The Industrial Revolution provoked sharp responses among contemporaries, and two hundred years later we still debate many of these issues.
Your textbook addresses some of the controversies – including those regarding living standards and child labor – and also discusses the ideological responses to industrialization. For this assignment, let’s simplify things a bit and identify three principle political options: liberal, conservative and socialist.
Based on the evidence presented in your textbook, as well as the materials available in the Documentary Reader (Sadler Committee, Ure, Engels etc.) and class lectures – I want you to identify with one of these positions (liberal, conservative, socialist) in framing your own responses to these issues.
Just to be clear, the liberal position at this time usually meant a laissez-faire argument: that private enterprise, guided by a providential “invisible hand,” would eventually provide its own solutions to these social problems, and that government had no business telling factory owners what to do with their property and their employees.
As for conservatives, for our purposes let’s assume the following: nineteenth-century conservatives were still mainly associated with landed interests — that is, agricultural rather than industrial, rural rather than urban — and opposed the up-and-coming industrial sector as a threat to their values and way of life. Britain’s landed interests, for example, wanted high prices for their grain and to this end promoted protectionist tariffs; Britain’s industrialists, on the other hand, wanted lower grain prices (so they could pay their own workers less) and demanded free trade. In Great Britain, it was often the so-called Radical Tories (the more reform-minded from the conservative camp, in other words) who led the public outcry against the abuses of early industrialization –- child labor in particular -– as one way to discredit Britain’s industrialists and their free-trade doctrines.
Generalizing about socialists is tricky, as early (pre-Marxian, in other words) European socialism embraced several theoretical perspectives and moral arguments. If there was a common denominator to this movement, it lay in its insistence that the new social problems opened up by industrialization demanded vigorous governmental action and reform. At the least, we can safely say, socialists felt a greater moral urgency about these issues than did their counterparts across the political spectrum.
What I want from you:
a) Write a response paper that takes a position – liberal, conservative, socialist – on these issues. Persuade your reader as to why you think your choice offers the most effective and sensible response to the problems of early industrialization. Drawing from evidence provided by course materials (please do not introduce other source materials into this exercise), especially from the Sadler Committee, Andrew Ure and other DR readings, justify this approach in historical terms– that is, not simply according to what you think is morally right, but also what you think the best, most practical ways to promote progress and improve working-class lives.
b) Write a brief summary (one paragraph will do!) of your position and enter it at the Discussion Board (I will provide the relevant Conservative, Liberal and Socialist threads).
c) Read your classmates’ responses and respond (either in support or against, but keep it respectful) to at least one of these. In other words, I’m asking for an initial statement from you all and then at least one response. Please enter your commentary on someone else’s entry by Saturday midnight (11:59 pm), July 6
While it may prove difficult to separate your present-day political sympathies from this exercise – these issues are still highly relevant to our world today – I ask above all that you approach this historically, as an exercise in historical imagination and interpretation. In other words, frame your response as a person living at the time of the Industrial Revolution – to whom the future was as yet unknown.
