couldn't agree more i i absolutely agree with our interpretation so we have tended to look at movements like the rise of chartism in the british case but all across these all across europe we have tended to look at these movements as having been born out of inequality poverty unfairness and that is all true of course there was poverty and there's a lot of unfairness but it's very difficult to see how 18th century Britain could have sustained mass working class political movements although there were a lot of really poor working people in the 18th century they couldn't group themselves together around a common cause and they couldn't agitate effectively. They didn't have the

resources, the mechanisms, the education, the literacy, the skills that would be necessary to make a powerful intervention, a political intervention. And one of the really interesting stories of the 19th century is working class people start to organize themselves they view themselves as being important and significant they learn how to coalesce around political causes they learn how to take political action they take really effective political action mass rallies and published newspapers and political manifestos and charters it's all born i mean it's born out of progress and i i would love to suggest that we could turn around that this is kind of born out of desperation and actually view it as what it is it's only relatively it's a relatively advanced and privileged working class or kind of working people who have the resources to articulate their message

and I think it's no accident that it is in 19th century Britain where the industrial revolution is happening that you get a lot of working people starting to articulate a message and that that develops and grows all through the 19th century spreads across to other parts of Europe as other parts of Europe start to industrialize as well. Well, obviously, Marx and Engels, I mean, they're writing about Manchester a lot, aren't they? I mean, they're absolutely, you know, Marxism is completely overshadowed by that experience, isn't it? Do you not think, Tom? I mean, you're going to say it's all about Christianity, I know, so let's not even go there. Well, Marxism, obviously, of course it's Christianity. But what I was actually going to ask was, um 1848 the year of revolutions across continental

europe britain doesn't have a revolution even though there's this kind of great chartist demonstration meets at kennington and everything um why do you think that is do you think that you reach a certain plateau of of wealth across society and then actually it's less likely you're going to have a revolution. I don't know. I can't answer why we don't really have anything similar to what's, you know, we don't really have an 1848 revolution like a lot of Europe does. But I mean, I suppose, I mean, in the big macro, you know, kind of stepping back and, you know, looking at things from a bit of a distance, Britain has been different from a lot of continental

Europe for quite a long time, you know, and I think, again, this comes back, you know, it really was quite different by the 18th century, it was already looking quite different by the early 19th century, it's really changed beyond all recognition. Many of these European nations have not really, you know know they're just embarking they're only they've really had an industrial revolution by 1848 so they're just they're just different kinds of nations really with different political setups with different economic setups and with very different issues um that they just make kind of that kind of cross comparison quite difficult to to make.

What do you make, Emma? We're reaching the end. We had a couple of questions about the legacy of the Industrial Revolution. So we had a really interesting one from Jack Fittles, who, for a Dickensian surname, I have to say. He said, he asks about the London Olympics and so on. And he said, you know, we romanticise the Industrial Revolution. How much of it is tied up with the story that Britain tells about its progress, its own?

And it's also, what's so interesting is asking that question after you've just talked about Britain being, I mean, you have slightly given a British exceptionalist answer to the last question. So, I mean, do you think the revolution is is it is it still central to the way that britain views itself and britain's sense of its own you know its own exceptional history unique destiny and all that sort of thing do you think oh that's a lovely question um what i think that's really interesting well i think there are two things there's a number of things i mean i think there are things that we like to have in our understand in our history of the industrial revolution things that get left out so i think there's two things. There's a number of things. I mean, I think there are things that we like to have in our history of the Industrial Revolution, things that get left out. So I think there's been a lot of attempt for a long time to kind of put empire and slavery in.

And it's never really quite taken off. And we've really always been much more comfortable thinking about Protestant worth ethics and technology and inventions. I do think there's a big resource story. We needed to get our raw materials, our resources from somewhere. And actually that does lead us out back to empire and it leads us out to warfare. So I'd love to bring that in

and make that much more part of the story. I mean, and historians, academic historians are definitely always saying, look, I think we need to consider this. But I don't think that reaches the um well london olympic ceremony that kind of um that doesn't make it into things like that i think that is fantastically interesting i love that ceremony i've been looking at again recently for reasons of my own um such an interesting interpretation of our national past and of course the i love the when it came out i couldn't believe

