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How Britain’s Industrial Revolution RESHAPED the world
Why did industrialisation take root so easily in places like France and Germany – but struggle in Portugal or Spain? Why did Japan industrialise, while China and India followed very different paths? Professor Emma Griffin explains more
The Industrial Revolution didn’t stay in Britain – it reshaped the entire world. In this final episode in her series on the Industrial Revolution, you'll hear from Emma Griffin, Professor of History and Head of School at Queen Mary, University of London. She moves beyond Britain to explore how industrialisation spread across Europe, the Americas, and further – and why some countries surged ahead while others were left behind. From industrial espionage in continental Europe to the rapid growth of industry in the United States and Germany, this is a story of technology transfer, natural resources, and global networks. But it’s also a story of inequality. As some nations industrialised and grew richer, others found their resources extracted, their industries undercut, and their development stalled. Why did industrialisation take root so easily in places like France and Germany – but struggle in Portugal or Spain? Why did Japan industrialise, while China and India followed very different paths? And how did empire and global trade shape who benefited – and who paid the price? View Green Video on the source website
Oh, Mary! makes a monster of Mary Todd Lincoln – but has history been too harsh?
Mary Todd Lincoln has been much maligned for her erratic behaviour ever since she stepped foot into the White House, and stage play Oh, Mary! leans into that, portraying her as a drunk, cabaret-obsessed drama queen. But the story of the real First Lady is one of enduring tragedy after tragedy
The legacy of US President Abraham Lincoln is beyond reproach: he emancipated the slaves and saved the Union in the American Civil War. That’s enough to enshrine him as one of the best to have ever served in the Oval Office. When it came to his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, however, the history books have been less kind. The First Lady is remembered as a tragic figure with a troubled mental state, which worsened throughout her life as she endured a series of devastating personal losses, including Abraham Lincoln’s assassination in 1865. Prone to depression, headaches and tempers, she battled inner demons within and censure without. Her own son had her committed to an insane asylum. While that does not sound like a story filled with laughs, Mary Todd Lincoln has inspired the darkly comic and deeply silly stage play Oh, Mary!, currently playing on Broadway in New York City and in London’s West End. *Warning: spoilers for the stage play ahead * Leaving historical accuracy far behind, it gleefully reframes her as a miserable alcoholic longing to escape her closeted homosexual presidential husband and become a cabaret star. Who was the real Mary Todd Lincoln? Mary Todd Lincoln was the wife of the 16th President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, who served from 1861 to 1865. Following his assassination, she would live for another 17 years, although she was consumed by her grief and deteriorating mental health. Her sad end was the more poignant given that, in her youth, Mary had the makings for a successful role in the political landscape of Washington, DC, thanks to an upbringing that fostered her education, intelligence and social standing. Born on 13 December 1818, she was the fourth child of a wealthy and well-connected businessman, Robert Smith Todd, and Eliza Ann Parker Todd, daughter of a prominent family. Mary lost her mother at the age of six and her father quickly remarried. With a total of 16 children, there was little affection in the Todd household. Yet Mary received an excellent education: her hometown of Lexington, Kentucky, was known as the ‘Athens of the West’ as it had grown into an intellectual and cultural stronghold for progressive thought. She had six years of studies, followed by four more at an elite institution called Madame Mentelle’s School for Young Ladies, where she excelled in numerous subjects, especially French. Read more | Was Abraham Lincoln the greatest US president? How did Mary Todd meet Abraham Lincoln? In 1839, Mary moved to Springfield, Illinois, to live with her sister Elizabeth. As her sister’s husband was the son of a former governor of Illinois, Mary immediately became accustomed to socialising with politicians. One rising star of the Democratic Party, Stephen A Douglas, tried to court her. The man who caught her eye, though, was a country lawyer named Abraham Lincoln. With a dirt-poor upbringing and few prospects beyond a career in politics, he hardly made a fitting match with the accomplished, attractive and ambitious Mary. Yet their shared passions and intellectual pursuits brought them together and the two soon formed a close bond. Although Mary’s family did not approve of Lincoln, the pair married at Elizabeth’s home on 4 November 1842. Over the next 11 years, living in Springfield, they had four sons – Robert, Edward, Willie and Tad – but it was not the happiest of marriages. Lincoln spent long periods of time away from home, either campaigning for office or travelling as a circuit lawyer. Then, in 1850, their son Edward died from tuberculosis at the age of three. Coming less than a year after her father had passed away, a traumatised Mary fell into depression. It would not be the last time. Yet all the while, she proved a crucial partner of her husband’s burgeoning political career, hosting events with influential people and acting as a behind-the-scenes counsel. With her support, he rose to be a presidential candidate for the anti-slavery Republican Party in the 1860 election – where, incidentally, one of his opponents would be none other than Douglas, the man who had unsuccessfully courted Mary. Following Lincoln’s victory, the family moved to Washington, DC, and Mary prepared for her role as First Lady. Was Abraham Lincoln gay? Despite his marriage to Mary, the question of Lincoln’s sexuality has been widely debated with a growing school of thought claiming that he was gay or bisexual. Oh, Mary!’s Lincoln is very much married to Mary for appearances only. In his youth, he was, according to his stepmother, “not very fond of girls,” and had intensely close relationships with several man, particularly Joshua Speed, a partner in a Springfield general store. Before his marriage, Lincoln shared a bed with Speed for a number of years, and they wrote intimate letters to each other. During his presidency, he was said to have shared a bed with his bodyguard, David Derickson. Yet there is no definitive evidence of Lincoln’s sexuality. Such claims have been refuted with the argument that, in the 19th century, it was far from uncommon for men to share a bed in a non-sexual way. His relationships with men like Speed were a clear sign of intimacy, but not necessarily sexual attraction. The debate, therefore, continues. Mary Todd Lincoln as First Lady By the time of Lincoln’s inauguration in March 1861, seven southern states had seceded from the Union and the American Civil War was about to break out. This posed an immediate problem for Mary. As she was born to a slave owner in Kentucky, a state which now straddled the Union North and Confederate South, questions were raised about her loyalty. Indeed, she had a brother and three half-brothers had fought for the South; two of her half-brothers had died for it. Mary, however, opposed slavery and was committed to her husband’s cause. To that end, she visited hospitals and battlefields, supported the Contraband Relief Association – which provided food, clothing, shelter and medical care to freed slaves – and set about sprucing up the White House in order to present a stable, modern government. Those renovations came under attack from the press, who criticised her wild spending habits on the lavish redecorations. Around this time, in another moment of visible excess, she took to stockpiling expensive, glamorous gowns made by her personal dressmaker, Elizabeth Keckley, who had been formerly enslaved but had forged a reputation as a successful seamstress. Vilified and unpopular, Mary then suffered the tragic loss of another son when Willie, aged 11, died of typhoid fever in 1862. Falling into despair, she did not leave her room for months and so missed the funeral, which was held in the East Room of the White House. Meanwhile, the physical ailments that peppered her adult life worsened, including headaches, mood swings and almost manic fits of extravagant spending. In the years since, Mary’s health has fuelled countless attempts at diagnosis, ranging from bipolar disorder to an autoimmune disease called pernicious anaemia. After her losses, a desperate Mary turned to spiritualism and even held seances in the hopes of reconnecting with her lost children. More loss followed just three years later when, on 14 April 1865 – just as the outlook appeared brighter with the end of the war – Abraham Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth. Mary was sitting next to him in Ford’s Theatre when he was shot in the back of the head. Read more | Could modern medicine have saved Abraham Lincoln? What happened to Mary Todd Lincoln after Abraham’s death? With her mental health deteriorating in the aftermath of Abraham’s assassination, Mary fled the US – where grief and bad press plagued her – and travelled in Europe for several years. She grew increasingly paranoid about money, despite continuing her excessive spending, and lobbied for a widow’s pension from Congress, which was granted in 1870. The following year, however, she had to endure yet another death: her son Tad, shortly after turning 18. Now in a deep depression, she returned to the US, where her last surviving son, Robert, became extremely concerned about her erratic behaviour. He called for a trial on her sanity that resulted in Mary being institutionalised in 1875, confined to a sanatorium for several months. Even after being released and a second trial declaring her to be sane, the public humiliation was all but complete. After a second escape to Europe, she spent her last years in failing health and living in Springfield once again. On 16 July 1882, aged 63, Mary died of a stroke at her sister’s home, the same building where she had married Abraham almost 40 years earlier. She was buried alongside her husband and three sons in Oak Ridge Cemetery in Springfield.
