Did workers gain or lose from the Industrial Revolution?

The short answer

• Factories pulled workers into towns. Steam power let mills and works gather where coal, canals and railways met, and the jobs they offered drew people from a countryside where enclosure, the fencing of common land into private farms, falling demand for hand spinning and a growing population left many underemployed. The population of England and Wales roughly doubled between 1801 and 1851, from about 8.9 to 17.9 million, and most of the growth went to the towns. Wages there were higher than in farming, which is why people came despite the conditions.
• No one was in charge of the towns. Most industrial towns had no elected council with power over building, drains or water until the Municipal Corporations Act of 1835, which gave the old boroughs elected councils, and many new towns had none even then. Builders and landlords faced almost no regulation, and private water companies supplied only those who could pay. This absence of authority, together with the sheer speed of growth, explains why towns grew for decades without sewers. Reform had to wait until disease made the cost of doing nothing impossible to ignore.
• Families needed children’s wages. Working-class families depended on several earners, because one adult wage rarely covered rent and food, especially when a father was sick, dead or out of work. The economic historian Jane Humphries’ study of working-class autobiographies shows that children from fatherless and large families started work earliest, often before the age of ten. Mill owners valued children for tasks such as piecing broken threads and for their low wages, so demand met supply. Poverty sent most children to work, and employers were glad to hire them.
• Evidence made the costs visible. Industrial Britain counted itself as no society had done before. Censuses from 1801, the civil registration of births and deaths from 1837, parliamentary inquiries and newly appointed inspectors produced numbers and testimony that campaigners could use. The civil servant Edwin Chadwick’s mortality tables and the evidence gathered after the Huskar Pit disaster, in which 26 children drowned in a flooded mine, turned private suffering into public facts that Parliament could not ignore. Statistics became a tool of reform. Numbers persuaded MPs who would never visit a mill or a mine.

What it changed

Protest grows from hardship. Low wages, hunger and the loss of skilled trades fed the protest movements of the same decades, from machine-breaking to Chartism, a mass movement demanding the vote for all men. The crowded industrial towns described in this chapter were their recruiting grounds, and their meetings filled the moors and squares outside them. The towns that concentrated hardship also concentrated the people who suffered it, which made mass protest possible for the first time.

Living standards rise after 1850. Real wages, life expectancy and heights improved clearly only after about 1850, as food grew cheaper, sanitation spread and working hours were limited. The gains of industrialisation reached most workers a generation or two after its costs. Trade unions and the vote, won by many working men in 1867 and 1884, helped them claim a larger share, so what workers received depended on political power as well as productivity.

Regulation spreads abroad. Britain’s factory and public health laws became models elsewhere. Prussia, the largest German state, limited child labour in 1839 and France in 1841, and by the end of the century most industrial countries had factory inspectors and public health boards, as chapters 7 and 8 show. The idea that the state should regulate industry became one of the Industrial Revolution’s most lasting legacies. Each new industrial country rediscovered the problems that Britain had met first.