Centers of Progress, Pt. 22: Manchester (Industrialization)
Introducing the city at the heart of the first Industrial Revolution.
Chelsea Follett —
Today marks the twenty-second installment in a series of articles by HumanProgress.org called Centers of Progress. Where does progress happen? The story of civilization is in many ways the story of the city. It is the city that has helped to create and define the modern world. This bi-weekly column will give a short overview of urban centers that were the sites of pivotal advances in culture, economics, politics, technology, etc.
Our twenty-second Center of Progress is Manchester during the first Industrial Revolution (1760-1850). Sometimes called “the first industrial city,” Manchester epitomized the rapid changes of an era that transformed human existence more than any other period in history. Manchester was among the earliest cities to experience industrialization. The city’s metamorphosis wasn’t easy, as it entailed working and living conditions far below those that we are used to today. But Manchester ultimately helped to uplift humanity by paving the way to the post-industrial prosperity that so many of us now enjoy.
Today, Manchester is the fifth most populous city in the United Kingdom. The city is famous for its soccer team, Manchester United, which has won more trophies than any other English football club (i.e., soccer team). Nicknamed the Red Devils, Manchester’s is among the world’s most popular and highest-earning soccer teams. Manchester is also known for its large research university, where the atom was first split in 1917. The University of Manchester operates the Jodrell Bank Observatory, a designated UNESCO World Heritage Site due to its substantive impact on research during the start of the Space Age. Manchester has also made notable contributions to music, producing groups such as the Bee Gees, who were among the best-selling musical artists in history. Much of the city’s architecture dates to the industrial era, with many prominent warehouses, factories, railway viaducts, and canals still remaining.
The area where Manchester now stands has been inhabited since at least the Bronze Age, originally by ancient Celtic Britons. Around the 70s CE, Romans conquered the area. They called the outpost Mamucium. That is thought to be a Latinization of the prior name for the settlement in Old Brittonic, which likely meant “breast-shaped hill.” Mamucium eventually became known as Manchester, with the Old English -chester suffix coming from the Latin castra, meaning “fortified town.” After the Romans departed Britain, the settlement of Manchester changed hands among several kingdoms during the middle ages and the Norman conquest of the area. Manchester first became known for the cloth trade in the 14th century, when a wave of Flemish immigrant weavers who produced linen and wool settled in the town. By the 16th century, Manchester’s economy revolved around the wool trade. A cottage industry, wool production was a slow and painstaking process that took place within individual households.
Manchester was a flourishing but small market town before the Industrial Revolution, with a population of fewer than ten thousand people at the start of the 18th century. As technological advances increased the efficiency of the cloth business, the city’s growth began to take off in the 1760s. The city’s canals, cotton-friendly climate, and location allowing for easy transport of goods into and out of the city, all destined Manchester to become a key industrial center once the right technology arose.
The Industrial Revolution is often said to have begun when the spinning jenny was invented in Oswaldtwistle, 25 miles northwest of Manchester, in 1764 or 1765. The spinning jenny was a frame for spinning wool or cotton with increased speed by using multiple spindles. It represented the first fully mechanized production process. Then, in 1771, another new invention, the water frame, was installed in a Cromford factory 50 miles southeast of Manchester. That invention used a water-wheel to power a spinning frame. Around 1779, in Bolton, which is located 15 miles northwest of Manchester, the inventor Samuel Crompton combined aspects of the spinning jenny and the water frame into the “spinning mule.”
The spinning mule greatly sped up the process of producing yarn. In fact, versions of the spinning mule are still used today in the production of yarns from certain delicate fibers such as alpaca hair. Water-powered textile mills making use of the new technology soon popped up across the region.
In 1781, just two years after the spinning mule’s introduction, the development of viable steam engines then enabled the growth of larger, more powerful, steam-powered textile mills. Steam power was a game-changer. While humanity had known about steam power since Hero of Alexandria (mentioned in our eighth Centers of Progress installment) demonstrated the phenomenon as a novelty in the first century CE, finally gaining the ability to harness steam in a practical way was the pivotal moment of the Industrial Revolution. Improved steam engines led to the swift industrialization of England’s cloth industry, allowing the spinning and weaving of textiles with a rapidity never before achieved.
