Last night, I watched a repeat of a programme that took me back about 30 years to when I was a young kid being taught history by a very leftwing history teacher. The period of study was the Industrial Revolution, and I remember getting what I call the default-setting “Black Satanic Mills” version of the 18th and 19th centuries, full of horrible factories, brutish owners, vicious and incompetent governments, heroic but downtrodden workers, starving farm labourers, not to mention a cast list of all those splendid French revolutionaries. I think it was at about this time – 1976-77 – that I formed in my still-young head the vague sense that I was being sold a line, that something about this was not quite accurate. Anyway, I was only 10, I was more interested in sports and messing about with my mates, and had yet to take a more serious interest in the world of current events. But even at that age I developed a love of history that has stayed with me, and for all that he is a died-in-the-wool leftie, my old history teacher, who is now retired, is someone of whom I have fond memories. He is actually one of the nicest of men and I keep in touch with him. The programme in question was fronted by Tony Robinson whom many non-Britons will know as the guy who played Baldrick in the glorious Blackadder TV series. In more recent years, Robinson, who is a campaigner for things like trade unions, long-term care for the elderly and other causes, has made a name for himself as an enthusiast for ancient history. His programme last night was a classic example of the sort of history that I was taught at school: wittily presented, but at its base incredibly biased, often factually inaccurate, and playing into a narrative of UK history that has coloured our views of industry, law, industrial relations and trade ever since.
One of the main parts of the programme was about the use of the death penalty and how the harsh penal code of the time was used to protect the property of the landed classes and the emerging class of entrepreneurs. That the code was harsh is undeniable. By the early 1820s, there were scores of offences, even ones like stealing potatoes or game, that were punishable by death. What Robinson ignored, however, is that juries frequently refused to convict such crimes because they could see that the punishment was outrageous. And in the 1820s, Robert Peel, Home Secretary at the time, swept almost all capital crimes off the statute books, save only for murder. Robinson does not mention this. And Robinson scorned how landowners were allowed, under the English Common Law, to defend their property by deadly force. He then juxtaposed pictures of poachers being executed with the recent case of Tony Martin, the Norfolk farmer who shot, and killed, an intruder at his home after having been burgled repeatedly. As far as Robinson was concerned, Martin was a throwback to the disgusting concept of using deadly force to guard property, and did not stop to consider that it is often very poor, vulnerable people who are the victims of robbery and attack. The arguments presented by the likes of Joyce-Lee Malcolm, who, for example, has defended the right of use of deadly force in self-defence, do not even enter Robinson’s frame of reference. Indeed, the whole show gives us an insight as to how the UK political left – Robinson is an avid Labour Party supporter of the old, hard-left variety – view the whole concept of self defence and the role of the state generally.
The economics of the Industrial Revolution makes up the background of his programme, which is mainly about crime and punishment. Not surprisingly given his political views, Robinson also gives the standard line that the Industrial Revolution was produced on the backs of “the workers”, but then what is crucial to any fair appraisal of the massive changes that happened at the time is whether most, if not all, labourers were better off than they were in the days of serfdom and the peasant-based, agrarian life that pre-dated it. The Marxist historians such as Eric Hobsbawm may like to present the pre-Industrial age as one full of peasants happily gamboling around in the woods choosing to work when and where they wanted, in order to contrast it with the horrors of industrialism, but this is dishonest nonsense. Without enclosure of land and the more productive agricultural system that sprang from it, and without the industrial wealth that enabled Britain to grow rapidly, it would have been hard to see how the rising population of the time could have adequately fed itself, let alone produce a sustained improvement in living standards. As a result of the agricultural changes and of free trade, Britain was less vulnerable to a catastrophically bad harvest, unlike Ireland, which because of its dependence on the potato and the Corn Laws, was terribly hit by the potato blight of the 1840s. Starvation was a regular feature of European life, even in relatively rich countries, for centuries. But in England, whatever other problems existed, widespread famine was no longer an issue by the end of the 18th Century.
There is no doubt that there was much misery and ugliness in the time. When tens of thousands of soldiers and sailors were paid off at the end of the Napoleonic wars, for example, there was an influx of labour into the workforce and wages in sectors like farming came under brutal pressure. But what Robinson ignores is to cure such poverty meant that the Industrial Revolution’s primary focus on producing goods for the mass market such as textiles and ironware was right, both economically and for that matter, morally. Within a matter of decades, the idea of even a poor person moving from say, Manchester to Newcastle in a day was not the stuff of fantasy. It was reality.
