INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

* Destruction of the rural life

- enclosure system leaves peasants landless

- end of feudalism ends rights as well as responsibilities

- alienated peasants pour poor and powerless into cities.

-> an exploitable and desperate labor force

* Factories and steam engines dislocated previous traditional industries

- weaving, pottery, blacksmithing

- long-time artisan communities obliterated fast

-> couldn't complete with cheaper, better goods

-> sometimes led to violence

=> Luddites attempted to destroy machines

=> for every riot, a new factory elsewhere

* Factory and mine labor

- factories preferred women and kids over men

-> cheaper, more malleable (controllable and shapeable)

- labor itself monotonous, low-skill, and dangerous

-> fires, chopped fingers, poisonings, crushing common

-> no business liability

- starvation wages since workers had no choice

-> whole family had to work

=> mother-homemaker a myth of the 1950's

-> children crucial in industry/mines

=> small enough for cramped shafts

=> tiny fingers for factory machines

=> six day weeks, eight hour days, five years old

+> after twelve, kids=adults

-> women scandalized at work

=> had own money, could live alone (gasp!)

=> close contact with strange men

=> mine women often worked hardly dressed in stifling galleries

=> paid less than men since not breadwinners

* The new classes

- peasants (old) (increasingly called rural proletarians)

-> worked on, but didn't own land

- farmers (newish)

-> profit oriented land owners

- elite/nobles/idle rich (old)

-> shrinking in numbers because not taking advantage of the new economy

-> watching boring shop keepers and factory owners pull ahead

=> have to marry their daughters to industrialist to pay the bills

- proletariat

-> urban working class, wage earners

-> have to work to survive

- bourgeoisie

-> owners of the means of production

=> own the factories, mines, big trading firms

-> risk-taking profit-makers

-> from shop-owners to very rich industrialists

-> increasing political and social power

=> the boring suit becomes the outfit of power

=> so long to Louis XIV's hose, wig, and cape

=> power is money and skill, not blood

+> that's the official story anyway