Manchester opened its first cotton mill in 1782—the five-story Shudehill Mill that is also sometimes called Simpson’s Mill. It made use of a thirty-foot water-wheel and cutting-edge steam power. By the year 1800, Manchester was described as “steam mill mad,” with over forty mills. By that same year, the city’s population had grown almost tenfold from the start of the 18th century, reaching around eighty-nine thousand souls. Between 1801 and the 1820s the population doubled. By 1830, Manchester boasted ninety-nine distinct cotton-spinning mills.
That year, the world’s first modern railway, “the Liverpool and Manchester” (L&MR) opened and supercharged Manchester’s already-booming textile industry. It did so by speeding up the importation of raw materials from Liverpool’s ports into Manchester’s factories, as well as the export of finished textile products out of Manchester. The 31-mile-long L&MR was both the first railway to exclusively serve steam-powered automotives and the world’s first inter-city railway. It was also the first railway to use a double track, operate fully on a regular time-table, employ a signaling system, and transport mail. By the end of the first Industrial Revolution in 1850, Manchester was home to some 400,000 people. The erstwhile obscure market town had become second only to London in importance within Britain and came to be called that nation’s “second city.”
The swelling of the population was driven by an inpouring of young men and women from the English countryside and from Ireland, drawn by the promise of work in the new factories and mills. Compared to back-breaking agricultural labor or lives of domestic servitude (in an era when many employers beat their servants with impunity), many people found even the famously harsh working conditions within the mills to be preferable to their other options. Mills paid high wages compared to opportunities in rural areas, and most migrants to the city saw an appreciable rise in their incomes. Gradually, and for the first time in history, a large middle class emerged.
That is not to make light of the working environment within early Industrial Revolution-era Manchester’s factories, which saw long hours, high rates of injury and the frequent use of child labor. Although it must be noted that child labor was not an innovation of the Industrial Revolution—it had tragically existed since time immemorial among the poor. In fact, it was only during the Industrial Revolution that living conditions improved so much that child labor began to come under scrutiny, resulting in Britain’s 1833 Factory Act. The Act is thought to be the world’s first anti-child labor legislation. Other acts followed.
If you could visit Manchester during the first Industrial Revolution, you would probably enter the city via steam-powered locomotive and your first sight of the city would be its bustling train station. You would emerge from the station into a city defined by a skyline of industrial smokestacks that the poet William Blake famously described as “dark Satanic mills.” In 1814, the British civil servant Johann May described that skyline as a sign of technological progress:
Manchester [has] hundreds of factories … which tower up to five and six storeys in height. Huge chimneys at the side of these buildings belch forth black coal vapours, and this tells us that powerful steam engines are used. The clouds of vapour can be viewed afar. The houses are blackened by it.
The sound might have been deafening. The French political philosopher Alexis de Tocquevillle described Manchester in 1835 by noting that the “crunching wheels of machinery, the shriek of steam from boilers, the regular beat of the looms… are the noises from which you can never escape.” And among the people in the streets you might have observed various protestors. The city was at the vanguard of radical political movements ranging from women’s suffrage and anti-Corn Law advocacy to communism.
The German political philosopher Friedrich Engels came to Manchester in 1842. He worked there as a cotton merchant by day and opined about the state of the city’s poor by night, culminating in the publication of The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844. One passage on Manchester’s slums reads,
In a rather deep hole … surrounded on all four sides by tall factories … stand two groups of about 200 cottages, built chiefly back to back, in which live about 4,000 human beings, most of them Irish. The cottages are old, dirty, and of the smallest sort, the streets uneven, fallen into ruts and in part without drains or pavement; masses of refuse, offal, and sickening filth lie among standing pools in all directions.
What Engels failed to notice was that for the first time in history, such abject levels of poverty were actually in decline—within his own lifetime the average Englishman became three times richer.
Penury had always been the default state for the vast majority of humanity. Then, suddenly, average incomes not only began to rise, but rose exponentially. The famous hockey-stick chart, perhaps the most important graph in the world, illustrates the dramatic shift. Humanity has produced more economic output over the last two centuries than in all of the previous centuries combined. That explosion of wealth-creation soon led to a massive decrease in the rate of poverty and improvements in living standards. Not long after incomes took off, life expectancy followed. The economic historian Deirdre McCloskey calls the change the “Great Enrichment.”