The Industrial Revolution has been, at least in my view, strangely under-covered in much of the mainstream histories that you see in bookshops today. Walk into a Borders or a Waterstones and much of the history sections are full of books about WW2, warfare generally, some social histories of quite recent times, some stuff about the Romans (popular again thanks to movies like Gladiator) and the Greeks. But this crucial phase of British, and world, history, does not really get much of an airing. A few years ago, I praised a wonderful book about some of the men who fashioned the Industrial Revolution, The Lunar Men, by Jenny Uglow. But such books are remarkably rare. Still one of the finest and most succinct accounts of the early phases of our industrial life was written more than half a century ago by T.S. Ashton. About the only other time one sees anything about the Industrial Revolution on the television, meanwhile, are things like the programmes about old machines by the late Fred Dibner or Jeremy Clarkson’s excellent programme about Brunel.
It seems to me there is a gap in the market for an account of the Industrial Revolution written by someone who is not reflexively hostile to it, as was demonstrated last night by an ageing comedy actor. It is about time the record was set straight.
Here’s a good essay on the standard-of-living debate and the Industrial Revolution.
I well remember exactly that kind of teaching of the evils of the industrial revolution, in Social Studies here in NZ in high school at about the same time, specifically 1976 and 1977 when I was in 3rd and 4th forms. I declined to do any formal study of either history or geography after that, but have done a fair amount of reading on my own in the decades since.
HE does have a bit of point, being able to shoot someone for taking a rabbit off of your land that was within living memory theirs as well is a tad harsh wouldn’t you say?
Lefties remind us of the evils of 19th Century capitalism because they think it suits their argument. The Labour movement, employment law and regulation of industry didn’t really get going until the 20th Century. At the same time living standards improved so lefties are apt to conflate the two.
There are two glaring difficulties with this presentation of the facts:
1) Pre-capitalism/British Empire/industrialisation were people in Britain not mining coal and tin etc.? What health & safety provisions, workers’ rights and employer liabilities existed then?
2) Comparing more capitalist countries (UK pre-WW2 or USA throughout the 20th Century) with less capitalist ones (USSR, North Korea), in which countries did conditions for workers improve?
Living conditions were awful, but that was a long time ago and a necessary stage to get from pre-industrial to where we are now (which is pretty bloody fantastic, all things considered). I think we have learned our lessons, it’s the Third World that still hasn’t cottoned on.
The only bit that “they” buggered up was not listening to Tom Paine, Adam Smith, Henry George etc. Whoever “they” are.
He certainly does, hence my pointing out that juries would often refuse to convict poachers. The anti-poaching traps and weapons used were an outrage. But it is outrageous for Robinson to somehow liken such practices to self defence against attack. He came across at that point as a wanker.
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Tony Robinson has always struck me as somewhat like the teacher you described. His politics are obvious, but he seems like a really decent bloke who’d be a wonderful companion for a night of numerous pints at the local.
Did you ever have any success at changing the views of your teacher in later years? It is people like him, and like Tony whom we should win over. How do you change the minds of decent folk who firmly believe they are working for a better world?
I thought that socialist nonsense had been discredited years ago, so spare the wisecracks about thermodynamics. If I have the right to pursue life, I have a right to sustain it and own the fruits of my labour so long as I do not coerce anyone else or rob them of what is theirs; and if one can establish a homesteading principle that says it is ok to acquire land from its virgin state, then property ownership is valid.
Even if one accepts – as is entirely valid – that many landowners inherited land from thugs and cronies of military leaders – to state that there is no valid notion of property ownership is a nonsense. Even under socialism, there needs to be a concept of ownership by collectives and justification for the transfer of property from A to B, etc.
Without property rights, individual liberty is a sham. If there is a lesson from the past 100 years or so, that is surely it.
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Re the Bloody Code….worth actually looking at what punished (rather than potentially so) by the death penalty.
The full statistics are here:
http://www.capitalpunishmentuk.org/1800.html
From 1800 to 1827 (that’s just the page I looked at) I canContent-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Content-Length: 1142
entry_id=11711
Thanks for the data Tim.
