Any history book gives big ideas like ‘changing gender roles’ and ‘market revolution’, but I’m more curious about the minutiae of less-commonly discussed changes in the way people lived, say in the 1830s-60s. What are some specific things that those people probably thought were hugely impactful that we’re less likely to think about today?
I was thinking about this when talking about the big change smart phones and the internet brought with young people….there are a million little daily things they do on their phones that we used to do the hard way that they never thought about (like calling a movie theater for times). So what are some things folks in 1850 would be saying to young people about how different things were for them in the 1810s or 20s?
Well, the lower classes started having leisure time, which meant they could, say, throw around a baseball or kick around a football. Eventually they formed clubs, and eventually other lower class people would watch the club players playing their games. And then bim bam boom: professional sports clubs.
So in an oblique and somewhat convoluted way, the Industrial Revolution birthed professional sports.
There was a woman named Ruth Belville who had a business in London selling the correct time to her clients. She would set her pocket watch to a clock in Greenwich, then take it around the city for her customers to set their clocks to. Prior to the industrial era, there was no need to synchronize people to a common time standard. I think some towns with large factories had a large bell or whistle that served a similar purpose, to keep people synchronized so factory work could begin on time.
Checking Wikipedia, I see Ruth’s business was actually started by her father in 1836. His widow took over from 1856 to 1892, and then Ruth until 1940.
Railroads made agriculture and ranching much more profitable because of the greater accessibility to population centers. Farmers and ranchers could then afford previously unobtainable goods not locally produced, but manufactured afar.
Likewise, produce and meat became much more affordable to the working class in manufacturing centers. This increased nutrition had the affect of making people, especially men, physically taller and heavier than in previous eras. There’s also probably an impact on the population’s general intelligence level, but that’s harder to document that height and weight.
And of course during the Industrial Revolution, some people were employed as knocker-uppers; waking people for work by knocking on the window, perhaps using a long pole to reach a second-story window.
Before the Industrial Revolution, people often slept in two shifts. They would fall asleep at darkness. They would wake up in the middle of the night. They would stay awake for an hour or so. They would then go back to sleep:
The difference in production time of basic textiles before and after the IR is just such a vast gulf. Most people have no idea that it used to take literally hundreds of hours of labour to produce a single garment.
Artificial lighting. It’s as ancient as almost any other technology and still improving to this day.
It’s how did they could paint those caves and pyramid walls, write the papyrus and build advanced dwellings. It’s remarkable how little light there is this time of year and I’m not that far north. And when our power and lights are out, for even a few dark minutes, we’re quite vulnerable.
I would guess that prior to the revolution, work was more random, but ever since, most of the world has operated by a Mon-Fri, 9-to-5 type of work schedule.
The speed of travel and communication improved tremendously. There is a series of maps from The Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States (1932) showing travel times in the US over the years. You’ve probably seen it on social media. For example, in 1800 traveling from New York to Chicago overland took 6 weeks. By 1830, after the Erie Canal opened, it was down to less than 3 weeks. By 1857, after railroads connected the two cities, it was less than 2 days. That’s about a 20-fold improvement in 57 years. Even with today’s modern jet travel, getting from city center to city center would likely take about 6 hours including travel to and from the airports, security, check-in, and all the other joys of modern travel. That’s only a further 8-fold reduction in the last 168 years.
Improvements in communications speed were even more dramatic. In 1800 you couldn’t move a message along that route any faster than you could move a person. Optical telegraphs existed before that elsewhere in the world, but the infrastructure didn’t exist between New York and Chicago or between most other places. By 1848 the two cities were connected by electric telegraph and a message could probably be sent in about an hour, including the time to deliver it to the recipient’s door.
I think it was Alvin Toffler’s The Third Wave which expands on the idea that the industrial revolution (the first one) began the practice of keeping time. While some things -church services, the prayer on the hours, etc. - did rely on clock time, most people’s lives were fairly lax about time. Factories made it a necessity that everyone, the whole shift, show up on time, the same time, and finish work the same time. Things like train schedules etc. reinforced the need. He also mentions that school is indeed as much as book learnin’ is also about teaching the new generations of workers to be good industrial workers - follow schedules, obey the clock, show up when told, sit and listen to the teacher/boss, do the tasks assigned, etc. He also mentions that people who had to supervise projects in the third world were often incredibly frustrated with work crews who had not grown up with this lesson - they showed up any old time, did not work hard and stopped working when the boss stopped watching. (And after half a century of culture creep into developing countries, this is much less of a problem today, I assume).
Another thing that I find odd - digging into my family tree in rural then industrial England - it seems to me that small families were more the norm in the days of farms, then around 1800 bigger families were more common. I’m not sure if this is generally true, I’m not sure the cause, but I would imagine reliable wages and so food meant reducing the number of children was less urgent. Plus, large farming families had to face the issue that too many children meant the family farm would be excessively subdivided, while industrial workers could send all those kids out into the world to collect whatever wages were offered, no dividing resources.
I remember a tour of Versailles, the guide opened up a closet and says - “this is where the king kept his clothes, even the king had only three pegs to hang clothes.” True, they’d have a chest or ten elsewhere full of clothes, but generally even rich people had a very limited number of garments. The cost of cloth and sewing was a large expense before industrial cloth production and sewing machines.
Discipline in the factories was a huge social change, not just in how it changed our relationship with time but in how it changed the worker/boss relationship. Indeed, it arguably created the worker/boss relationship as we know it today.
