Science, chemistry, and engineering were the cutting edges of the Industrial Revolution which initially was undeniably brutal. Child labour, worker exploitation, dangerous working conditions, and environmental degradation were all part of this revolution which reshaped our world forever.

Charles Dickens brilliantly captured the urban squalor in his fiction some 150 years ago. More recently, social scientist Peter F. Drucker in his 1994 essay "The Age of Social Transformation" wrote that while industrial workers were indeed paid poorly at first, they were still paid better than farm or household workers. Moreover, factory workers worked specified hours, unlike servants and farmers who were often kept working at the whim of employers. Drucker noted that infant mortality rates dropped immediately when farmers and domestic servants moved into factory work.

It should be added that technology led directly to the emancipation of women as knowledge and intellectual skills increasingly displaced brute muscle power in the industrial marketplace. Ultimately, the development of a skilled working class, along with the wealth generated by mass production, freed a long-abused rural class from centuries of misery and deprivation. The development of canals, roads, ships, railways, and planes increasingly slashed the costs of food, goods, and services in economies previously serviced by pack horses and camels.

To the economies of scale were added the economies of scope, as advances in transportation technology rivalled that of manufacturing. A pack horse carrying cotton goods to Liverpool could only haul about 60 kilograms as it wound along Lancashire's hilly terrain. The same horse pulling a canal barge could move several tonnes directly into the great port. Indeed, it was a canal that converted Manchester, an inland city, into a port with a global reach. The barges later brought back foods from around the world to feed the factory workers, completing a cycle in the revolution that was to encircle the world. Fifty percent of Britain's economic growth since the Industrial Revolution was due to better nutrition, according to economist and Nobel laureate Robert Fogel.

But nutrition alone does not always lead to better health. Increasingly, the crowded slums around the factories led to lethal outbreaks of disease until the development of sanitary engineering drastically improved public health. Those diseases, which tragically are still endemic in the Third World, are now found only in the history books of modern societies, a direct benefit of the Industrial Revolution.

But perhaps the biggest benefit is the one most overlooked: that democracy usually displaces despotism when citizen empowerment replaces feudal systems. The dynamic that gave the workers manufacturing skills also gave them political power. Drucker notes pointedly that the three most destructive people of our age—Hitler, Stalin, and Mao—produced absolutely nothing in their lifetimes except wreckage.

Ironically, technology is often contemptuously abused by ill-informed critics who seem totally unaware of their historical debt to science and technology. To these people, the works of the remarkable Frenchman, Fernand Braudel, should be required reading. Conventional history tells us much about pharaohs, caesars, kings, and queens but surprisingly little about the lives of average people. However, in his books, including Structures of Everyday Life, the French historian rectified this historical vacuum by showing how ordinary people lived and worked over the ages.

Braudel weaves an intricate tapestry from historical facts, which dispels many of the romantic illusions that some environmentalists have of pre-industrial society. He ignores the more regal focus of his historical contemporaries and deals with such fundamentals as births, marriages, and life expectancies in society at large. He also examines energy sources and uses, economics, social change, and urbanization—areas commonly neglected by orthodox historians.

Many ecologists emotionally link acid rain with English poet William Blake's "Satanic Mills," and now regard all industry and technology with deep suspicion. Some of our environmental zealots, with their suspicions of, and deep-seated resistance to science and technology would undoubtedly be shocked by Braudel's findings. In pre-industrial societies, millions laboured in appalling conditions so that a few might live in luxury. Even at the turn of the century it was said that Britain was heaven for 30,000 people but a living hell for 30 million.

Braudel's research, however, reveals that even the rich lived in conditions that would disgust modern Canadians. Conventional French historians tell us of the wonders of the great chateaux, the glory of Versailles, its splendid architecture, glistening mirrors, and elegant interiors. But when I visited Versailles not long ago, I learned that food was often served cold because the kitchens were located far away from the main palace. In fact, the original marble floors, which kept the palace so cold that wine was known to freeze in winter, were torn up to be replaced with wood.

If the stench of the nobility's houses centuries ago would nauseate us today, the hovels of the poor, by far the overwhelming majority, must have been unbearable. As Braudel so eloquently puts it, the world, prior to industrial development, was a brutal, disease-ridden, and hungry place for its inhabitants, most of whom had very short life expectancies. The most comfortable inhabitants of those times were the fleas, lice, rats and other vermin which infested the houses of rich and poor alike.

Braudel stresses that every human being born before this century was actually lucky to have lived. Most babies simply did not survive and those hardy ones who did, for the most part, had short lives punctuated by crippling diseases. Without contemporary science, there were no drugs to ease the pain, or machines to diagnose many medical conditions that can easily be treated today.

It is somewhat ironic that the applied sciences, which enable us to live free from the crushing burdens of hunger, are often spurned by today's environmentalists. Most of our history was burdened by regular famine. Now we have lucrative "fat farms," companies such as Weight Watchers, and health clubs whose clients pay money to work out and eat less. Actually paying money to voluntarily diet and toil in gyms, rather than working hard in the fields out of necessity, is a situation unprecedented in human history.

But our militant activists seem unaware that many less fortunate countries, lacking our technology, relentlessly continue a protracted and unequal battle with nature. Even more tragic is that most poverty-stricken people are politically powerless, unable to protest their miserable conditions.

The works of Braudel and Drucker should be required reading for today's professional malcontents, perhaps even becoming mandatory issue when the protest placards are being handed out. If activists knew a little more history, some might become grateful for—instead of hostile to—the benefits of technology, which have enriched and extended our lives, while creating a climate of political freedom in which to complain about it all.

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Last Modified: Wednesday, October 20, 1999.