Johnathan Pearce wrote:
‘HE does have a bit of point, being able to shoot someone for taking a rabbit off of your land that was within living memory theirs as well is a tad harsh wouldn’t you say?
He certainly does, hence my pointing out that juries would often refuse to convict poachers. The anti-poaching traps and weapons used were an outrage. But it is outrageous for Robinson to somehow liken such practices to self defence against attack. He came across at that point as a wanker.’
Hmm. Not sure where a jury could have much effect when the poacher was shot dead by the landowner exercising his ‘common law right’.
Gentlemen, step lightly – man-traps are set in these grounds!
I think you need to make a very-much-brighter line distinction between the use of deadly force for the protection of life and limb vs the use of deadly froce for the protection of mere property – if that is indeed what you mean to say.
Regarding this:
‘As far as Robinson was concerned, Martin was a throwback to the disgusting concept of using deadly force to guard property . . . ‘
Well, yes – that’s what he was. He set out to shoot burglars, he never suggested that he was defending his own life and limb when he did what he did. What other construction could one possibly place on his actions?
For the sven-hundred-and-fifty-sixth time, I have to wonder just how much those who keep calling upon the story of Tony Martin actually know about the facts of his case. For heaven’s sake, part of his appeal was that he suffered from a paranoid compulsion – to shoot burglars! His entire case revolves around the concept of ‘using deadly force to guard property . . .’
Those who desires the restoration of the right and the means to self-defence in the UK really, really need to find a better poster child for their efforts that Tony Martin.
llater,
llamas
I’m sure Tony did mention that it reached a point where judges & juries would find a man not guilty rather than send him to the gallows.
Anyway, as for Tony Robinson himself – he’s a barking mad trot but he is so nice about it that you can hardly hold it against him.
Tony Robinson is the extreme left wing media luvvie par excellence. It’s no wonder he’s never off the telly. Personally I don’t watch anything he fronts as I know he’ll piss me off, so none of this surprises me at all. For him to try and conflate 18th century laws which allowed the execution of poachers with a scared man in an isolated farm house in the middle of the night who shot at two home invaders only illustrates his moral bankruptcy. Having said that, the commie fuck has presumably got a nice house in Primrose Hill or Hampstead, I may go and live in his spare room for a while. Clearly, he won’t have a problem if I smash a window at dead of night and just move in. He can hardly complain, given that property is theft.
Are you suggesting that he did not regard his own personal safety as a reason for defending himself, that he was shooting burglars as a form of sport?
I am sure one can pick apart the case to find flaws. My brother, a Norfolk lawyer, knows the Martin case well and would probably endorse about 50 per cent of what you say. But the issue is not quite so easily dismissed as you try to do: the guy was repeatedly burgled, at night. He lived on his own and there were no police for miles. This is the reality. It ought to be the case that in ideal world, if a burglar comes into a person’s home, is challenged and told to show himself, and refuses to do so, that deadly force could be used if the householder was in genuine fear of his life. Whether Martin was a bit of a nutter, of course, might affect the judgement of these matters. I dunno if you have ever lived in such circumstances.
quite possibly.
facism at work, oh joy.
Try harder.
At his appeal his defence team had to come up with any old shit to try and get him off, and they succeeded, life for murder was reduced to 5 years for manslaughter, and he is now a free man. The law is just a fucking game, and you must know that.
Given that the property he defended with deadly force was his own dwelling, and he was in it, alone at dead of night when two burglars invaded it, I would argue quite strongly that in this case there was no difference between defending his property and defending his life.
There was a recent case in Burnley, where a business owner, fed up with repeated burglaries, set up a spring gun in the form of a home made shotgun loaded with a live cartridge. Unfortunately, a boy who found it and tried to take it apart lost a hand. Now that really was a case of using lethal force to defend property, the man didn’t live there, he was sick of his business being robbed. He was prosecuted and got off. Tony Martin was in his own home and shot two real burglars and was convicted. As I said, the law is a fucking game.
Good piece Johnathan.
I got the same line handed me about the IR when I was in school too.
But seeing as I grew up in S Wales, which was pretty much the heartland of them there Satanic Mills, and 99% of all employment depended on them, we also got the guff about look what a wonderful job the workers are doing now they own the means of production.
