LBravo - Homework 25/02/2019

Critical analysis of the article “Revealed: Industrial Revolution was powered by child slaves”

Considering the title, the intelligent reader understands that the article will be about a discovery: the Industrial Revolution (in particular the English one) has been nourished by child exploitation. Reading the article, it is possible to figure out that this is a thesis of an argumentative text, developed by the economic historian Oxford's Professor Jane Humphries, who supports it with valid argumentations, in particular with statistical dates of that period. First of all, she considers the huge number of children exploited in the factories, affirming that their work has been the reason why England has become a so powerful imperialist Nation. Then she considers the fact that children were preferred instead of adults, because they hadn't been formed for agricultural work, so they were more malleable; moreover, they were “tailor-made” for factories, which means more suitable to manage the machineries located in them. Therefore, she highlights that the number of very young children exploited in factory work was constantly increasing year by year, underlining also the fact that children were employed in the “working world” even before, by farmers or artisans. It is also explained that children were usually not paid: they were just given a dormitory and some food. All these pieces of information send also to cultural consequences: the “age for marriage” was reduced and the tax of natality consequently grew. As a result, women got back their “original” role of “angels of the heart” and their husbands and little-grown children went to work for the industrial production. In this period a lot of men died too (mostly for epidemics, accidents and wars): consequently, a lot of families had a single parent and this led to a promotion of sending young children to work as soon as they were apt for it.

In conclusion, professor Humphries stresses once and again how fundamental has been child labour for England to become such an expanded Land, and how family and economy issues are not so far one from the other.

I would connect this article to Verga's short story “Rosso Malpelo” and to Dickens' novel “Oliver Twist”, two works that deal with the theme of a difficult child condition. Therefore, this article could also be linked to the text about the Industrial Revolution we read and also to the theme of Puritanism, because, as Weber claimed, Industrial Revolution could be a consequence of Puritan mentality.