Was Life Better Before The Industrial Revolution?

no, its actually one of my least favorite things to do. I really need to move to a part of the country where public transportation is readily available. I would much rather stop at small market on my bus/subway/bike ride home every day to pick up something for dinner rather than make one big weekly grocery trip in my car. I like the ease of travel with cars but I would rather have mass public transportation and do away with cars all together.

I frequently camp at Black Balsam which is right outside Pisgah off the blue ridge parkway. It is gorgeous, pristine wilderness but you can still see the lights of Asheville as soon as the sun sets.

 

There still are a lot of places where you can enjoy the nightsky without any light polution at all. But it is true you generally have to look for them. Actually light pollution annoys me slightly as well (not as much as most other kinds of industrial pollution).

 

Ever camped inside the GSMNP? It sounds perfect for you. The south end (closest to the Georgia line) seems to have the least human activity. You can get quite a few miles from a road.

There are also primitive campsites all over the lower south face of Grandfather Mountain, accessed by unpaved Forest Service roads. No big cities around there... something like 20 miles to Lenoir.

No roads at all inside the Linville Gorge. Everybody has to hike in. No roads or logging has ever been allowed there. An unpaved FS road follows the top of the ridge on the west side.

One of the darkest places in the eastern US is east-central West Virginia. Pocahontas County has the lowest population density of any county in the eastern half the US. Most of it is in the Monongahela National Forest. It's quite a drive from real civilization. You can't even get a cell phone signal there, not even at the Snowshoe Resort. That's remote!

 

What pre-industrial empires were bigger than Englands?

 

Just weighing the pros and cons of each. Of course there was less time for other things but sometimes people with a romantic vision of pre-industrial life might forget all we take for granted.

On the other hand people living back in those days didn't have time for so much of the superficial bullshit we spend so much of our lives on. There was less alienation addiction and spiritual void. Their lives were surely more authentic. Nature was still sacred and people were more connected to nature which is something we have largely lost as a society. It was also a much more sustainable life they lived.

 

That's an increasingly severe problem that I see all the time. I can remember when every October, every parking lot at every point of interest along the Blue Ridge Parkway used to overflow at least a quarter of a mile in both directions. This year, they were closer to half full. Off the paved roads, less than 10% of the primitive campsites I drove past were in use, during peak weekends. Driving along the south face of Grandfather Mountain on US-221 after a couple days of heavy rains, the many small waterfalls along the road were at their best, but we only met something like four other cars the whole time we were out there.

I know people are busy working and often short of money for nonessential driving, but I also think kids are increasingly opposed to being taken anywhere they can't get service on their smartphones. Texting and updating Facebook have become their highest priorities.

In the business world, when I make any kind of an analogy or illustration of a point making reference to anything in nature or on a farm, most younger people have absolutely no idea what I'm talking about, or why I would want to talk about anything that isn't urban.

And now, neglect is starting to take away opportunities for future travelers. I'm starting to see bed and breakfast inns and country restaurants go out of business, especially in western Virginia. Mount Jefferson (NC) recently lost its observation tower, and I'm not sure anyone even bothered to complain about it.

I'm not opposed to big cities. I enjoy visiting them regularly. But there are times when you need to get as far away from them as you can get.

 

totally depends on where you were and what you were doing. a lot of stresses have been created by and since, what i would call the industrial and capital perspective came to dominance.

but it isn't technology itself, whatever its level, however "advanced" or "primitive" that itself has near as much affect on the quality of experiencing life, as cultural perspectives, which really have more to say, about how it gets applied and even the directions in which it evolves. some breakthroughs may just happen through shere blind effort, but more are found by the directions in which that effort is focused by cultural imparitives and perspectives.

 

If anyone can honestly say there life would be better without the internet, we wouldn't even know who they were. Its like that tree falling when no ones around.

If someone dies offline, does anyone notice?

lol

In all seriousness, I couldn't be happier to not be living in the industrial revolution. If the question were posed as to whether or not you wanted to live Before or During, I'd choose beforehand. But as it is stated, I guess I'd feel happier AFTER the industrial revolution, but necessarily because of it. I imagine if I lived in the industrial revolution, my life wouldn't be too different than a Charlie Chaplin film. I wouldn't speak, and I'd rather steal and go to prison than work at an assembly line with the sheep.

 

i'd prefer to live in a world that keeps solar and science, after the oil, coal and uranium run out, making the automobile obsolete, but keeping refrigeration, and the net.

i like my toys, but some cultures were wiser and saner. generally ones history ignores and tries to pretend didn't exist.

 

I'm glad I didn't have to live through the industrial revolution. The social conditions it led to in Britain were appalling by any standard. At a time when Britain led the world in industrial innovation, and had a massive and lucrative empire, millions of workers and their families lived in overcrowded, disease ridden poverty, with no hope of getting out of it. Conditions of work were brutal - long hours doing dangerous work. Child labour was universal.

It was high price to pay, and those who paid it gained very little advantage.

That said, I'm as hooked as everyone else on our comfortable modern life.

 

at least the children had something to do, besides sitting in the house getting obese.

 

Emigrate to America was one way

 

Here in the Old South, that was a time of great progress. Before that, nearly everyone had lived on family farms, in large families. The population was growing fast, but the farms were not, so the average quality of life was low. Farm life was extremely basic, with no electricity or indoor plumbing, no stores, no restaurants, no movies, no TV, no medical care except for the most extreme situations. Fundamentalist protestant churches dominated the social scene. When the textile, furniture, and cigarette factories showed up, most younger people were happy to leave the family farm for a better life in a small nearby town. Most of the houses were new, though they were identical and very close together, and crime rates were extremely low. You literally didn't need a lock on your front door. Over a period of about 20 years, these towns gained most of the amenities typically associated with modern life. If you were willing to travel an hour or two to a larger city, you could even see world-class traveling entertainment shows of all kinds, something that their parents never even dreamed of. Free public education was now within easy walking distance around the corner, instead of five miles away on primitive dirt roads.