Well we know what a wonderful job they did. post Nationalisation, they ran the coal and steel industries into the ground.
Wales was an especially dangerous place in the 1800s.
The rebecca Riots against the toll roads, the Merthyr Riots. You were more likely to get killed in a gunfight in Merthyr than you were in Tombstone back then.
I was watching an episode of Coast recently (the Scots hippie is beginning to get on my nerves, but the scenery is good) and the Clearances were mentioned.
Now the line we got in school was that these cruel greedy landlords were getting rid of people because they could make more money from sheep than people.
But the landlords argument was put this time. First time I’d heard it.
The aguement being that they were trying to save the peasants from themselves.
They were so locked into subsistance farming that the slightest hint of a bad crop or god forbid a famine like Ireland, and they were fucked.
The landlords wanted to reorganise the land to feed more people not less.
Oh and mr Robinson is an irksome bullying self opinionated leftist asshole in real life.
He was one of our local celebs when living in Bristol.
You would he him swanning around town in his big brimmed burgandy hat and his cape.
He looked like a gay Zorro!
Too true, he’s been dodging the barber for far too long in my opinion.
Johnathan,
Thank you for an intelligent exposition on the topic.
Some years ago I got into a pleasant conversation one rainy afternoon with a pleasant chap flogging some lefty rag outside WH Smith in Streatham. The discussion got onto this topic and he tried to use it to make a point. When I asked him, if conditions in the factories were so dreadful, why people worked there, he replied that he thought the government forced them to!!! He truly was astonished to learn that people flocked to work in the Dark Satanic Mills. He had no idea that bad as the conditions were by our standards, it was an order of magnitude better than the hells offered by the available alternatives.
Preindustrial agricultural life has been romanticised into outright fantasy, and industrialisation, despite its clear and immediate benefits, has likewise been demonised by deceit.
good entry, Jonathan…
It’s indeed about time that a proper, comprehensive history of the industrial “revolution” occurred, that doesn’t consist of malarkey of the Dark-Satanic Mills school (Blake was referring to actual mills near his town, not the new factories).
Isn’t it the case that when Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1838 or so, half of Britons lived in absolute poverty (hence the term, “the better half” and “the other half”). In 1901, when she died, this was only the condition of 10% of Britons…?
I remember being impressed by this, can anyone confirm it?
RAB said:
I’m sure we all feel much better knowing that.
Yes I know how nanny statish
that sounds in a modern context…
But it was their land.
To dispense with and deal with, as they wished.
The crofters were tenants not owners.
How did they get to be there in the first place?
Or, What drew them to where they were, so they could make a living?
Well something did.
And they made a life, or an existance (that we romaniticise about) around it.
Later circumstances changed.
We smart humans adapt to new circumstances
not harp back to the past.
The past was hard. I will tell you tales of my grandfather if you are not carefull!
If my factory is making a loss
How is some fatuous employment regulation about retaining unproductive workers at all costs,
going to turn me a profit?
Hmm?
Jonathan,
Try “The industrial revolutionaries” by Gavin Weightman – about the entrepreneurs behind the industrial revolution – very good and came out in 2007.
Has a particularly good chapter on the development of Japan from quasi feudalism to industrial society – good because I knew nothing about it!
Per RAB:
So, llamas, the Clearances were a good thing, right? Society forcing people to do what’s in their best interest even if the poor benighted sots didn’t know or want it and all that, right?
Well, to be fair the Victorians themselves were to a large extent responsible for the romanticising of the earlier “rural idyll”. In particular the old “Highland life” and all that malarkey. You know, the Pre-Raphaelites and neo-gothic architecture (just look at Manchester City Hall) and the Arts and Crafts Movement and all manner of crap like that.
It was the New-Age, Greenieness of the C19th. So pervasive was this that in WWI the most popular postcards to send to the troops on the Western Front (to show them you cared and to remind them what they were fighting for) showed idealized rural scenes and not the urbanised reality of most of these soldiers real homes and hearths. We had convinced ourselves we were fighting for The Shire and not for Salford or Stepney.
And just for the record, of course British Industrialization could have been handled more humanely and various cock-ups could have been avoided but hell, we were first and nothing like it had ever happened before. To have expected it all to have gone swimmingly (and therefore to judge it harshly because it didn’t) is perverse.
