The story of industrialisation in the UK is too often told as a tale of progress — of steam, steel and the march of machinery. But for the millions of men, women and children who fed that machinery with their labour, industrialisation was not a ladder up. It was a descent into longer hours, deadlier workplaces and a systematic assault on the right to organise.
The factory owners and the state did not stumble into this new world of exploitation by accident. They built it, law by law, and defended it with the full force of the criminal justice system. And as workers toiled longer and died younger, the owners of mills and land grew fabulously wealthy on the surplus their labour produced. A pro-worker reading of history demands we say plainly what the textbooks often soften: industrialisation made working conditions worse, it made the working day longer, and it made the elite much richer by exploiting the workforce.