Revealed: Industrial Revolution was powered by child slaves

The essay in analysis was published by Cambridge University Press in 2014 and deals with child slavery in the Victorian age.

The text advances the thesis by which Industrial Revolution was powered by child slaves which held an important role in the industrial and economic improvement that occurred in England in XXIX century. Children's role was a "crucial ingredient" for Industrial Revolution to succeed. This is what happened in England in contemporary economic historians' opinion.

Historians thesis is supported by a "detailed statistical analysis of the period". The first paragraph has the function to provide the reader a first argumentation. Oxford's professor Jane Humphries found out that there were more than a million child workers in England during the XXIX century. The innovative discovery proves that child labour and child workers were a common source of workforce.

The second and the third paragraphs explain what caused such great child exploitation process. Children were used as workers due to the lack of adult workers: factories were located next to fast-flowing rivers where no available workers could be found and the local labourers were already working as farmers. Factory owners adopted an upsetting strategy using children as a new created source of workforce. Children were "fast-learning, cheap and malleable" and perfectly met all factory owners' needs.

The next paragraphs report a piece of the detailed statistical analysis Humphries carried out. The function of the statistical data is to strongly argument Humphries' thesis.

However, says Humphries, child labour was not a XXIX century innovation. As Humphries explains in the following paragraph children were already employed as trainee by farmers or artisans. Moreover the abundance of children had an important role in child labour development: the Industrial Revolution removed and inhibited rigid social control over young men and women who married younger and procreated larger families with several children. Wars, empire building and labour mobility led fathers to abandon their families and to leave their sons and daughters alone.

Children, concludes the professor, were an efficient and cheep fuel which gave to industry the power to revolutionize itself.

Jane Humphries' analysis and reflection provides to the reader an underrated and sometimes excluded characteristic of the Industrial Revolution. Children had an important and underestimated role in building the English economical and political empire.

However the essay omits some important characteristics of the Industrial Revolution such as the technological development. In my opinion the text focuses too much on children's role in the revolution and the reader could be mislead into thinking they were the only source of power. The title itself "industrial revolution was powered by child slaves" sounds misleading: child labour was only one of the several elements which led to the Revolution. Industrial Revolution is a complex matter which cannot be exhaustively explained focusing of the "crucial role" of child labour.