Cats,
You stumbled there upon the leftist, statist mind-set. Anything big and dramatic happens – it must be the Government. The idea that it’s tens of thousands of engineers and inventors, capitalists and managers doing it as individuals off their own bats is something that doesn’t compute with the statist mindset.
Well I wouldn’t go so far as to convert
the Amazon Delta
Into Malboro Country
right off…
But,
Shit happens economics wise.
Gaia will understand!
Laird wrote:
‘Per RAB:
The aguement [sic] being that they were trying to save the peasants from themselves. They were so locked into subsistance farming that the slightest hint of a bad crop or god forbid a famine like Ireland, and they were fucked. The landlords wanted to reorganise the land to feed more people not less.
So, llamas, the Clearances were a good thing, right? Society forcing people to do what’s in their best interest even if the poor benighted sots didn’t know or want it and all that, right? ‘
False premise – RAB’s description of it, anyway.
From all I have read about enclosures and the Highland Clearances, the landowners didn’t give a toss about the peasants and their welfare – their purpose in enclosing was to facilitate the raisng of higher-profit livestock (sheep) and/or crops (by systematized mono-crop/rotational agriculture)and they did it by destroying the ancient system of common land and low-yield arable farming.
I have never before read or heard that the landowners (term used loosely) who enforced the gradual enclosures of the British isles ever gave more than a moment’s thought to the future best interests or the feeding of their tenants. They were too busy, for example, trying to pass laws to limit emigration so that the peasants could be kept in-country to work in the new manufactures.
llater,
llamas
For the sven-hundred-and-fifty-sixth time, I have to wonder just how much those who keep calling upon the story of Tony Martin actually know about the facts of his case.
I suspect that we’re at the point where there has to be a cololory to Godwin’s Law. Any discussion of self defense in the UK will ultimately turn to Tony Martin.
Most of the problems I have with the Mill Owners and what they were doing have less to do with the quality of life arguments and purely what they were doing full stop.
The Mill Owners in Preston did arm twist the militia into opening fire on protestors at the Corn Exchange, the bullet holes are still in the building facade (even if it is a ropey pub). Economic systems were set up to control wages and prevent market forces from working properly.
On the other hand, if you visit most of the Lancashire Mill towns almost every public building and piece of infrastructure is down to those guys(*) and that’s worth remembering.
(*) or their lawyers. The Harris family built Preston’s university, library, court buildings, water system etc… they were lawyers to Mill owners.
Daveon wrote:
‘On the other hand, if you visit most of the Lancashire Mill towns almost every public building and piece of infrastructure is down to those guys(*) and that’s worth remembering.’
never-mind the unuisual habit that the owners of those Dark Satanic Mills had, of building entire ‘model’ communities for their workers.
I well-recall, during my one extended visit to Northern Ireland, seeing the remains of the model community of Bessbrook, built in the 1850s to house the workers at the linen mills. Although the town was completely ravaged by the Troubles, the model homes were still occupied.
Bourneville and Port Sunlight also spring to mind. There’s one on Derbyshire, too . . . ?
Some of these may have sprung from the religious or social convictions of the owners – I think the owners of the Bessbrook mills were Quakers? I’m not sure. I’m eqaully-sure that most were built to supply a steady source of happy labour close to the mill – in other words, for economic rather than altruistic reasons.
llater,
llamas
Why not Both?
They are not mutually exclusive
despite what the left have to say.
Except as you say, model villagers tended to be Quaker types.
Paradise on earth and all that!
Good books and buttermilk.
No Boozers!
Home grown veg and re-cycling
Is this getting uncomfortably close to present reality yet?
never-mind the unuisual habit that the owners of those Dark Satanic Mills had, of building entire ‘model’ communities for their workers.
Some did, some didn’t. For every Port Sunlight etc…, there were an awful lot more areas like Avenham or Deepdale in Preston which were awful even before they tore down the slums in the 1890s and replaced them with new ones.
(…stop to check a couple of things…)
Ah. Ok, so checking on this Port Sunlight was practically post Industrial Revolution (started in 1894) – when I’d say that conventional market forces were starting to really play into the hands of the workers in a way that they hadn’t been 30,50 or 80 years earlier when some of the most egregious excesses took place. Like the aforementioned massacre at the Preston Corn Exchange in 1842.