it you know seeing it for the first time but oh my god this is what i do this is all the industrial revolution look at that what i think is also really surprised by that emma were you surprised because i was really surprised i mean i shouldn't have been and i but i just didn't know what our i i wasn't very familiar actually with the olympic opening ceremony so i didn't really quite know what it was going to be um but everybody said look watch it and i think david put it on and said yeah that's my husband they we we should watch this i'm like okay let's watch it um and there it was my work suddenly all in front of my eyes um but anyway that's by the by what was what i love about it is is it does kind of capture how we view well our past but also the industrial revolution and it's not entirely i

mean it's got that kind of green fields pleasant green fields then the dark and the dark and the smoke the tikensian industrial revolution and it's not entirely celebratory um i mean it's there and i love the fact that it's there because it is so important but if you look at the faces of the workers as they're kind of doing their kind of simulations of their working they've all got sad faces and they've got smoke on their face and it's grim and it's not nice you'd like them to be contemplating their rising wages would you exactly exactly and i think that's interesting why why we as britain i mean it came me away from from the Olympics. I think as a nation, we find it very hard to celebrate the Industrial Revolution. We find it very hard not to be ambivalent about it.

So there is this pride in it, but there's also this ambivalence about it that we have. And it's very interesting when you look at other nations talking about their process of industrialisation. When they start to industrialise, they're just thrilled. It's amazing. It's wonderful it's the best thing that ever happened and we have so much chest beating that goes on about whether it was good and whether it was bad presumably because we're the first and so it's much more of a trauma for us we have we have no way of comparing and is i mean it's been a kind

of abiding it was a kind of an abiding critique under the Thatcher government, wasn't it? That we've basically, industrialists become very successful and then they go off and study useless things like classics and build country homes and things. And we de-industrialise. So do you think that, I mean, there have been costs for being the first industrialist? Definitely. And I mean, it's why it's good to go back to people like dickens i mean he is part of our cultural heritage he's part of our dna um we it's very hard if you're raised on that kind of interpretation of your history which we kind of are whether we like it or not

it's quite hard then um as mature adults in our 30s 40ss or 50s to say, oh, no, it was great. I mean, it just has become part of our DNA, part of our narrative. And it's very hard for all of us to separate from it. We've got one last question, which I know you will enjoy, from Imagining History. And Imagining History says, why is the Industrial Revolution so interesting, but was so boring to learn about at school? What's all that about? And he's not wrong, actually so boring to learn about at school. What's all that about? And he's not wrong, actually.

It is quite boring at school. I hated the Industrial Revolution. What is that about, Emma? Are we teaching it wrong? It's so interesting. I know. And it was so boring at school, wasn't it? I mean, gosh.

I couldn't agree more. What were they doing in the 70s and the 80s with the industrial revolution in schools yeah i just remember that's still boring well i don't know i mean i think everything they do at school they do much more interestingly now and i love the way they teach history in schools um nowadays i mean i think i think almost a lot of the history i taught was really boring not just the industrial i think most of the history was really boring. And I love the way they teach history in schools now and they encourage people, you know, they teach about the First World War. And then they get the students to read some letters of somebody who was in the trenches and to think what it was like to have been in the trenches, which is the bit that we didn't do in our day.

But now how do they teach the industrial revolution do you know well i mean some of them teach the industrial revolution with liberty's dawn which is amazing that's yeah they've got the book tom yeah they've got well and i've seen lesson plans where they give um their students an extract of an autobiography and say let's think about the industrial revolution from this perspective um so i mean it's humanized it's humanized and i guess it's what's happened all through the teaching of history in schools which was very top down there's a lot of humanizing all and i think it's wonderful what they do so it's not just waves of inventions which i know not anymore i think the trick is for imagining history i think the trick

is to go back to school because schools nowadays are very different places and they're doing a much better job just amazing teachers doing just a fantastic job of making it um lively and interesting so that's a brilliant note on which as are the academics um yeah as are the as is the president of the royal Historical Society. Emma, thank you so much for coming on the programme. Nobody ever again will have the right to say the Industrial Revolution is boring because you've comprehensively proved it isn't. Emma's book is Liberty's Dawn, if you're interested.

And if you're not interested, it's still at Liberty's Dawn. So it's goodbye anyway. Thank you, Emma. Goodbye, everybody. Bye-bye. Thank you. Bye. you Emma goodbye everybody bye-bye thank you bye thanks for listening to the rest is history for bonus episodes early access ad-free listening and access to our chat community please sign up at rest is history pod dot com that's rest is history pod.com