Engels lived in Manchester on-and-off for three decades. In Manchester, he was visited multiple times by his friend and fellow German philosopher, Karl Marx. Moved by the state of the poor in Manchester and other factory cities, and failing to recognize the ongoing Great Enrichment, the two men developed a political philosophy that aimed to create a workers’ paradise.
Their proposed solutions tragically led to far worse suffering—including food shortages, gulags, 100 million deaths, and psychological scars that still echo to this day, with heightened dishonesty and lower trust persisting in formerly communist areas. Ironically, Marx and Engels’ goals of shorter work-days and higher incomes have been achieved within a market economy .
As the quintessential industrial city, there is no doubt that Manchester earned its nickname, “the workshop of the world.” As a key early center of industrialization, Manchester underwent an at-times difficult transition with profound effects. The unprecedented prosperity created by industrialization eventually allowed for the improvement of working conditions and the heightened living standards that characterize post-industrial affluence. For helping to weave the fabric of the modern world, Manchester is deservedly our twenty-second Center of Progress.
High mortality rates killed many fathers and left others to raise their children alone.
Chelsea Follett —
Summary: Father’s Day has a somber origin rooted in a West Virginia mining disaster. William Jackson Smart, a single father who raised six children after his wife’s death, inspired the modern tradition of Father’s Day. Today, as workplace safety has improved and life expectancy has increased, we reflect on the progress that has granted fathers more time with their families.
Few are familiar with the tragic origins of Father’s Day. Father’s Day was inspired by both a lethal workplace catastrophe and by a single father who raised six children after his wife’s untimely death.
In 1907, an explosion in a West Virginia coal mine resulted in the deaths of 361 men, 250 of whom were fathers. It was the deadliest mining disaster in U.S. history, and 1,000 children lost their fathers in the accident. To honor the lost miners, a local woman named Grace Golden Clayton arranged a “Father’s Day” tribute the following year on July 5th.
Workplace death was sadly common in that era: scholars estimate that in the United States around 61 workers per 100,000 employees died annually in work-related accidents during the early 20th century. In 2020, the most recent year for which there is data, that figure was 3.4 fatalities — a 94 percent reduction. Progress in workplace safety is particularly good news for men. Holders of the 20 jobs with the highest occupational fatality rates, such as logging and steelworking, are over 90 percent male, and men account for more than 90 percent of workplace fatalities. While even one workplace death is too many, we can be thankful that, as workplace deaths have become rarer, far fewer children lose their fathers to disasters like the one that inspired the first Father’s Day.
A tragic, but rewarding life
While West Virginia may be the birthplace of Father’s Day, the event did not catch on until later; the annual Father’s Day tradition on the third Sunday in June that we know today was inspired by a devoted single father named William Jackson Smart.
William was born in 1842 in Arkansas. He had the unusual experience of fighting on both sides of the Civil War. Arkansas joined the Confederacy, but in 1863 William switched sides to fight for the Union. He was fortunate to survive: one in five Civil War soldiers met an untimely end. In 1865, the year the war ended, he married Elizabeth. She died at age 30 in 1878. Some sources report that the couple had five children, and that at least one died in infancy. What we do know is that William was left to care for three surviving children: an infant daughter, a five-year-old daughter, and a six-year-old son.
In those days, losing a spouse to premature death was a common affair. Data suggests that among white men in William’s birth cohort, nearly 5 percent were widowers during their 40s. Reflecting the higher male mortality during the Civil War, over 10 percent of women in that same demographic were widows in their 40s. Such statistics are not surprising, given how short the typical lifespan was during that era. As late as 1880, the average U.S. life expectancy was only 39 years; today that figure is more than 76 years.
After two years of single fatherhood, William remarried in 1880. His second wife was Ellen, a 29-year-old widow with three children of her own. William and Ellen added seven more children to their household (one of whom died in infancy), and moved their sprawling family from Arkansas to a farm in the Pacific Northwest.
Daughter honored twice widowed dad
William’s children from his first marriage and his stepchildren were grown when he became a widower for the second time. When Ellen died in 1898, William was left to raise their 16-year-old daughter Sonora and five sons: a 15-year-old, 12-year-oldtwins, a 10-year-old, and a 7-year-old. Sonora may have helped him take care of her younger brothers initially, but when she married the following year, William was left to raise the five boys on his own.
William rose to the challenge. Sonora said admiringly of her father: “This role he performed with courage and selflessness until we were all in homes of our own.”