The next generation had it much better. The manufacturing companies started offering college scholarships to employee families who had children who made good grades in school. A few of those college graduates returned home, where the manufacturing company increasingly needed well-educated workers in the office. With access to TV and FM radio, we felt connected to the national culture. Country clubs (golf) and upscale neighborhoods sprang up in old tobacco fields. People could afford to travel more. Fundamentalist churches lost their firm grip on the culture.

The third generation saw it all go away. All the manufacturing went to China, all the small town factories closed down, and everybody with a good education moved away. Mexican migrant workers took their place. Some of us go back to those places to visit elderly relatives at Christmas, appalled at what these towns have become, and that nobody important seems to care at all.

Big cities are where the jobs are now. Some of us commute from small towns on the perimeter, but those towns take on the personalities of the core city they are attached to.

 

Life has never been better in the past compared to the present. Men simply become older and despise the way the world is changing. Then old men die and the world continues to change.

 

Karen - Some of the problems Britain experienced during the early phases of the industrial revolution were because it was the first country to industrialize on a mass scale.

People moving to the new industrial centres just continued as they had in a rural setting. That meant piles of human and animal excrement in the streets, housing built with one non flushing toilet for as many as 100 people, contaminated water supplies and so on. It wasn't until the 1830's that measures were introduced to clean things up, and even then there was much division among politicians.

The dreadful conditions of labour were gradually improved over the 19th c, and unions were eventually allowed to organize. Child labour was limited, education for all introduced, levels of pay gradually got better.

I don't want to go on at length about labour conditions, but one example would be people employed as sharpeners in the blade making industry in Sheffield. They had to operate large grindstones, but the quality of the stones was very poor, as factory owners wanted to save money. The stones would often shatter, either maiming or often killing the unfortunate worker. The average life expectancy was about 3 months once you got on that particular job. Cheaper to take on a new worker than improve the quality of the stones.

It's really hard to imagine the soul destroying and filthy conditions people had to put up with. And that's without the enormous levels of pollution generated by reliance on coal as the main source of power. An archaeologist friend of mine told me that when you get down to the early 19th c levels, you come upon a layer of what she described as 'filth'.

So I think it's fair to say it was rough for those who had to live through it. But the benefits we enjoy now would not have been possible without all that.

Obviously this is a huge subject, and there were many other factors involved.

 

OK if you could get the fare for the passage together. Many had no way to get out.

 

Timing was obviously important, as well as political systems, and size of cities.

Being second to the party, the larger northeastern US cities learned a few things from UK experience, but not much. I've heard plenty of horror stories about those times in Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh. The view from the top of Mount Washington (western Pennsylvania) used to be nothing but the top of a solid layer of smoke. Some of my liberal school teachers used to show us film footage of those horrible conditions.

By the time that manufacturing technology trickled down to the American South, around 1920, we were much higher up on the learning curve. Companies were learning that unhealthy and injured workers were unproductive workers, and the old farms couldn't keep supplying new employees forever. Small town governments became puppets of big employers, and were told to keep everything relatively safe and orderly, so that there would be no major disruptions to commerce. Big cities couldn't be so easily cleaned up at this point, but there were no cities in the South that fully met the definition of a big city except New Orleans, which has never been industrial. Therefore, we dodged the biggest pollution disasters pretty much everywhere down south except Birmingham, Alabama and Chattanooga, Tennessee. Most of the important union safety rules got written into federal law.

In the late 1960's and early 1970's, a few visionaries foresaw the American South as the next great manufacturing giant of the world, and we were going to do it right. We had knowledge of all the big mistakes made in the past, and how to avoid repeating them. We had cheap labor that could be sustained through a low cost of living, plus easy access to capital investment and engineering expertise from the Northeast, and nearly unlimited natural resources available via the national rail system. What could stop us? Chinese labor, that's what. Nobody saw that coming.

I still wish we could have gotten our shot, to show the world (and ourselves) what we could do. With proper government regulation, I think we could have done better than China has done. We almost did it.

 

I live in Seattle and just 150 years ago the area was covered with old growth rain forest. Now I have to travel 40 minutes through urban sprawl just to see one old growth tree. From the environmental perspective industrialization has been so destructive. Less than 10% of the original forest in the Pacific Northwest is left

 

That's a regulatory issue, not industrial. If the industrialists had gotten their way, no old trees would be left. The ~10% survives because a democratically elected government decided that they would be preserved.

If you own or use anything made out of wood, you can't say cutting trees is always bad.

 

I think many countries including the USA avoided the worst excesses of the industrial revolution as Britain experienced it partly because they industrialized later, and had the British model to look at. Still, most 19th c. manufacturing, mining etc was not that good for the workers. By the 20's things were better, if not great.


Britain was overtaken by America as the number 1 industrial power back in the 1870's as I recall. By then, we'd been industrialized for a century. But even with the vast resources of the Empire, we couldn't compete with America. The final decline of the UK as an industrial nation came post WW II, and was finally realized in the 1980's.

I would prefer a world with US hegemony rather than Chinese and in the not too distant future, Indian too. At least in terms of actual manufacturing industries. But I'm afraid you're right - as far as I can see America had it's chance and somehow missed it. I'm not exactly sure quite when that happened. Since the 80's though, it appears to have all been downhill.

Both America and Britain are locked into this post-industrial cycle, and I'm not convinced that anyone knows how to fix things. Here, the social consequences are not at all good, and from what I've seen on TV it's bad in the States, although as always, in different ways.