Did the Industrial Revolution make life better – or worse?
We’re often told a simple story: before factories, people lived peaceful, rural lives. Then industry arrived, bringing smoke, slums and suffering. But Professor Emma Griffin reveals in this video that the truth was far more complex
We’re often told a simple story: before factories, people lived peaceful, rural lives. Then industry arrived, bringing smoke, slums and suffering. But as this episode reveals, the reality was far more complex. In this video, Emma Griffin, Professor of History and Head of School at Queen Mary, University of London, explores how most people – even at the height of industrialisation – never worked in factories. Rural life was already harsh, wages were low, and poverty was widespread. Cities brought overcrowding and pollution – but they also offered steady employment, higher wages, education, entertainment and political engagement. Did industrialisation make life better or worse? It certainly made society more complicated, more unequal, more dynamic, and more modern than ever before. View Green Video on the source website
Why did Britain industrialise first? It’s more complicated than you think
The Industrial Revolution didn’t happen because the British were uniquely inventive. There's much more to the story, explains Professor Emma Griffin
From spinning jennies to steam engines, British factories changed the world in the 18th and 19th centuries. But those machines didn’t operate in isolation. In this video, Professor Emma Griffin, Professor of History and Head of School at Queen Mary, University of London, reveals how – without coal, cotton, and colonial networks – the revolution might never have happened. In the second episode of her HistoryExtra series on the Industrial Revolution, Professor Griffin explores why Britain was the first country to industrialise – and why the answer lies not just in technology, but in empire, economics, and exploitation. Was it the abundant coal under British soil? The breakthroughs in machinery? Or something more hidden – like the profits of slavery and access to cheap raw materials? From the growth of the textile industry to the importance of African enslavement in Caribbean plantations, this video dismantles the old myths of British exceptionalism, and shows how the wealth and resources extracted through colonialism helped fuel industrial growth at home. View Green Video on the source website
"It was the greatest act of violence for 66 million years": why the modern world was born of bloodshed
In the 18th century, developments in finance, weapons and industry converged to create a modern economy born of bloodshed. Clifton Crais explores how killing powered the industrial age
Imagine you’re in Nebraska, standing on North America’s Great Plains, where the broad Platte and Missouri rivers join on their way to the mighty Mississippi. It’s 1804, and in the blistering 36°C heat of summer you’re accompanying Captain Meriwether Lewis and Second Lieutenant William Clark as they head west towards the Pacific Ocean, exploring the commercial possibilities of this vast new country. Stretching away in front of you is a sea of chocolate-brown: thousands of animals, each standing as high as a man and weighing upwards of 900kg. Now picture putrefying carcasses and heaps of bleached bones extending as far as the eye can see. “The bones were everywhere,” homesteaders complained, “as thick as cones under a big fir tree”, and so numerous that it was impossible to plough the land. That was mere decades after Lewis and Clark’s fabled expedition. By the end of the 19th century, America’s population of bison had been reduced from tens of millions to around 350. Much of this killing unfolded over the course of just a few years – one of the most concentrated acts of ecological destruction in history. The usual explanation for the slaughter of the American bison ties it to the government’s decision to solve its ‘Indian problem’ – kill the bison and you destroy the Indigenous peoples’ food supply. “Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone,” wrote Colonel Richard Irving Dodge, who had fought in the Civil War before heading west to subdue the Native American population. But politics didn’t kill the bison. Economics did. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/GettyImages-515301392webready-0494d00-e1771951017974.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph showing large piles of bison hides piled up after many animals have been killed for their skins" title="Thousands of bison hides lie in huge piles in Dodge City, Kansas, 1878. Advances in chemistry enabled hides to be processed and used in belts in industrial machinery (Image by Getty Images)" /> General Philip Sheridan, another Civil War veteran who led the Indian Campaign across the Great Plains, knew as much. These hunters “have done more in the last two years… to settle the vexed Indian question than the entire regular army has done in the last 30 years”, he said. “Send them powder and lead, let them kill, skin and sell until the buffaloes are exterminated.” A combination of guns, finance and industry made the near extinction of the bison possible. New advances in firearms made the act of slaughtering bison faster and achievable from a far greater distance. Banks rushed across the Mississippi, lending money to hunters and turning them into “businessmen with rifles”. Advances in chemistry transformed the animals’ body parts into saleable commodities, especially their notoriously difficult-to-process hides. Many of these hides ended up in factories – somewhere between 2 and 6 million in England in the 1870s and 1880s alone. Skins became drive belts that were integral to the machinery of mass production in the industrial revolution. Until the advent of rubber, industrial belting was made from hides, including those of the American bison. Meanwhile, American settlers gathered millions of tonnes of bison bones. Railway companies laid down branch lines for the sole purpose of collecting the bones and shipping them east, where they were processed in places such as the Michigan Carbon Works in Detroit – that state’s largest factory before the automobile revolution. Bones were turned into fertiliser, carbon filters and inks. For a time, bison bone could be found in ‘fine bone’ china and even in mascara. Back on the Great Plains, wealth accrued by killing and bone harvesting supported the rise of farming and ranching. Read more | These three unsuspecting inventions won the American Wild West – but did they destroy it too? What unfolded on the killing fields of the US was part of a global phenomenon. Industrial capitalism’s ‘big bang’ and our current age of global warming emerged out of the greatest act of violence the planet had seen since the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event 66 million years ago, when a meteor crashed into the Yucatán, killing off the dinosaurs and enabling the rise of mammals. The development of modern finance and the mass production of guns, bullets and gunpowder made killing for capitalism possible. This also helps explain the rapid rise to global economic dominance of the UK and the US: two countries that were adept at extracting wealth from destruction. By the first decade of the 19th century, the US’s GDP per capita was on a par with the UK’s. The economic historians Peter Lindert and Jeffrey Williamson have written that the US became “one of the first, if not the first, [countries] to join the modern economic growth club” pioneered by the UK. The two would soon account for a large percentage of global wealth and until 1900 were responsible for most global industrial CO₂ emissions. Firearms have a long history – almost 1,000 years – but in the 18th century the flintlock musket became the ubiquitous weapon of choice. A dramatic improvement on earlier guns that used matchlocks, it was versatile and cheap to produce – the Ford Fiesta of firearms. An experienced marksman could get off three shots in a minute. Workshops and factories across the western world scrambled to meet the insatiable global demand for the new weapon. England became the world leader in musket manufacture and distribution, beginning in London’s East End before spreading to Birmingham and Liverpool. Muskets were useless without gunpowder and lead, and England had plentiful supplies of the latter. Mines in Northumberland and Derbyshire yielded thousands of tonnes of the metal each year. When it came to gunpowder, the British East India Company’s exploitation of the subcontinent’s resources proved vital, especially the principal chemical, saltpetre. The monopolistic East India Company considered its control over the saltpetre trade to be “combined and interwoven with the welfare and even with the existence of the empire in India”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/BAL44583webready-ef1bf1a-e1771951145854.