James C. Scott’s Against the Grain is one of many books that argues sedentary agriculture and cities long before the IR increased rates of infectious disease, not least because storing grain attracted rats and mice and because people were close together. Industrial diseases were, obvs, an IR thing.
One overlooked IR–or capitalism–thing is that “The advance of capitalist production develops a working class, which by education, tradition, habit, looks upon the conditions of that mode of production as self-evident laws of Nature. The organisation of the capitalist process of production, once fully developed, breaks down all resistance. The dull compulsion of economic relations completes the subjection of the labourer to the capitalist. Direct force, outside economic conditions, is of course still used, but only exceptionally.”
Not saying feudalism was better, but work was certainly different, as was resistance. Strikes replace burning the castle, and instead of killing the lord, we have Muley’s question in The Grapes of Wrath: “Then who DO we shoot?”
I think a big overlooked impact was a substantial change in how people socialized.
If you were a farmer in a pre-industrial society, you mainly saw your family every day. You had occasional opportunities to see groups of other people like at market days or religious services, which were non-work environments.
If you were a factory worker after the industrial revolution, you were seeing the same group of your fellow workers on a daily basis at your workplace.
So you had a social group with which you didn’t have an emotional connection like you did with your family. And the environment where you were interacting with this social group was different.
That might have been the case in America where perhaps due to the mode of pioneer settlement followed a pattern of isolated farmsteads. In Europe the prevailing pattern was living in a small village surrounded by the fields and pastures people worked. So e.g. an English farmer saw his neighbors every day.
Which the Soviets unfortunately seemed to take as advice on how to successfully build an industrial infrastructure, rather than as something lamentable.
Indeed. Lenin went from opposing Taylorism in 1913 to insisting it was essential in 1918. That’s one reason many left critics refer to the Soviet Union and its equally deplorable offspring as state capitalism rather than socialism.
It also opened up the market for Blacks to obtain certain consumer goods that they otherwise wouldn’t have been able to purchase, being forbidden from patronizing certain brick & mortar businesses. The Sears catalogue didn’t include a field for “Race” that you would check when you sent in your order.
Here’s an article from the History Channel that discusses it. I’m not saying cable TV is an unimpeachable source or anything, but they cite an academic.
“Barry Kudrowitz, associate professor and director of product design at the University of Minnesota, has studied the history and use of toilet paper. Through the 1700s, corncobs were a common toilet paper alternative. Then, newspapers and magazines arrived in the early 18th century. “The ‘legend’ goes that people were primarily using the Sears catalog in outhouses, but when the catalog began to be printed in glossy paper people needed to find a replacement,” says Kudrowitz. Americans also nailed the Farmer’s Almanac onto outhouse walls, leading the company to pre-drill the legendary “hole” into their publication in 1919.”
True, but even the academic refers to it as a legend. I don’t doubt that people needed to find a replacement as he says. But is there contemporary evidence anywhere of widespread outrage?
I do suspect the prevalence of bimodal sleep is overstated. The issue becomes that when its repeated as definite fact, it gets construed as a widely universal phenomena…when…it might have been only a few people in a few situations.
All I’ve seen are stories that “suggest” “sometimes” “certain people” did this, but I’ve not seen true and definitive proof about how widespread it is. It makes a good and interesting cocktail party factoid.
Unfortunately, it has been repeated enough that we take it as an absolute truth, and repeat it here as such as well.
I’m still doubtful, but it has entered our consciousness as ‘must be true’ that we can’t fight it.
We could probably do a whole thread on these—historical ‘facts’ that we aren’t actually sure of—not the same as the debunked ones in another active thread, but stuff like this that get accepted as fact without really good evidence.
One overlooked aspect of the Industrial Revolution was its impact on breakfast.
Rather than being a meal of leftovers; it became a necessary meal to fuel the workday. It’s during this time that foods like eggs and bacon became “breakfast foods”, and the need for something quick and easy eventually gave rise to the proliferation of breakfast cereals.
Keep in mind that I’m NOT saying that it didn’t occur. This error in understanding my point will lead to erroneous dismissal of my contention. What I’m saying is that I don’t believe the behavior to be as broadly common as the statement implies.
….and not so oddly, when I use co-pilot to ask “What evidence is there against sleeping in two shifts used to be common?”
I get references about the limited geographic and cultural scope. Anthropological evidence against universality, interpretive issues with historical texts, biological and evolutionary considerations for monophasic sleep, and experimental evidence being context dependent.
Essentially, my references are pointing to the behavior being present in high latitude areas where it was dark for long periods of time. I can also make the argument that bi-phasic sleep is not too far off of taking afternoon naps (especially when it gets dark so early in the afternoon in the winter). People were going to sleep at dusk, then waking up for a few more hours. What is the difference between that, and taking a nap in front of the TV during the evening news?