Starting in 1909, as Mother’s Day — a holiday with its own tragic backstory — grew in popularity, Sonora worked to popularize a complementary Father’s Day to be celebrated around the date of her father’s birthday. She partnered with businesses, ranging from menswear manufacturers to greeting card trade groups, and spent decades lobbying for the holiday’s official recognition — which finally arrived in 1972.
The holiday’s heartrending beginnings highlight how much more difficult fatherhood often was in the past, when high rates of premature death killed many fathers and made others into widowers left to raise children on their own. This Father’s Day, appreciate the progress that has given fathers more years with their families, alive and well.
Are the employment trends, from agriculture to manufacturing to services, cause for worry? Far from it!
Marian L. Tupy —
The U.S. President Donald J. Trump has repeatedly lamented the supposed decline of the American manufacturing sector. During his presidential campaign, he asserted that Americans “don’t make anything anymore” and pledged “to restore manufacturing in the United States.” Yet there is no reason to think of manufacturing jobs as the gold standard in employment. The nature of work has been changing for about 250 years and it is likely to continue to evolve – thanks to declining birth rates, and the rise of robotics and artificial intelligence – in the future.
Prior to the Industrial Revolution, between 80 and 90 percent of the world’s population worked in agriculture. At the start of the 19th century, people in Western Europe and North America began to move into manufacturing jobs en masse. Factory jobs were not universally welcome. Factory jobs were criticized by philosophers, like Karl Marx, lampooned by comedians, like Charlie Chaplin, and bemoaned by poets, like William Blake.
Marx felt that factory production, in which products are generated using an endless sequence of discrete and repetitive motions, did not offer the worker enough psychological satisfaction. The worker, who did not design or market the product, was thus “alienated” from the latter. Chaplin turned the soul-and-body crushing assembly line mode of production into a hilarious comedy skit in his 1936 movie, Modern Times.
And, who can forget William Blake’s 1808 poem Jerusalem, in which the artist mourns the “satanic mills” (i.e., factories) that in his view pockmarked the bucolic face of the English countryside?
And did those feet in ancient time Walk upon England’s mountains green? And was the holy Lamb of God And did the Countenance Divine Shine forth upon our clouded hills? And was Jerusalem builded here Among these dark Satanic mills?
Today, we know that most people moved from agricultural work in the countryside to factory work in the cities willingly, for the latter provided higher wages, and greater independence and cultural stimulation. This trend continues to this day. Between 1991 and 2017, for example, agricultural employment fell from 43 to 27 percent of the global workforce. Only in very poor countries, such as Bhutan and Zimbabwe, does agriculture continue to employ over 50 percent of laborers.
In the United States, employment in the manufacturing sector continued to grow until the middle of the 20th century. In 1950, for example, manufacturing employed approximately 35 percent of all workers. Fifty years later, it employed only 15 percent of all workers. Conversely, the share of workers employed in the service sector increased from approximately 18 percent in 1960 to almost 80 percent in 2000. Similar trends can be observed in other advanced economies, such as the United Kingdom, Germany and Japan.
Meanwhile, manufacturing jobs have grown in countries that embraced industrialization in more recent decades. Between 1991 and 2017, for example, industrial employment rose from 12 to 19 percent in Bangladesh, from 19 to 24 percent in China, from 15 to 25 percent in India and from 9 to 23 percent in Vietnam. History suggests that, as these populous and rapidly industrializing countries become richer, the service sector will play an increasingly prominent part in their economic development.
Are these employment trends, from agriculture to manufacturing to services, cause for worry? Far from it! The service sector consists of jobs in the information sector, investment services, technical and scientific services, healthcare and social assistance services, as well as arts, entertainment, and recreation services. Most of these jobs are less physically arduous, more intellectually stimulating and better paid than either agricultural or manufacturing jobs.
They are, also, less dangerous. In 2014, global fatality rates per 100,000 employees in agriculture ranged from 7.8 deaths in high-income countries to 27.5 deaths in South-East Asia and Western Pacific. In manufacturing, the range was from 3.8 in high-income countries to 21.1 in Africa. The range for the service sector was from 1.5 in high-income countries to 17.7 in Africa.
The evolution of the workplace is far from finished. With fully mechanized farms on the horizon, agricultural employment in advanced countries is heading toward zero. Similarly, the rise of robots and artificial intelligence is likely to displace tens of millions of manufacturing and service sector workers in rich countries.