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Workers inside a brick‑walled workshop tend large heated pans built into furnaces while others handle tall conical molds set over containers, with steam rising from the equipment. Metal vessels filled with processed gunpowder materials are scattered across the floor, showing multiple stages of early gunpowder production." title="Gunpowder is made at the Woolwich Arsenal, c1750. Controlling large reserves of Indian saltpetre, an ingredient of gunpowder, Britain became a major player in arms manufacture (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> Thanks to the research of Dr Nicholas Radburn at Lancaster University, we have quite precise figures for the millions of pounds of saltpetre imported into the UK, and the overall production of British gunpowder, across the entire 18th century. Between 1698 and 1808, Britain produced more than 522 million pounds of gunpowder. Much went to its military, especially the navy, where a single shot from a 16-pound cannon used 8 pounds of powder. But more than 78 million pounds were exported to Africa, the Caribbean and what would become the United States and Canada. These are just the official numbers, though; the real totals are probably higher. In any case, that was enough powder for more than 1.25 billion musket shots – a number greater than the entire global population in 1750. Other nations got in on the action, too, especially the French and the Dutch. Americans weren’t far behind, and by the 1820s US-made weapons were being sold far and wide, especially across the Pacific Ocean and into China, where American Colt pistols were used in the 1850–64 Taiping Rebellion – one of the most catastrophic wars in human history. Plying the world with weapons was a volatile business – literally. Stores of gunpowder and saltpetre frequently exploded. The 1794 Ratcliffe Fire in London, sparked when a barge loaded with saltpetre caught fire, was the worst conflagration in the capital since 1666. It was described by The Times as “a striking and awful spectacle” – devastation on a scale not matched in London until the Blitz of 1940–41. On the other side of the Atlantic, throughout the 19th century there were almost yearly accidents at the huge DuPont explosives factory in Delaware, where a local cemetery was filled with the victims. Murder and pillage are nothing new. In fact, both are as old as our species. However, with the widespread proliferation of weapons in the 18th century, killing became infinitely easier. Read more | Did Aztec civilisation really ‘collapse’? The reality isn’t as simple as you might think This is where modern finance enters the picture. In the 15th and 16th centuries, the Spanish were outstanding at pillaging, producing men such as Hernán Cortés who rampaged across Mexico. The Conquistadors ransacked from the Americas the equivalent of billions of dollars in today’s money, much of it in precious metals. But Spain struggled to convert wealth produced by violence into capital for investment and production – and capital is what capitalism is all about. Instead, it spent its fortunes on religious and dynastic wars, churches, art, buildings and other forms of conspicuous consumption. England’s financial transformation was a game changer, building on innovations pioneered by the Dutch in the 17th century. In the 18th century, there was a revolution in English banking, along with a tranche of developments including insurance, bonds, stock markets, patent law and an increasingly standardised currency. In the first quarter of the 19th century, the number of banks outside London increased 30-fold, and doubled in that city. London became the “capital of capital”, as the economic historian Youssef Cassis termed it, led by the Bank of England, which was established in the closing years of the 17th century. “The multiplication of banking companies,” Adam Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations (1776), was a great example of the virtues of competition and increased public confidence in the economy. Wealth – including that generated by violence – was free to become capital. By 1820, the US had just over 300 banks. Forty years later, that number had grown to more than 1,500 – a five-fold increase, and many more than in the UK. With banking came an array of financial innovations, from insurance to stocks and bonds. Like that of its former imperial master, the US legal system protected wealth – whether it was land, money or, across the South, human beings – which meant that it was easy to transform wealth into investable capital. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/BAL87937webready-7efb6df-e1771951291786.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A busy 19th‑century city street where a crowd of men in top hats gathers in animated discussion, while two barefoot newsboys hold up papers in the foreground. Behind them, tall commercial buildings with large signs and a horse‑drawn streetcar marked “Broadway” frame the bustling urban setting." title="Crowds throng Wall Street, New York City’s banking hub, during a financial panic in 1857. The United States’ rise as an economic heavyweight was boosted by its ability to convert the wealth it accrued from the killing of bison, beaver and whales into capital for investment (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> This is how bison hides ended up in factories, and their bones in your ancestor’s teacup, connecting Manchester with Wyoming, halfway around the world. The connections to killing don’t stop there, though. Those factories required lighting. Sunlight alone was unacceptable to factory owners, who wanted their workers to be labouring as long as humanly (or inhumanly) possible, sometimes from five in the morning until well into the night. Until the advent of hydrocarbons such as paraffin and natural gas, it was whale oil that kept these places lit. England was soon consuming at least 50,000 barrels of the stuff each year, generating more than 3 billion lumen-hours of illumination. By the 1830s, most of the whale oil entering England ended up in its factories for lighting and lubrication. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, anywhere between a quarter and a third of sperm-whale oil (which produced the best light) harvested by American whalers made its way into factories. Whale oil was also used for lighting in Caribbean mills, where enslaved people were forced to work continuously to process the sugar-cane juice that helped provide cheap energy for the industrial working classes. Demand for lubrication and lighting in both factories and cities resulted in the mass slaughter of whales, from Greenland to the Indian Ocean. Though it is impossible to determine the exact scale of the killing, we do know that about 2 million whales were slaughtered between 1750 and 1900. Whaling produced huge profits until the number of those marine mammals dwindled, and whalers were forced to spend more time at sea, often returning home with empty casks. In the case of New England’s whale industry, profits were reinvested in a variety of businesses, from cotton mills to railways and the transition to fossil fuels in the US. One of the world’s largest textile factories – the Wamsutta Mills in New Bedford, Massachusetts – was funded by the harvesting of whales. And some of the early investors in what became John D Rockefeller’s powerful and notorious Standard Oil Company amassed their capital from hunting whales. People found many ways of turning into capital the natural resources in their surroundings. England’s land-enclosure movement was one of them, and has commonly been offered as an explanation for the development of capitalism, going back to the works of the classical political economists in the 18th and 19th centuries. But using violence to generate capital was a global process, and an ongoing one. It proved possible to turn just about anything into profit, from whales and bison to deer, beaver and African elephants – plus another mammal: Homo sapiens. The spread of guns led to a global increase in enslavement, most infamously across Africa. Beginning in the early 16th century and continuing for over 350 years, more than 12.5 million enslaved people were trafficked from Africa’s shores – by far the largest forced migration in human history. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/GettyImages-517213402webready-820476d-e1771951455442.