Fairly basic logic should indicate to you that it wouldn't have been possible for people to work as much. There was no manufacturing. The vast majority of people who worked, worked in agriculture. You cannot work in the middle of winter, you cannot work at night. I don't know how it would have been possible...and that is why people then lived in crushing poverty (it isn't comparable to anything that exists today, even third-world nations today aren't close to the poverty that existed then).
I think the surprising thing is that anyone would conclude that anything about feudalism was better. The reason why people didn't work long hours was because the economy was stuck in a Malthusian trap, and there wasn't enough productivity or work to actually feed people (apart from after mortality crises where close to a majority of the population died).
The only reason the argument is being made is so that it can support the OP's conclusion about work in the present. It has no real significance by itself, this isn't history (incidentally, this is why history is important...it is taught so badly in the US, so badly...but everyone makes these bizarre ahistorical comparisons, everyone looks at the past when trying to understand the present...it is unfortunate that we have the knowledge to inform the limits of this process, but people just ignore it).
I doubt anyone would really be happy returning to feudalism, but I imagine the goal of highlighting this stuff is to expand the sense of what is possible. It's easy to start thinking of the current state of affairs as some kind of immutable law of the universe and not a carefully negotiated political arrangement that can be altered as we see fit.
Again, this is exactly my point. This isn't history. This is specifically not what history is for. History does not inform that process because the past is not like the present. They are orthogonal. Attempting to inform your view of the present using the past is like trying to play baseball like football...it just doesn't make any sense.
Absurd. "History" is not some kind of science done by weights and measures but the job of interpreting various things about the past into some sort of cohesive narrative. Of course the result of trying to recapture something about the past is often not very much alike -- I don't think the American Republic is really that much like the Roman Republic, despite consciously attempting to recreate it -- but the idea that that's "not what history for" is just not true as a descriptive statement. Perhaps you believe it should not be used that way, but if your only lens to look at things is the present, your imagination will be incredibly constrained.
The "cohesive narrative" stands alone. History exists only on its own terms. You cannot look at something that happened in history and say: we can do this because it happened then. It is not absurd, it is the basic aspect of how histography is taught in university (and btw, if you study politics...you will find the same idea, "path dependence"...you see parallels in every social science because it is a fairly common mistake made by people who haven't thought about the issue deeply...the "why don't you be like Denmark" meme is a classic of comparative politics).
I am not saying that the present is the only lens (again, you haven't even started to understand what I wrote). The point is that the present is the only present. The past can only be understood in it's own terms. You are not constrained in any way because the past provides only information about the past, not the present.
The past leads directly into the present, so how could that possibly be? When do you think it’s cut off? Does yesterday not suggest anything about today?
It can possibly be because that is what history is. It is the study of things which are not the present.
It is irrelevant whether yesterday is like today because history is not about yesterday. Again, if you are interested about this subject, I would read some books about historiography (EH Carr and Elton are two of the most important books of this last hundred years...but, again, I don't think you will find anyone arguing for the position you are taking because it so clearly is an attempt to justify a political position today...this isn't what history is, any political position today has to be justified in the terms of today...historical relativists do not take your line, no-one does, it makes no sense unless you have no idea what history is).
I can agree as far as the point that the past must be understood on its own terms and not in terms of contemporary categories, but if EH Carr and Elton truly believe the past has absolutely nothing to tell us about the present, they're about the only people on Earth, including academic historians, who think so. Looking them up suggests their ideas are rather controversial and not simply accepted as consensus ones either (and indeed rejecting the concept of "contingency" would put him out of step with pretty much every working historian I've listened to).
Isn’t history supposed to repeat itself and in that way tell us about the future? And isn’t history an insight into human nature and in that way illuminate modern issues?
I was taught that as well, in what retrospectively was blatant capitalist propaganda. That the only thing that has given us leisure was the efficiencies of capitalism, and the benevolence of capitalists.
Albeit my school district was really into right wing propaganda in general, describing the civil war as "the war of northern aggression" in its text books.
The industrial revolution did give us a lot more leisure time if you're willing to live with at the same standards as people back then did. But we don't find those standards acceptable.
The lack of leisure time peaked during the industrial revolution, as the article this thread is on highlights. Victorian era work houses weren't really known for amenities, even by feudal standards.
> That the only thing that has given us leisure was the efficiencies of capitalism, and the benevolence of capitalists.
This is the opposite of what you expect from one perspective. When a task becomes more efficient people want to put more time in it since they get more out of it. So the more efficient we make jobs the more people will want to work to get more and more stuff. There might be a cap to that, but as of yet we haven't reached it, even programmers making $500k a year still wants to work more even though they could easily spend most of their time not working.
There's a huge push for reduced work weeks. And even where it's not official a lot of those software engineers spend their work week on reddit, so I'm not sure your example checks out.
