INDUSTRIAL EXISTENCE

Producing the Wealth of Nations

- Mass manufacture endlessly churned out needles, ribbons, yarn, envelopes, steel pens, personal watches and all manner of specialized everyday consumables at affordable prices.

- With the availability of cheap jam, working-class women “no longer spent their few spare hours before bed making soups for the next day's lunch”.

- Grand exhibitions and trade fairs beckoned the middle-classes to come taste the success and future of 'Western Civilization' in an afternoon.At Prince Albert's prefabricated Crystal Palace (“a technological world wonder” of 1851), they sipped ginger beer and marvelled at the thousands of fantastic new industrial innovations gathered from around the globe. In “the great hall of machines [at] Napoleon III's Universal Exposition” a few years later, they were dazzled by a techno-utopian promise of the future “tower[ing] over them”

The century of the Indu rial Revolution was also a century of capital’s booms and bu s - the rhythms unpredictable, the returns evitable. With every fresh cr (1797, 1814-16, 1825,1839, 1847, ’57 and ’66) the workers were le without daily bread, even as the “classical econom ts from Smith to Mill regarded bus ess depressions and booms” unworthy of economic analys . (Deane)

- The basis of the new wealth was in fact a large pool of workers dependent on the daily sale of their labour power for survival. The competition at this level was stiff. With increasing mechanization and the division of labour into a series of unskilled tasks, the demand for skilled labour kept falling. Workers had to take up on themselves the costs of staying strong and dexterous while packed into tenement housing.

- By the 1830's British parliament declared working-class pauperism a natural problem, “a law of nature” which could be overcome only by a good education in the capitalist ethic.

Brit h ve ors were eculat g on South American m g projects, ve g trade that never touched Brit h shores. Railway shares and du rial ocks became middle class concerns. Individual ve ments grew tightly tertw ed with government war expenditure and balance of trade.