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A painting depicting a slave auction. A man in a blue suit and grey top hat stands on top of a large box, talking to a crowd of gentleman, pointing towards a group of people of colour sitting on the floor, looking sad" title="Enslaved African people are sold at auction in the US, c1852. Vast numbers perished as a result of the transatlantic slave trade (Image by Getty Images)" /> However, nearly 7.9 million people – 63 per cent of the total Atlantic trade in human beings – were moved in just 60 years from the mid-18th century, during the industrial revolution and just as weapons began flooding the continent. This rapid expansion of the slave trade precisely tracks the import of gunpowder into Africa, as Nicholas Radburn has demonstrated definitively. The UK alone exported more than 26 million kg of explosives to Africa in the 18th century, most of it after 1750. Weapons yielded the greatest gains. One result, as the tyrannical King Adandozan of Dahomey (reigned 1797–1818) bragged, was a kingdom where his people “cultivated not with hoes, but with guns”. People hunting people is part of the nasty and brutish reality of enslavement. But how many people lost their lives to produce the 7.9 million people shipped across the Atlantic, where nearly 10 per cent died along the way to the Americas? I have estimated upwards of 2–3 people died to yield a single enslaved person. In other words, perhaps as many as 24 million humans perished in the flood of weapons and enslavement. Similar ratios unfolded elsewhere in the world, where guns were used to hunt people. In the south-east US – where Indigenous people were employed to hunt and enslave other Native Americans – the hunters killed three Native Americans for every one they captured. We know that profits from the transatlantic trade increased dramatically in this period, as work by Nobel-Prize-winning economists Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson has demonstrated. The Caribbean sugar and American cotton that made its way into workers’ cups of tea and into the English textile mills – which were releasing CO₂ and beginning to warm the Earth’s atmosphere – were tied to Africa’s killing fields. The industrial revolution and our own age of global warming are inextricably tied not just to the institution of slavery – a continuing subject of debate across the world – but also to the mass destruction of people, animals and the environment that guns and finance made possible. Read more | The profits of slavery: the dire impact of empire on Britain's countryside This is the dark reality of capitalism’s creation myth – one that historians and climate scientists are now beginning to understand. The industrial revolution and the global warming that now threatens our very existence emerged from the globalisation of killing for profit. The deaths of millions of Africans that underpinned the entire Atlantic slavery complex is only the most obvious connection. While there were other factors at play here, the wealth generated by the system of slavery “contributed causally to Britain’s industrial revolution”, according to a 2022 study. This recognition underpins many ongoing and fraught discussions, especially in the UK – most recently the February 2025 parliamentary debates on reparations, and the July 2025 University of Edinburgh report on donor links to slavery. These conversations, however, miss something very basic. History’s horrors go deeper into the totality of destruction that made our world economy – one that entangles the deaths of Africans with the slaughter of bison and whales in addition to a vast number of other species. This is one reason why the popular term ‘Anthropocene’ may not suffice, and why I have suggested a different word to describe the epoch that created our contemporary planetary peril: the ‘Mortecene’ – the Age of Killing and Death. Clifton Crais is a professor of history at Emory University. His new book is The Killing Age: How Violence Made the Modern World (Picador, 2026) This article was first published in the February 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
The Industrial Revolution wasn’t what you think
The Industrial Revolution wasn’t just about cotton mills and steam engines – it was a radical transformation of how the world worked. Professor Emma Griffin explains more
Professor Emma Griffin, Professor of History and Head of School at Queen Mary, University of London, explores the real story behind the world’s most transformative era. As you'll hear, it wasn’t just spinning machines and factories – it was a complete shift in how we produced goods, traded, and lived. Find out why the shift from local, home-based manufacturing to globalised mass production changed the course of human history. View Green Video on the source website
Be wary of technology’s big promises, but roll with the changes
From spinning jennies to ChatGPT, the advent of new technology often sparks widespread anxiety, Professor Emma Griffin tells Dr David Musgrove. But the industrial revolution shows we can adapt
I hate my vacuum cleaner with a passion that sometimes surprises me. I was sucked into buying an expensive model a few years ago. When it’s working, it’s great, no doubt about it. But it’s often not working, as it gets clogged up very easily. So I spend a lot of time taking it apart and removing the blockages. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m sure there is a substantial element of user error at play here, and there is definitely a surfeit of dog hair that I’m asking it to deal with. But, for a labour-saving device, I spend a lot more time labouring on it than it does labouring for me. Quite often, I revert to a broom instead. One of the most pressing questions for our modern age is how to navigate the rapid advance of technology. From artificial intelligence to automation, we’re told that machines will make our lives easier. But will they? Or are we simply shifting the labour elsewhere? Are we creating more work for ourselves, or creating machines that do all our work and make us obsolete? And how do we cope with it all? To shed light on this, I spoke to Professor Emma Griffin, a historian of the industrial revolution and author of Bread Winner: An Intimate History of the Victorian Economy (Yale University Press, 2020). Can we take any lessons from her research into working-class life in 19th-century Britain, a period when the white heat of technology was really smoking? The age of machines The industrial revolution, which began in Britain in the late 18th century, transformed everything. Machines began to replace manual labour on a mass scale. Factories powered by steam engines and filled with spinning jennies and power looms revolutionised the production of textiles. Coal mining, iron smelting and transport infrastructure all expanded dramatically. It was an age of innovation, but also of anxiety. “There was always a lot of fear that new technology and new machinery would throw people out of employment,” Griffin explains, “[That] they would de-skill jobs. It would leave people without gainful employment. It would leave them with nothing to do. And it was to be feared.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/07/GettyImages-802464806-ca480a1.jpg" width="4346" height="3226" alt="The spinning jenny was patented by James Hargreaves in 1770. His machine used several spindles to spin wool and cotton rather than one. (Photo by The Print Collector/Getty Images)" title="The spinning jenny was patented by James Hargreaves in 1770. His machine used several spindles to spin wool and cotton rather than one. (Photo by The Print Collector/Getty Images)" /> This fear was not unfounded. The Luddites – skilled textile workers who destroyed machinery in protest – are shorthand for anti-technology sentiment. (You can find out more about them on our podcast here.) But Griffin urges us to look beyond the myth and examine the broader picture. While some people did lose out, the overall impact of industrialisation was not mass unemployment, but rather a reorganisation of labour. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/07/GettyImages-1185854652-d970399.jpg" width="4724" height="4057" alt="The Luddites attacked textile machines in Britain in 1811 in protest against the introduction of automated machinery. (Photo by Getty Images)" title="The Luddites attacked textile machines in Britain in 1811 in protest against the introduction of automated machinery. (Photo by Getty Images)" /> “In the industrial revolution, some people did lose their employment, but there was always other employment that emerged in its place,” she says. “At the same time as having all of these labour-saving devices that make things like spinning so much quicker and so much easier, you also have a greatly increased demand for cotton goods and for woven goods.” In other words, machines changed the nature of work, and moved tasks from one area to another, but they didn’t eliminate it. False advertising The term ‘labour-saving device’ may be misleading. Just because a machine can do something faster or more efficiently doesn’t mean it reduces the total amount of work in our lives. “Labour-saving devices are part of technology. They’re part of progress. They are here to stay. They’re not going to go anywhere,” Griffin says. “But if we take a long view and look back from the 21st century, what they don’t seem to have done is turned us all into idle people who are all unemployed and who all have nothing to do.” That point is well illustrated by a piece in the New Scientist magazine from 1989. Its author, Sue Birchmore, penned a splendidly vituperative article about the impact of technology on her life. She bemoaned the stock of ill-used kitchen appliances that she had amassed, and threw some heavy shade on her vacuum cleaner too. But she also made this point: “Labour-saving devices don’t seem to have actually reduced the burden of housework; in fact, if all these findings of modern research are to be believed, the time western women spend on housework has gone up over the years, not down. It’s partly that standards have got tougher; a house that was tolerable in 1918 rates as a tip in 1989.” Birchmore was on the money there. Technology raises the bar, and I don’t just mean about cleaning floors. This is bigger than vacuum cleaners – it’s about the way we live and interact with technology at home, at work and in