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By Root 596 0

we had more clothes and more kinds of food than we did when we was a-farmin’. And we had a better house. So yes when we came to the mill life was easier.’ And in the 1990s Liang Ying was delighted to run away from the family rubber farm in southern China, where she had daily to cut the bark of hundreds of rubber trees in pre-dawn darkness, to get a job at a textile factory in Shenzhen: ‘If you were me, what would you prefer, the factory or the farm?’ The economist Pietra Rivoli writes, ‘As generations of mill girls and seamstresses from Europe, America and Asia are bound together by this common sweatshop experience – controlled, exploited, overworked, and underpaid – they are bound together too by one absolute certainty, shared across both oceans and centuries: this beats the hell out of life on the farm.’

The reason that the poverty of early industrial England strikes us so forcibly is that this was the first time writers and politicians took notice of it and took exception to it, not because it had not existed before. Mrs Gaskell and Mr Dickens had no equivalents in previous centuries; factory acts and child labour restrictions were unaffordable before. The industrial revolution caused a leap in the wealth-generating capacity of the population that greatly outstripped its breeding potential but it thereby also caused an increase in compassion, much of which was expressed through the actions of charities and governments.

The metal Midlands

The burst of innovation which Britain experienced quite suddenly in the late 1700s was both the cause and consequence of mechanisation, of the amplification of one person’s labour by machinery and fuel. The tiny nation of Britain, with just eight million people in 1750, compared with twenty-five million in far more sophisticated France, thirty-one million in far more populous Japan and 270 million in far more productive China, embarked upon a phenomenal economic expansion that would propel it to world domination within a century. Between 1750 and 1850 British men (some of them immigrants) invented an astonishing range of labour-saving and labour-amplifying devices, which allowed them to produce more, sell more, earn more, spend more, live better and have more surviving children. A famous print entitled ‘The Distinguished Men of Science of Great Britain Living in the Year 1807–8’, the year that Parliament abolished the slave trade, depicts fifty-one great engineers and scientists all alive at the time – as if they were gathered together by an artist in the library of the Royal Institution. Here are the men who made canals (Thomas Telford), tunnels (Marc Brunel), steam engines (James Watt), locomotives (Richard Trevithick), rockets (William Congreve), hydraulic presses (Joseph Bramah); men who invented the machine tool (Henry Maudslay), the power loom (Edmund Cartwright), the factory (Matthew Boulton), the miner’s lamp (Humphry Davy) and the smallpox vaccine (Edward Jenner). Here are astronomers like Nevil Maskelyne and William Herschel, physicists like Henry Cavendish and Count Rumford, chemists like John Dalton and William Henry, botanists like Joseph Banks, polymaths like Thomas Young, and many more. You look at such a picture and wonder, ‘How did any one country have so much talent in the same place?’

The premise is false, of course, because it was the aura of the time and place that drew forth (and attracted from abroad – Brunel was French, Rumford American) such talent. For all their brilliance, there are Watts, Davys, Jenners and Youngs galore in every country at every time. But only rarely do sufficient capital, freedom, education, culture and opportunity come together in such a way as to draw them out. Two centuries later, somebody could paint a picture of the great men of Silicon Valley and posterity will stand amazed at the thought that giants like Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce, Steve Jobs and Sergey Brin, Stanley Boyer and Leroy Hood all lived at the same time and in the same place.

Just as the Californian is today, so in 1700 the British manufacturing entrepreneur was