I’m pretty sure that Blackburn had better stuff again through the Quaker connection, if memory serves the Quakers originate from that part of the world.
Thank you, Jonathon. Very nice piece. I also have fond memories of a high school history teacher, more than one, in fact, although there may have been slightly less statist indoctrination involved.
Much of the famine and disease in pre industrial and early industrial times was the result of the little ice age, from roughly 1300 to 1800. We’ve been warming up from that cold spell for the last few centuries.
It is fascinating to watch much of the rest of the world recapitulate the industrial revolution, a process which has accelerated greatly since the second world war, and especially since the collapse of marxism/maoism in Russia and China.
There are those who are trying the western model, and those perversely committed to the soviet model, and, of course, those trying to have both at once.
As the old toast, or curse, goes, we live in interesting times.
I think this is a great point. It reminds me why I gave up history at 15 during an O level course where we spent a term and a half on the Chinese Revolution and about 2 lessons on the causes of the 1st World War.
Since then I have taught myself as much history as I could, simply out of interest, especially since I found out that my ancestors were owners of dark satanic mills and that John Bright was my great x 3 great uncle.
It’s worth pointing out that the original liberals were painted as pioneer radicals, while Bright himself is on record for fighting the Corn Laws with his colleague Richard Cobden on the basis that the working man was paying so much more for bread that would have been necessary under a supply and demand system.
The point being that the period between about 1830 and 1845 marked the end of the centuries old orthodoxy of government being run solely in the interests of the aristocracy and at the expense of the rest of us. Hence the birth of collectivity and unionism etc., and quite rightly, under the circumstances of the time.
But today every time there is highish inflation, unions in the public sector predictably and shamelessly hold the country to ransom for more money in complete contempt of economic issues and the fact that one month at 3.8% inflation does not equal 3 years, thereby taking the rest of us for complete twats. Except that this time there won’t be a Thatcher to save us.
In our local paper this week, council worker unions stated that it was completely unacceptable that in the town, 10 workers had already left for higher paid jobs and that this was a primary reason for higher pay.
No understanding, predictably, of the supply and demand rationale, which in a normal world would increase demand and therefore wages for the service hemorrhaging its labour force.
No wonder the elite doesn’t want everyone to understand the evolution and development of Enlightenment values in the 19th Century. A good reason for sacking the lot of them and paying private firms to do council work I’d say.
They’re still at it. They call them “eco towns” these days. The same patrician attitude is alive and well. Smal healthful homes suitable for the labouring classes (with inside bog), a library and no pub.
fascism at work, oh joy.
People in the 19th century were better off than their predecessors of the 18th century.
There was not only the industrial revolution but also an agricultural revolution, which slightly preceded the first. A few figures mentioned by Paul Bairoch in his book about the economical history of the last centuries “Victoires et déboires” illustrate this.
First he cites the number (threshing excluded) of man-hours needed to produce 1 Ton of wheat.
In traditional societies, let say about 1500 AD 2,000 man-hours were required.
In 1700 this was already reduced to 1,000 man-hours.
In 1840 this around 90 man-hours.
In 1900 this was more than halved to 40 man-hours.
In 1990 this was 2 man-hours.
Between 1700 and 1900 the productivity rose 25 times and by 1990 had reached 500-fold increase.
The major factors allowing this enormous leap in agricultural productivity were the private property of the farmed land and the disappearance, so lamented by Marx, of the commons and of course both the industrial and scientific progress, which revolutionized farming.
The population shared in the fruits of this raise in productivity since in 1700 4 man-hours (unskilled labour) were required to buy a 1 loaf of bread of 1 kilogram and in 1870 only 1 man-hour was needed for the same. In 1990 one buys such a bread for a few minutes.
Tom C,
A very large number of those civil service types could spontaneously combust in the next five minutes and the world would be a better place for it.
If they want to go on strike then fuck ’em. There is nothing wrong with parasites being forced to eat their own children and pets. Or better yet dying in the gutter howling like stuck wombats.
Another interesting article in this area was reprinted by the von Mises Institute last year – The factory system of the early nineteenth century. It’s full of interesting little bits about the spin and propaganda of the time and finishes:
1.) Tony Robinson should have stuck with being Baldwin.