life generally. It might save time on the one hand, but it’ll likely make more work on the other. That’s annoying if you’re looking to save time on the household chores, but pretty important if you’re thinking about the future of employment, and humanity generally. Watch View Green Video on the source website The AI revolution The arrival of artificial intelligence – particularly large language models like ChatGPT – has sparked similar fears to those during the industrial revolution. Will these tools make our jobs obsolete? Will they devalue human creativity and skill? These are the questions we all want answers to. Does history provide them? No, but it gives some context. “It was really interesting, I think it was in 2023, when I heard about ChatGPT for the first time. It was suddenly all over the news and I didn’t know what it was,” recalls Griffin. “You’re getting a lot of commentators saying, well, this is really bad news for workers because their jobs are going to be made obsolete.” But, just as with the spinning jenny, she believes the reality will be more complex. Jobs will change. Some will disappear. But new roles and needs will emerge too. “I think in some ways it’s just the wrong framing. It tends to mean that we work differently. Some jobs that had been done by human hands or human ingenuity will obviously now be done through computing,” she says. “Most businesses – and this is exactly what you see with the spinning jenny – they’ll be like, great, we can make more, and we can sell more.” Making more and selling more ought to mean more work for individuals, and that is what happened in the industrial revolution. You might question whether the little people really benefited much from this, or were just thrust into lives of endless drudgery to the benefit of the mill owners. Griffin’s take is that it’s important not to look back to the past with rosy romanticism. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/07/GettyImages-507134596-0596662.jpg" width="5376" height="3744" alt="This 1828 painting Off to Market by Edmund Bristow offers a perhaps idealised glimpse of rural life in 19th-century Britain. (Photo by Getty Images)" title="This 1828 painting Off to Market by Edmund Bristow offers a perhaps idealised glimpse of rural life in 19th-century Britain. (Photo by Getty Images)" /> “The idea that before industrialisation, before the factory, before the city, before the machines, people lived quite nice, happy, wholesome lives. They lived out in the countryside; they did a little bit of gardening; they did a little bit of weaving; they lived in stable family units – and life was nice. And then of course, the factory and the machine come along and decimate all of that. I don’t subscribe to that view because you can only sustain that if you take a really romantic view of what life before the industrial revolution was like.” Searching for a better life Emma Griffin’s research into working-class autobiographies from the 19th century (which she discusses in this HistoryExtra interview) reveals a perhaps surprising pattern: many people embraced the move from rural to urban life. They found greater freedom, more varied employment and better wages in the cities. “Many of the working-class autobiographers I’ve looked at make that journey. They’re born into rural poverty. They grow up and move to the city. And in the city they find all sorts of really appealing things,” she explains. “There’s a vast array of different jobs that people can do in an urban setting. If you live in the village, there is only one job. So, whether you like growing turnips or not, everybody has to join in the work of growing a turnip.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/07/B5GRTW-3ef5b49.jpg" width="4837" height="3664" alt="Steel factories flourished in Sheffield during the industrial revolution and many workers moved from the countryside to the city. (Photo by Alamy)" title="Steel factories flourished in Sheffield during the industrial revolution and many workers moved from the countryside to the city. (Photo by Alamy)" /> As technology reshapes the job market, the ability to pivot, to retrain and to find new roles will be more important than ever. “There will be certain areas and certain things people do that we just won’t be able to continue doing in exactly the same way,” Griffin says. “But I suspect what we’ll find is there’ll be a huge shifting around and reorganisation of the way we do things. And new opportunities will emerge from that.” That said, she is clear-eyed about the risks. Not everyone will be able to adapt easily. Some skill sets may become obsolete without clear pathways to new employment. The transition will be bumpy for some. “There will be some tasks, some skill sets from which people will find it difficult to pivot to something else,” she notes. “Those opportunities that open up elsewhere may or may not be ones that they can grasp.” I think it’s important to look at the whole picture here. Technological changes are not just about jobs and work productivity, or about labour-saving devices at home. They cause shifts in the fabric of society itself. The model of the breadwinner was born out of the move to factory production in the industrial revolution, and that radically changed the dynamics of family life, and the opportunities for men and women, and children, at the time. In an article that Griffin wrote for HistoryExtra a little while ago (available here), she outlined what that meant for people: “The outcomes of the industrial revolution were, clearly, mixed. Healthy adult men stood to gain the most, enjoying more work, higher wages and opportunities for cultural and political expression. Women were almost wholly bypassed by these developments and, though children were affected by the great demand for labour, for them the results were far from beneficial”. The changing world of work There were winners and losers in the industrial revolution. There are going to be winners and losers in the AI revolution. How do you make sure you’re winning more than you’re losing? Frankly, I’m not sure. But the lesson from history is that flexibility and an open-minded approach are key. Embrace the benefits of new technology, but just be quizzical about the big promises that are made for it. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/07/GettyImages-640351083-efe3be8.jpg" width="4961" height="3508" alt="With the arrival of AI, what will the future bring? Professor Emma Griffin’s Life Lesson from History encourages us to embrace change rather than resist it. (Photo by Getty Images)" title="With the arrival of AI, what will the future bring? Professor Emma Griffin’s Life Lesson from History encourages us to embrace change rather than resist it. (Photo by Getty Images)" /> “I think the big takeaway for me is that, since industrialisation, we’ve lived in a very rapidly changing world, a very fast-moving world,” observes Griffin. “For millennia, people lived pretty much the same kind of life as the life that their parents had lived and their grandparents had lived. Everything was fundamentally fairly similar. And that’s just not the case for us today.” That pace of change can be disorienting, unmooring and anxiety-inducing. But it’s the world we live in – and it’s not going away. Whether we are well adapted to this flood of novelty is going to become clear over the coming years I suppose. Looking back to the industrial revolution, we can perhaps take solace that people did cope. If you look at their autobiographies, as Griffin has done, you might take a broadly positive view of how it went for people then. She sums it up in that HistoryExtra piece I mentioned earlier: “This much is clear: we would do well to discard the darker interpretations of this era. The industrial revolution ushered in revolutionary social change, and working people certainly shared in the benefits.” So is there a bright and cheery message from the past? I’m not sure – artificial intelligence feels like an altogether different prospect to the spinning jenny to me. But maybe I’d have felt similarly anxious about the latter if I’d been alive in the 18th century. And those people who lived through the age of the jenny and the power loom coped and adapted. Undeniably, there was massive social change, and we’re still working through the consequences of that now. But at the time, some people prospered, and found great benefits in the new world. Like them, we should expect, and we’re going to have to accept, ever more change. Griffin’s view – informed by her knowledge of how people fared in the past – is that it’s better to work with change than fight it, and I share that sentiment. I’ve used AI to help me write this article – I asked it to select some killer quotes from an automatically generated transcript of my interview with Professor Griffin. I asked for quotes that illustrated specific points I wanted to make, and obviously I checked them to make sure they were good and accurate. That’s saved me half an hour of the task, which I’m going to use to go for a run with my dog, to bolster my health and mental wellbeing, and to keep just a few of those labrador hairs on the trails outside, rather than inside that pesky vacuum cleaner. That’s my way of making the machines work for me.
