Poverty and the Industrial Revolution

'Many historical works leave a comfortable feeling that the past is over and done with. This one provokes parallels with the present’ - A J P Taylor

‘By the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread’’... ‘the poor shall never cease out of the land’… ‘the poor are always with us’ – for centuries this pessimism was taken to embody a fact of human existence. And as long as production remained based on manual labour there could be no reason to doubt it was justified. But then, towards the end of the eighteenth century, England became the scene of two economic revolutions: agricultural and industrial.

Enclosure of land formerly farmed communally meant that up-to-date methods of crop rotation could be introduced and more efficient use made of farm machinery, to provide larger yields per acre. Industrial machines enabled one man to do the work of many. Inevitably, speculation began over what this might mean for mankind. Might not the wealth which was being released be used to reduce poverty – perhaps even to remove it entirely?

Today, two centuries later, we are still wryly speculating. Even in the most advanced, richest communities, poverty remains a problem. Why? Is it possible that, trapped in traditional assumptions about the nature of man and society, we have been going the wrong way about trying to solve it? And, if so, may there not be lessons for us if we look at what happened in England as a result of the industrial and agricultural revolutions?

Poverty and the Industrial Revolution provides a reassessment of that period in an attempt to find out why the development of our society took the course it did, and how this course can be influenced in the future.