When we look at the organization of work from the perspective of the twentieth century, the prevailing system, factory discipline, seems the natural and timeless way of organizing work. Under factory discipline the worker faces a very constrained choice. In return for their wage they surrender to the employer complete command of their labor for a fixed period each day. The employer sets the pace of work, and dictates also how the worker will conduct themselves at work. In some cases the worker will be offered a piece rate but even then the hours of work will be controlled, as will the conduct while at work, and a minimum pace of work will be expected.
In the immediately preceding era of cottage industry, piece-work was the norm - firms would contract with individual workers to produce so much cloth for example in a given week, and pay on receipt at the warehouse on Saturday. This had downsides but one thing it did do was give the worker a lot of power over how much was produced. Obviously everyone had a minimum they needed to earn. But beyond that they had control over their hours. If they wanted more money, they could work longer and harder and produce more. If they wanted more leisure time, they could work less.
In order to get paid on Saturday afternoon the workers would labor long and hard on Saturday, and on the days before. But once they were paid they would take leisure on Saturday evening, and on Sunday, and gradually drift back to work on Monday, Tuesday or even Wednesday of the next week. If they had worked little at the beginning of the week, as was apparently common, they would put in intense efforts on Thursday and Friday. Some would work all night on Friday night if they had a specific task to complete such as to weave an entire warp of cloth. The intense efforts at the end of the week would increase the desire for leisure at the beginning of the week. Not all workers would “honor St. Monday,” as the custom of taking a holiday on Monday was called, but enough that Monday in pre-industrial manufacturing areas was generally the equivalent of our Saturday. This was true of all the manufacturing areas of Europe.
Work hours within the week were completely flexible. If there was an event such as a hanging, a birthday, or a wedding, workers might down tools temporarily to join the fun. They could make up the time later. Just as workers varied their work pace over the course of the week, so they varied the pace over the course of the year. The weeks before the major feasts - Christmas and Easter for example - would be ones where workers put in extra efforts to earn more with which to properly celebrate the holidays. Records from workers employed in the nineteenth century under these conditions show that individual workers varied greatly in their weekly work patterns. Some would earn about the same week after week. Others would show great fluctuations in their weekly earnings.
Obviously, bosses hated this! They had contracts to deliver so much finished work, and they did not have direct control over the processes that would or would not create that output. Another way of saying this is that workers had power:
Workers liked the “domestic” or “putting out system” for a variety of reasons. It gave the worker a great deal of freedom to control his or her own affairs. Workers could keep a small farm as well as engage in industrial production since their time was flexible. It also allowed workers to choose who they would work with. Generally also the worker was not tied to one employer. The domestic system also allowed great social mobility. If a worker was frugal they could increase the number of machines they owned and rent these out to other workers. They could also become a subcontractor giving out work to a whole group of workers for a distant manufacturer, and perhaps eventually setting up in business themselves as a “putter-outer.”
Under the factory system, the power all went the other way. Factories were a necessity of powered mechanisation - first workers had hand looms (e.g.) at home, then would pay to rent larger more powerful looms in a workshop (but still “putting out” and in control of how many hours and days they worked there) but finally the factory system took hold in which access to the machines and thus to earning power was controlled by the bosses and thus became a source of power. At first this was negotiated:
In the factory the employer dictated when workers worked, their conduct at work, and the steady attention of workers to their work. Under discipline workers were rewarded not only according to their output as in the workshop, but also or even exclusively based on their conduct. Workers were heavily penalized for small deviations from the approved conduct. Workers seem to have strongly resented factory discipline. The market evidence is that they had to be paid a substantial premium to work in these conditions
The heavy penalties included fines and lockouts - i.e. workers just a few minutes late would be barred from working at all that day. This is obviously a direct attack on the culture of workers controlling their own time.
As is evident from the fact that discipline came with a wage premium, it made workers use the machines more productively. In industries with large capital costs, this made discipline well worth while. In industries with lower capital costs, less so - pottery workers still had huge amounts of freedom in the early twentieth century.
Even now, white collar roles where human capital is a big proportion of costs see people work flexibly, whereas you will get fired very easily for lateness in roles where you are part of a capital intensive process. The factory process of course also involves a degree of de-skilling, in which case you become easier to replace and thus more subject to discipline.
Tourism becoming something ordinary people do. Tourism used to be something the aristocrats and the wealthy did, travel was too slow and expensive and just plain nasty* for most people to do it for pleasure. Powered vehicles, modern roads and the general increase in wealth meant that travel for entertainment became practical for ordinary people.
There’s a reason that the word “travel” shares the root word of “travail” (“tripalium”, a Latin term for an instrument of torture, as it happens).
It has had an impact on spreading infectious or irritating agents. If something woven into a textile produces a skin reaction that can in turn become infected, previously only one, or maybe two people might be exposed to it. When you look at the textile itself, others that might be next to it in a pile, or woven on the same loom immediately after, instead of the weaver taking a break, that agent reaches more people.
Same with meat that can cause food poisoning. Instead of feeding just one family, it might feed several-- or might get sold to someone who makes food and peddles it around to factory workers.
Infant mortality was very high, so the number of babies born was significantly higher than the number that were recorded as family members in the parish records.
Hence Marx’s (or was it Engels) concept of the proletariat - people whose only capital was their children.
A less highfalutin result of the industrial revolution: changes in shopping/marketing habits. Shops developing alongside or replacing markets, longer shopping hours to accommodate factory workers (aided by artificial lighting).