What working-class autobiographies can tell us about the Industrial Revolution
Emma Griffin explains how 19th-century working-class autobiographies could revise our understanding of the industrial revolution
The British industrial revolution stands out as a pivotal moment in human history. But when we think about the men, women and children who, with their strong backs and nimble fingers, did the most to power it, we tend to feel that there is less to celebrate. All of the great Victorian commentators – Engels, Dickens, Blake – painted those industrial times in a very dark hue: they lamented the introduction of new working patterns that compelled men to work at the relentless pace of the machines; children forced into factories and down mines at ever-younger ages; families squeezed into dark, disease-ridden cities; and no future but the workhouse for those who slipped through the net. Listen on the podcast | The Industrial Revolution: everything you wanted to know Their dismal litany echoed through the 20th century as a succession of pioneering social historians – Barbara and John Hammond, Eric Hobsbawm and EP Thompson, to name a few – turned their attention to the devastating impact of the industrial revolution on the working poor. Workers’ words Yet, despite the frequency with which various versions of these bleak perspectives have been retold, their central claim – that this period was worse than anything that has gone before – has not received the scrutiny it deserves. In particular, it is remarkable that so little effort has been made to listen to what working people themselves had to say about their life and times. Of course, it is usually countered that such an effort would be futile because such people did not leave behind much in the way of written sources. But though it is certainly true that they wrote far less than their social superiors, it is not the case that they wrote nothing at all. Their legacy is a little-known but remarkable collection of autobiographies written by working people. If we listen to these, we hear a story very different from the one that we are used to. Historians have long been aware of the existence of such memoirs, but most have been sceptical about using them to study working-class life. After all, this was a period of relatively high illiteracy, so (it has been argued) there was something exceptional about the working man or woman with the ability to record their personal history. Yet this line of argument assumes that literacy was more unusual among the working class than was really the case. In the 19th century a range of very cheap avenues for developing literacy – dame schools, Sunday schools, night schools and mutual improvement societies – were available to both children and adults, so writing a memoir was within the grasp of even the very poor. Among autobiographers of the time were men such as John Hemmingway, who was put to work in a Manchester cotton mill at the age of eight and raised in poverty by his mother following the desertion of the family by his father. As an adult he turned his hand to various occupations – weaving, shop-keeping, driving a horse and cart, joining the army – but never rose above the station to which he had been born. In old age he and his wife were forced to sell their furniture and wedding rings, move into a miserable cellar dwelling and live off a small dole from the parish. So, though some of the autobiographers were exceptional in one way or another, that was far from true of all. Of course, the use of these accounts is not without its problems. One major frailty is the paucity of autobiographies written by women. Also, these writers were haunted by failures of memory, inevitably producing subjective accounts of their lives. But nearly 400 autobiographies written during the period of industrialisation provide a rich and hitherto untapped seam of evidence that we cannot afford to ignore. Furthermore, in contrast to the other sources consulted by historians interested in the lives of ordinary workers – the poor law, the census, the criminal courts – these records were freely created by the men and women we wish to study. In this sense they are unique, and an excellent resource for the study of working-class experiences of the British industrial revolution. What, then, do these personal histories tell us about how the advent of industrialisation changed workers’ lives? More than anything, the autobiographers indicate that industrialisation, and the urban growth that accompanied it, increased the amount of work available. These sources make it possible to compare descriptions of earning a living written by people in pre-industrial areas with those set in rural and industrial districts. They reveal that, in the absence of industry, most workers were not fully employed – and, as a result, lived in a state of chronic poverty. The low wages and patchy employment of agricultural workers meant that even skilled artisans in pre-industrial Britain – shoemakers, blacksmiths, carpenters and so forth – were rarely able to make a good living from their trade, because few of their neighbours had the means to pay for their services. As a result, many skilled workers turned to agriculture to try to make ends meet – and the resulting growth in the number of people trying to eke out a livelihood from the land helped ensure that living standards remained low. This situation, more than anything else, changed with the emergence of industrialisation. The industrial revolution increased the amount of work available – for the skilled and the unskilled, for the young and the old. As manufacturing expanded, young men and women poured into cities from the countryside to work in the new factories. Full employment But working on the factory floor was just the beginning. Coal was required to run the machines, providing an important stimulus for the mining industry. Factories needed their workers, but they also had to be built, their machines maintained, their warehouses organised – and it all amounted to a steady stream of employment for the men who flocked to the cities. One autobiographer noted that goods needed to be weighed as well as made, and found a job doing precisely that. Others made a living transporting raw material and finished goods – driving horses and carts, building railways, driving trains. Providing for the needs of a large population also created a mountain of work: the growing urban populace needed houses, furniture, bread, shoes and clothes. This demand for the staples of life provided plenty of business for skilled workers – and what’s more, unlike the rural poor, the urban workforce had the money with which to pay them. The factories’ labour needs meant that many workers were now fully employed throughout the year, which helped to drag families out of the grinding poverty that agricultural workers endured. Full employment was the single most important way of increasing a family’s prosperity, but it was also significant because it changed the balance of power in the working relationship. As long as workers outnumbered jobs, employers held the upper hand. In the industrial heartlands, though, the demand for workers was insatiable, placing them in a far stronger position to bargain over such matters as working hours and wages. Included among the autobiographers are men who gave their notice over disputes concerning the length of tea-breaks or the church they attended. One worker gave as a reason for resigning simply that he “got sick of the job”! Such actions were inconceivable in the rural context and help to remind us that full employment not only improved men’s incomes but also enhanced their working conditions and status. Read more | Your guide to the Luddite Movement Yet, though adult men generally stood to gain from industrialisation, we should not assume that these advantages were enjoyed by others in their families. The demand for labour, particularly in the factories and mines, meant that there was ever more work for children too, with the unfortunate result that those in industrial districts were being hustled into the workforce at ever younger ages. Accounts reveal that children living in rural areas and market towns did not usually enter the workplace until the age of 11 and a half. The contrast with the industrial districts is stark: on average, children in those areas started work aged eight and a half – three years younger than their peers living in areas without industrial employment. Furthermore, in contrast to young workers in rural areas, who often started part-time and whose hours were limited by the seasons and daylight hours, children in factories and mines entered a world of full employment, working very long days, day in and day out, year after year. In some respects, then, the evidence suggests that the situation for children mirrored that for adult men: industrial growth significantly improved their prospects of finding full-time employment. But whereas that enhanced living standards for men, it had the opposite effect on children. Working 13-hour days from the age of six