Collapsing fertility rates in rich countries, however, will likely prevent the emergence of mass unemployment. Moreover, high levels of human capital and the relative openness of advanced economies are likely to unleash innovation in unexpected ways, thus soaking up displaced workers.
The employment picture is less sanguine in some poor countries. That’s especially true of Africa, the population of which is projected to go on expanding well into the 22nd century. Scandalously mismanaged state education systems retard development of human capital and lack of economic freedom, especially rigid labor markets, make African countries ill-positioned to respond to the challenges of automatization.
Will the millions of young Africans without a prospect for meaningful employment force change upon their sclerotic governments or opt to migrate out of the continent? Time will tell.
It is in the interest of the employers not to expose their workers to unnecessary risks.
Marian L. Tupy —
The free market, some people allege, is incompatible with workplace safety. Competition drives down profits, the German philosopher Karl Marx asserted, which forces business owners to cut corners and expose their workers to growing risks. Yet, by historical standards, work-related fatalities are at an all-time low. Labor activism and government regulations deserve part of the credit for that happy state of affairs. But, a general improvement in living standards and, consequently, higher expectations on the part of the laborers, also played a part in improving workplace safety. Plainly put, a safer workforce is a more contented workforce. It is in the interest of the employers not to expose their workers to unnecessary risks.
All economic activity involves some degree of physical risk. That has always been the case. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors had to contend with wild animals, poisonous snakes and other vagaries of nature that surely make the modern workplace a much safer alternative. Credible data on work injuries and fatalities during the agrarian era is difficult to come by, because most farm laborers were self-employed. Simply put, no entity, official or otherwise, had an incentive to collect occupational safety statistics. Yet agricultural work must have been quite unappealing, considering that most people preferred factory work over life on the farm.
Even today, notes the U.S. Department of Labor, agriculture “ranks among the most dangerous industries.” In 2011, the “fatality rate for agricultural workers was 7 times higher than the fatality rate for all workers in private industry; agricultural workers had a fatality rate of 24.9 deaths per 100,000, while the fatality rate for all workers was 3.5.” Likewise, the Workplace Safety and Health (WSH) Institute in Singapore found that global fatality rates per 100,000 employees in agriculture ranged from 7.8 deaths in high-income countries to 27.5 deaths in South-East Asia and Western Pacific regions in 2014. Manufacturing deaths ranged from 3.8 in high-income countries to 21.1 in Africa.
Collection of statistics came about as a result of industrialization and the birth of modern labor relations in the 19th century. Labor unions started to collect workplace safety statistics in order to achieve more advantageous working conditions for their members, while employers kept work safety data, because they were legally liable for injuries in the workplace. By modern standards, it is clear that working conditions in mines and factories during the first 100 years of the Industrial Revolution were appalling. As the then-U.S. President Benjamin Harrison put it in 1892, “American workmen are subjected to peril of life and limb as great as a soldier in time of war.”
In the United States, estimates Harvard University psychologist Steven Pinker in his 2018 book Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, 61 workers per 100,000 employees died in work-related accidents as late as 1913. That number fell to 3.2 in 2015. That’s a 95 percent reduction in work fatalities over a little more than 100 years. A similarly encouraging trend can be observed globally. According to the WSH Institute estimates, 16.4 workers per 100,000 employees died worldwide in 1998. By 2014 that number fell to 11.3. That’s a 31 percent reduction over a remarkably short period of 16 years. Considered in a slightly different way, workplace fatalities around the world seem to be falling by almost 2 percentage points each year.
What accounts for those improvements? Labor union activism, including strikes and protests, has been traditionally credited with making the workplace safer. But, improving working conditions cannot be divorced from the overall improvement in the standard of living. The massive economic expansion in the second half of the 19th century, in particular, tightened the labor market and workers started to gravitate toward more generous employers. It was only after a certain critical mass of workers achieved more tolerable working conditions that more general workplace regulations became imaginable and, more importantly, affordable.
Thus, at least in the American context, the reduction in workplace fatalities preceded the Wagner Act of 1935, which enabled private sector employees to organize into trade unions, engage in collective bargaining and take collective action. By the time that the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration was created in 1971, worker fatalities were roughly two-thirds lower than what they have been prior to World War I. Thus, as with working hours, government regulations tend to affirm that which is already happening in the labor market place anyway.
