Turning Points: The Great Debate on History’s Defining Moments

In 1771, Richard Arkwright opened a cotton mill in Cromford, Derbyshire, and put 200 people to work in two, twelve-hour shifts. It was the first modern factory, and it changed... well, everything. Last week we debated history's turning points, and it’s hard to find a bigger one than the Industrial Revolution. The question is, was it a catalyst for progress, or was it a catastrophe? I think for the children working those twelve-hour shifts, some as young as five, the answer is pretty clear. It was a catastrophe. We can talk about long-term trends, but the immediate human cost was staggering. The exploitation of child labor, as historian Beverly Lemire called it, was systematic, and it was the engine of that so-called progress.

I hear you, and no one is defending the use of child labor. But to define the entire era by its worst excesses is to miss the fundamental shift. For the first time in human history, we saw a sustained rise in real income per person. Between 1760 and 1830, average real income in England went up about sixteen percent. That had NEVER happened before. Sixteen percent over seventy years? That's about 0.3 percent a year. And that average hides a brutal reality. The Gini coefficient, a measure of inequality, jumped from point-five-four to point-six-zero. All that new wealth was flowing to the top decile, to the factory owners. For everyone else, it meant leaving the countryside for crowded, polluted cities where infant mortality was actually RISING.

Okay, but that urbanization, that concentration of labor, is what enabled mass production. It's what broke the old, inefficient cottage industry system. And it led to undeniable gains. Life expectancy at birth in England rose from thirty-five in 1781 to forty in 1851. That's a fifteen percent increase in longevity. People were, on the whole, living longer. A few years longer, maybe, if you survived childhood in a soot-choked city. And that longer life was often spent working ten to fourteen hours a day, six days a week, in incredibly dangerous conditions. The data on suicides from that period in England and Wales shows a clear increase.

So, people were living a little longer, but were they living better? The evidence suggests, for many, the answer was no. But you're freezing the picture in the early nineteenth century. You have to look at the whole arc. The horrors of the factory system DIRECTLY led to the rise of labor movements and unions. As historian María Valentina Vargas points out, the abuses spurred the creation of the very protections we value today—child labor laws, the weekend, workplace safety. It was a painful, but necessary, catalyst for social reform. Necessary? Oh, I don't think so. That feels like a justification after the fact. It’s what Tony Wrigley called the "rose-tinted" view.

It treats the suffering of millions as an unavoidable cost of doing business. The factory owners and politicians of the day made choices. They could have chosen to build a more humane system. They didn't. They built the only system they could, with the technology they had. And that technology—James Watt's steam engine, the power loom—unleashed a wave of innovation that lifted the entire world. Economic historians like Peter Lindert and Jeffrey Williamson are clear: the Industrial Revolution began the transformation that led to the "extraordinarily high" living standards we have today. You can't separate the outcome from the process.

I think you must. You have to be able to say that the process itself was morally bankrupt. You can't just point to your iPhone and say it was all worth it. The foundation of our modern world is built on the backs of exploited workers and children. To ignore that, to just call it "the process," is to erase their experience from history. I'm not erasing it. I'm contextualizing it. It was a violent, disruptive period—some historians like D.C. Coleman even call the whole idea of a "revolution" a myth, preferring to see it as a faster acceleration of existing trends. But it was the pivot point. It was the moment humanity, for all its painful flaws, finally broke out of subsistence-level poverty for good.

It broke some people out of poverty by driving others into a new kind of industrial misery. It swapped one form of hardship for another, and concentrated wealth and power in a way that we are still grappling with today. It wasn't a clean break with the past; it was the messy, violent birth of the modern inequalities we're still trying to fix. And yet, those efforts to fix it—the social safety nets, the labor laws, the very concept of a middle class with leisure time—all of it grew out of the economic surplus the revolution created. Without the upheaval, there's no progress to build on. That assumes the only path to progress was through that specific form of brutal exploitation.

And that's a profound failure of imagination, both then and now. So we're left with this, then. A transformation that gave us longer lives, unprecedented wealth, and the foundations of the modern world... ...but at the cost of grotesque inequality, human suffering, and a legacy of exploitation that still shapes our society. Which leaves the real, unresolved question: Can you ever truly separate the world we inherited from the price that was paid for it?