or seven took a very serious toll on a child’s health, development and wellbeing, making their overall welfare gains highly questionable. Did they know it was a revolution? Autobiographers did not use the expression ‘the industrial revolution’, but many did display an unmistakeable awareness that times had changed during the course of their life. So what did they make of it all? In contrast to the way that historians have viewed this period, the autobiographers spoke in remarkably consistent terms of improvements and progress. Benjamin North, for instance, thought that if his parents and ancestors could “revisit the earth… and see the domestic alterations, commercial improvements, and the wonderful and astonishing activities of life” they would not be able to “believe their own eyes”. Looking back to the early 19th century, Joseph Livesey could not help “constantly exclaiming ‘What a contrast there is betwixt the present advantages of poor people and their children compared to that period!’” These writers never expressed regrets about the passing of the old days – or “the bad old times”, as they were styled by one writer. There were no fond words for the quiet or simplicity that their forefathers had known. Thomas Wood declared that he would be a “misanthrope indeed who would wish the old days or customs back again”. To a man, our writers were glad that their grandchildren would never know the life they had once lived. Mother’s ruin The outcome of industrial growth for women was different again. Though it increased the likelihood of men and children finding full-time employment, usually at better wages than the agricultural alternatives on offer, it made relatively little difference to women’s experiences in the workplace. It is true that women living in the industrial heartlands benefited from the growth of factories. But, once they were married with a family, few were able to maintain a position in a factory, and most retreated from the workplace altogether. Betty Leeming, a mill hand in the Lancashire town of Preston, was typical in this respect. Following her marriage to Benjamin Shaw she handed in her notice at the factory. Though she did make a few attempts to earn money from home following her marriage – she took in bobbin-winding and baked oatcakes to sell to her neighbours – she never returned to the factory. Autobiographies also reveal that family responsibilities were the primary reason for women giving up paid jobs. Indeed, unmarried women and those with no children almost always worked outside the home. In families with just one or two children, between 70 and 80 per cent of mothers worked. As a woman’s family grew, however, the chances of her being in work rapidly diminished. Of mothers with three or four children, the participation rate hovered around 50 per cent, a figure that steadily declined as families increased in size. Almost no women with eight or nine children did any paid work. In the absence of reliable childcare or effective means to limit family size, mothers had little choice but to stay at home and care for their families – a situation the industrial revolution did little to change. The most obvious consequence of increased work opportunities was higher family incomes; for those living close to the breadline this was a very welcome development. But the changes were not simply material. A widely recognised feature of industrialisation is the growth of great towns. Historians have often drawn attention to the fact that these could be dark, crowded and unhealthy – but cities were also places of freedom. In a city one could attend a night school or worship at whichever church one chose. It was possible to join a union or even a political association, and start to shape the society in which one lived. Men who threw themselves into city life did not view themselves as victims. William Aitken described his fellow Manchester Chartists as the “sons of freedom”. His view, shared by many other autobiographers, was that city life was liberating, not oppressive. The outcomes of the industrial revolution were, clearly, mixed. Healthy adult men stood to gain the most, enjoying more work, higher wages and opportunities for cultural and political expression. Women were almost wholly bypassed by these developments and, though children were affected by the great demand for labour, for them the results were far from beneficial. Nonetheless, this much is clear: we would do well to discard the darker interpretations of this era. The industrial revolution ushered in revolutionary social change, and working people certainly shared in the benefits. In their words Historians have long known of the existence of working-class autobiographies. A bibliography of 19th-century memoirs compiled in the 1980s listed nearly 800 items, and many more have since come to light. They go under various titles: life histories, autobiographies, memoirs, notes, sketches, recollections and adventures, as well as many other, more idiosyncratic names. The defining feature of each, though, is that writer and subject are one and the same. These are works that we would today recognise as autobiographies, though it’s worth noting that the word ‘autobiography’ only entered the English language in the late 18th/early 19th century, long after the culture of life-writing had taken root. Some of these books are well known, such as the great autobiographies of the Chartist leaders William Lovett, Thomas Cooper and Robert Lowery. A few found success in their own time. For example, James Dawson Burn’s autobiography (some editions of which were titled The Beggar Boy) was first published in 1855; by the end of the decade a fourth edition was in print. Others were published in very small numbers by obscure provincial printers, more for the writer’s satisfaction than in response to any public demand. Some of the most interesting were not written for publication at all. One such example is the Simple Naritive written by John Lincoln, now stored in the vaults of the Norfolk Record Office. The 80 pages of Lincoln’s notebook are fragile and torn, filled with the untidy hand of a self-taught writer. The closely inscribed, margin-less pages remind us that Lincoln lived at a time when paper was a precious commodity. They contain a detailed account of his life, from earliest childhood recollections to the present, and range over topics – sex before marriage, an illegitimate child, an unhappy marriage and the death of the writer’s small children – about which some of the more polished accounts were reticent. Emma Griffin is senior lecturer in history at the University of East Anglia. She has written widely on the history of working-class life in Britain This article first appeared in the March 2013 issue of BBC History Magazine
From family to factory: women's lives during the Industrial Revolution
The Industrial Revolution saw thousands of women enter the workplace alongside men – but it was far from emancipatory, writes Elinor Evans
The Industrial Revolution caused a dramatic shift in women’s roles in society. Before industrialisation, the household would have been the centre of production, and women’s work largely confined to the domestic sphere, but no less physical for it. Tasks such as fetching water, and tending livestock would have kept women as busy as clothing and feeding a family, while many also took other work into their home such as hand-spinning or weaving. Cottage industry, as it was called, didn’t entirely end with the arrival of large- scale manufacturing, but the advent of machinery had an irreversible impact on women’s lives. As machines replaced individual labour and burgeoning industries needed coal, women became part of the growing working classes that laboured in mines and mills. In the late 18th century, many families would seek employment together, with husband, wife and children all working at the same factory or pit, while for many single women, taking a job outside the home offered the chance of greater independence. LEARN MORE: Women's lives during different historical periods But women were seen as less physically strong and skilled than men and were paid less. Many employers were quick to exploit this cheaper option, and soon, tasks such as printing and working at spinning machines that didn’t require as much strength and were easy to learn, became seen as ‘women’s labour’. Work-life-imbalance Despite the disparity in pay, the conditions in many factories were no less dangerous for women. They could work as many as 80 hours in a week, were offered few breaks, and often served inedible food. In 1832, 23-year- old Elizabeth Bentley was interviewed by a parliamentary investigation into conditions for textile workers. She described working in the card room of a flax mill near Leeds. “It was so dusty, the dust got up my lungs, and the work was so hard... I got so bad in health, that when I pulled the baskets down, I pulled my bones out of their places." As well as the long hours and physical demands of factory labour, the domestic roles traditionally viewed as women’s work continued – unpaid. Tasks such as cooking, cleaning and childcare still needed to be carried out. Perhaps unsurprisingly, few employers were understanding. Bentley described a practice known as ‘quartering’: “If we were a quarter of an hour too late, they would take off half an hour; we only got a penny an hour, and they would take a halfpenny more.” Another common role was in the mines of Lancashire and Yorkshire, where women laboured underground alongside men in physically demanding roles until the mid-19th century. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2022/03/GettyImages_959874830-87635ce.jpg" width="4044" height="5478" alt="A painting of a woman and her child, who is sat in her lap" title="Even when women downed tools, they were still expected to look after their children and act as homemakers – with no additional financial support from the state.(Photo by Print Collector/Getty Images)" /> Isabel Wilson, a 38-year-old coal putter (someone who pushed tubs of coal from the coal face to the pit eye) was interviewed as part of Lord Ashley’s Mines Commission of 1842. She told how the dual roles of having children and producing for a family came with immense hardship. “When women have children thick [fast] they are compelled to take them down early. I have been married 19 years and have had 10 bairns; seven are in life,” she said. One job carrying coals “caused me to miscarry five times from the strains, and was gai ill after each. Putting is no so oppressive; last child was born on Saturday morning, and I was at work on the Friday night.” But jarringly, it was not such testimony in Lord Ashley’s report that caused the most public outcry. Pushing carts underground was hot work, and both young men and women would strip to the trousers in efforts to keep cool. One small detail in the report noted that some women were working topless alongside men. Outrage in the press fuelled a belief that mining girls were being corrupted by their surroundings, and making bad wives and mothers. It was of no matter that the investigators found just one pit where females worked without tops (the Hopwood pit at Barnsley, which was labelled “a nursery for juvenile vice”). It wasn’t long before the Mines and Collieries Act of 1842 had banned women from underground work to protect their health and morals. How gruelling was the Victorian workhouse? But ultimately, as legislation forced more women away from the workplace for better or worse, ideas of gender evolved to match this new dynamic; men who went out to work were seen as breadwinners and providers, and by the mid-19th century the female ideal had become that of mother, moral guardian and homemaker. This article was first published in BBC History Revealed
"An enlightened turn": how medicine (and the vaccination) developed in Victorian Britain
With industrialisation making living conditions worse in the cities, the improvements to hospital provision, surgery and the care of the poor needed to gain apace. Emma Slattery Williams explores how healthcare in 18th-century Britain changed, and the pioneering preventative treatments that helped combat a killer disease
By the late 18th century, Britain was seeing the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution, a process that eventually led to a huge migration of people to industrial cities, with widespread overcrowding and unsanitary living conditions. Drinking water was often contaminated with raw sewage, rubbish rotted in the streets, and crowded living conditions meant disease could easily spread. As many as one in five children died before their second birthday. There was, however, growing institutional provision for curing the sick and the number of hospitals grew in Britain – some of these were run by local parishes, while others were founded by philanthropists wishing to help the poor and perhaps improve their own social position in the process. In return for an annual contribution, a benefactor could recommend a sick person for admission to hospital. “The notion was that you could intervene and save working class people who might otherwise die for lack of healthcare,” explains Mary Fissell, professor of the history of medicine at Johns Hopkins University. “It was part of a larger, almost mercantilist, view of the health of the population being a significant variable for government.” Read more | The history of vaccination: from Edward Jenner to anti-vaxxers The 18th century also saw improvements in surgery. Surgeons such as William Cheselden, Percival Pott, and John Hunter delved into anatomical studies, diagnosing new diseases, and inventing new procedures. In 1745, the Company of Barber Surgeons was divided into two separate bodies by an act of Parliament, thus forming the Company of Surgeons, a body that formalised the training and licensing of surgeons and which today is known as the Royal College of Surgeons. Dispensaries began to be established – these provided what we might today class as outpatient medical treatment and advice, solely for the poor and free of charge. By 1800, about 40 dispensaries had been founded across Britain. Professor Fissell explains: “In 18th-century Britain, we see a growth in the institutional provision of healthcare that simply hadn't been seen before. For the first time, working people who could never have afforded healthcare previously could now access it in a new way. We can also see something similar in the workhouse infirmaries of the Old Poor Law at this time.” Read more | John Hunter and the horrors of 18th-century surgery It is this preventative rather than reactive approach to healthcare that remains a legacy of 18th-century medicine, Professor Fissell continues. “I see this as part of an enlightened turn towards the belief that things could be made better. It was a realisation that it was possible to prevent people from dying of disease and illness, and that's really radical.” One of the deadly diseases that was rife in the early 18th century was smallpox, characterised by its distinctive, progressive skin rash; outbreaks killed millions of people all over the globe. In 1715, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu – one of the most celebrated aristocratic women of the time – caught smallpox but survived, although the disease left her scarred. Her brother William had died from the disease in 1713, aged just 20. The following year, Lady Mary and her husband, Britain's new ambassador to the Ottoman empire, moved to Constantinople. On the podcast | Gareth Williams explores efforts to combat lethal diseases, from smallpox to polio There, she discovered the widespread use of variolation (inoculation): individuals were deliberately infected with smallpox (often by blowing dried smallpox scabs into the nose) after which they contracted a mild form of the disease. After recovering, the individual would usually be immune to smallpox – some estimates state that 1–2 per cent of those inoculated died, compared to 30 per cent who died after contracting the disease naturally. Lady Mary's children were inoculated and once back in England, in 1721, she publicised the benefits, facing resistance and scepticism. Undaunted, she convinced Caroline, then Princess of Wales, of the value of inoculation and it was tested on prisoners, all of whom survived. Physicians began to inoculate their patients, but devised elaborate and costly procedures to make sure the body was prepared, ensuring that only the well-to-do were protected. By the late 18th century, mass inoculations with no preparation were on offer, and ultimately Lady Mary's efforts paved the way for the work of Edward Jenner. Edward Jenner and the world's first vaccine As a child, Edward Jenner (1749-1823) was inoculated against smallpox thanks to the work of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and at 14 was apprenticed as a surgeon. In 1770, Jenner moved to London to train under renowned surgeon John Hunter before returning home to Gloucestershire and becoming a local practitioner. Growing up in the country, Jenner was aware of an old wives' tale that said people who caught cowpox – a mild infection caught from cows – never caught smallpox. Inoculation, which Jenner carried out on his patients, still posed a risk, so he began to research alternatives. In 1796, Jenner inoculated eight year-old James Phipps with pus from a cowpox sore; a few weeks later, he infected him with matter from smallpox pustules, but Phipps never went on to develop the disease. The following year, Jenner submitted his findings to the Royal Society, but his ideas were rejected as too radical. After experimenting on other children, including his own infant son, Jenner published his findings in 1798. Jenner's methods were initially ridiculed and criticised, and his initial tests would be considered unethical today, but it soon became hard for anyone to deny the obvious protection vaccination offered. Nearly 200 years later, in 1980, smallpox was declared officially eradicated by the World Health Organization. This article was first published in the February 2021 issue of BBC History Revealed