It's not "capitalist propaganda". There's a reason humanity moved in this direction, away from feudalism and subsistence farming. It sucks. More people today enjoy a higher standard of living than even the wealthiest could have dreamt of in the time period discussed in this article. Your life does not hinge on a good growing season or getting mysteriously sick with no cure. You don't have to know how to hunt, forage, clean a carcass, construct shelter or clothing, on and on and on. It's remarkable that people today can survive without knowing _anything_ about where the means for the survival came from.
Literally this article is about how on several important metrics, we don't overall have a higher standard of living.
People didn't move into the factories from the fields for the higher standard, they moved there because they never owned the fields, and the industrial revolution pushed them out with increased automation, so they moved to the only place that would employ them even though it was a step backwards in standard of living.
> Literally this article is about how on several important metrics, we don't overall have a higher standard of living.
Can you show where this is? All I can find is that by some estimates, some people spent less time doing certain things than they do today. That is not a "higher standard of living" unless you want a completely shallow and de-contextualized feel-good talking point.
Objectively improved standards of living over the 500+ year period in question: child mortality, caloric availability, adult literacy, crime, sanitation, understanding what _germs_ are... the list really goes on and on and on.
It's not a conspiracy. People voted with their feet on this one.
I'm curious where you are getting this alt-history. Do you have any academic or popular primary references? Who do you read for economic history that supports these conclusions?
The article in the thread does not discuss the mechanism by which populations migrated to factories!
Or are you reading a different article? Where are you getting these ideas that peasants were forced to move into the factory towns against their will, or that they considered themselves worse off for doing so?
I will give you some actual facts here (because you appear to be genuinely interested, I can only speak about England which industrialized first).
Urbanisation happened over a long period of time and was very far advanced in the UK (and in places like Belgium). Europe always used a far higher stock of capital (inc. animals) than in Asia but it was only when land began to be enclosed that you saw productivity really improve (it wasn't until the 1700s that European agricultural productivity really equalled places like China), and urbanization accelerate. It is also important to remember that the Industrial Revolution did not happen overnight, there was a period of proto-industrialization when work was "put out" by merchants, this was often in textiles and sometimes with capital/machines that workers owned in their own homes.
It was really in the late 18th/early 19th century that you saw levels of protest begin to rise, as factories started to grow, as workers began to get displaced into factories, and then as workers got displaced by children working in factories. This was a huge "thing" in politics throughout this period, although during the Napoleonic Wars laws were passed which clamped down on protest significantly (Chartism, the Luddites...this was probably the first example of cohesive "working class" political movement anywhere). Importantly though, the only cohesive example (that I know) of protest against agricultural improvement was the Swing Riots in the 1830s, which were localised.
To be clear, this is not because there were no protests but because the protests had happened two centuries earlier with enclosure. That was the main process that really led to agricultural productivity improving (combined with the mortality from the Civil War and migration to the Colonies decreasing the pressure on population). Mechanisation in agriculture wasn't really a factor until much, much later (there was very little need, labour was basically free and ample...the poor laws of the early 19th century were a huge wage subsidy for land owners).
The other stuff the guy you replied to said is way, way off...as I have said elsewhere, this is just feudal romanticism by people who don't understand the past but have their views about the present so just see what they want to see. The standard of living then was significantly below the level existing in every developing nation today. It is fair to say that the industrial revolution treated them no better (the riots I mention above bear that out, it wasn't automation but mechanisation and the introduction of child labour which mechanisation facilitated), but that ignores the massive political changes that occurred soon after (if you look at the UK, the stuff occurring in factories was a huge scandal...a lot of the "political economists" of the day who are famous today unf did not help, but it did get solved and living standards improved).
I am really interested in economic history, so I was aware of the enclosure period, but don't know much about it -- can you recommend some reading material to this and also the Swing Riots? (I know I can google, but books are better)
I can't provide any recommendations on enclosure. I studied it at university, and can't recall what books were recommended.
But if you search for stuff about agricultural productivity, you will find lots. I believe Gregory Clark and Robert Allen have written quite a bit about this.
No idea about the Swing Riots either. I have just read about it in other books. I think Luddism is more interesting. Afaik, there was no real persistent movement like it in agriculture.
Fairly basic logic should indicate to you that it wouldn't have been possible for people to work as much. There was no manufacturing. The vast majority of people who worked, worked in agriculture. You cannot work in the middle of winter, you cannot work at night. I don't know how it would have been possible...and that is why people then lived in crushing poverty (it isn't comparable to anything that exists today, even third-world nations today aren't close to the poverty that existed then).
I think the surprising thing is that anyone would conclude that anything about feudalism was better. The reason why people didn't work long hours was because the economy was stuck in a Malthusian trap, and there wasn't enough productivity or work to actually feed people (apart from after mortality crises where close to a majority of the population died).
The only reason the argument is being made is so that it can support the OP's conclusion about work in the present. It has no real significance by itself, this isn't history (incidentally, this is why history is important...it is taught so badly in the US, so badly...but everyone makes these bizarre ahistorical comparisons, everyone looks at the past when trying to understand the present...it is unfortunate that we have the knowledge to inform the limits of this process, but people just ignore it).