2.) The people who inveigh against the Dark Satanic Mills are the same people who queruously carp at working conditions in (say) India, where pore little kiddies work in modern-day DSMs for only $2 a day — ignoring the inconvenient fact that in India, $2 a day feeds an entire family for a week, and is a hell of a lot more than the single-figure rupees that were earned before, from begging.
I don’t know the exact numbers, but I suspect that Britain in the early Industrial Revolution was pretty much like that.
Whatever, the descendants of the original DSM workers now go to Spain on cheap package vacations, own cars and color TVs, and in general live a life which their ancestors would not have dreamed possible.
3.) Ditto all the people who still quibble and moan about The Clearances — for fuck’s sake, that happened two centuries ago, get over it already — who are the spritual companions of those who moan about how the Evil White Man kicked the Noble Cheyenne off “his” land. Yeah, living conditions in Stone-Age America were SO much better than they are today, after life expectancy went from something like 38 in 1850 to over 75 at present.
Socialists and their camp followers are total tits, and are on the losing end of history almost from the moment their Glorious Revolution takes place.
A row of ticks, in my personal box markings
for your comments there Kim.
Just one thing.
Thats Baldrick not Baldwin…
Unless you are trying to be even more Byzantine than I usually am… 😉
It’s pronounced “Baldwin” in Texas, RAB.
;=)
That’s a big “Right Ho”
There Kim!
Never argue with a Texan.
Even if you live in a road
That’s spelled Belvoir
but is pronounced Beaver.
They are armed you know!
You seem to have overlooked the fact that these “losers” have, to all intents and purposes, won.
I think Tony Robinson is about as decent a lefty as you can get, and is being unfairly blackened above. He’s a presenter, not a professional historian, folks.
What he was presenting is the standard model of the history of the topic in the 18th century, which is why the same things are also taught in schools. The teachers don’t know any better. Generally I suspect it is not that they are teaching it like that because they are lefties; it is that they are lefties because this is the history they learned.
The influence of a handful of scholars in the area is astonishing. (And of E.P. Thompson in particular.) Perhaps it is because they got the last word to influence the accepted narrative before professional history shattered into micro-studies, super-specialism and post-modern gibberish. They were the ones offering a Marxist, or at leasy Marxian, counter to “the Whig interpretation of history”. Which is why economistic explanations and conceptions of class-interest dominate. But they have also been easy to read and digest for a couple of generations of students in a way that subsequent academic work hasn’t been, while still having an academic credibility that the similarly readable “Whigs” don’t.
You can see the influence of that sort of thing everywhere. A glorious example is the massively successful commercial historical fiction of Philippa Gregory (PhD), which hangs on a framework of Marxian historical analysis probably unnoticed by more than one reader in a hundred.
To look for a work that has been as totally absorbed by generations in a discipline as both Thompson’s Whigs and Hunters and his The Making of the English Working Class in other disciplines, you probably need to go to John Griffith’s The Politics of the Judiciary, which is of much the same generation, facility, and New Left attitude unburdened by explicit theoretical apparatus.
Really? How long do you give the Great Socialist Experiment in Great Britain, Ian? Think British society will be the same dreary neo-socialist pit in twenty years’ time as it is now?
I bet the Soviet Commies thought they had it won in 1979, too.
Guy, good point about EP Thompson. His influence has been enormous on this subject, as, to a similar degree, has been that of Hobsbawm.
Actually, I think I was rather gentle on Robinson, although some of the commenters haven’t been. The problem is precisely that he is one of the “nice guys”; he is the acceptable face of hard radicalism. He is a good civil libertarian although when he started to denounce the idea of armed self defence, he seemed to be letting class obsessions trump notions of self defence. That is, I am afraid, a serious flaw for left-libertarianism.
Heavens no, it’ll be far worse than that.
Touché, Ian.
:=)
Although it’s difficult to see how it could get any worse, let alone much worse.
Buty leave it to the statists to take us to places where no man has gone before.
Actually, there are no places where the statists have not gone before – and yet history repeats itself.
Its a bit weird how lefties get so choked up about the non-existent pastural past where everything was wonderful. Marx didn’t, in the Manefesto at least he said that the old fuedal ways where for him definitely worse than the current capitalist ways which he claimed would naturally give way to socialism that would be better still. That the left is now so backward looking and wants to retreat into the mythical past rather than advance into the future must say something about the state of lefty ideology in general.