Grim Old Days: Peter Laslett’s The World We Have Lost

Poverty and hardship long predated the factory age.

Chelsea Follett — Aug 14, 2025

Summary: Before the Industrial Revolution, life in England was marked by widespread poverty, illiteracy, and relentless labor. Even children worked from as young as three. Most people lacked education, political voice, and basic comforts, enduring hunger, disease, and harsh living conditions that kept them in constant proximity to hardship and death. Peter Laslett’s The World We Have Lost reveals that the deprivations often blamed on early industrialization were in fact the norm long before factories and industry.

Peter Laslett’s book The World We Have Lost is an influential history of what life was like in England before the Industrial Revolution. Laslett makes clear that the infamous problems of the industrial era were preexisting, not innovations that first arose with the construction of factories: “The coming of industry cannot be shown to have brought economic oppression and exploitation along with it. It was there already.” His book brings into focus the poverty and hardship faced by preindustrial people and the fact that “we now inhabit a world wealthy on a scale quite unknown before industrialization.”

Laslett describes the dearth of schooling, observing that neither Isaac Newton’s nor William Shakespeare’s parents could read. Inventories from Kentish towns between the 1560s and 1630s show a steady increase from a fifth or less owning books to nearly a quarter, although such inventories were recorded only for prosperous households and thus probably overestimate the extent of book ownership. Leicestershire wills from the 1620s to 1640s show that only 17 percent of people with wills bequeathed books to their heirs, and even among the gentry that figure was only 50 percent.

The “inability to share in literate life cut most men off from even contemplating a share in political power.” And the idea of women attaining a political voice was more absurd still. Even James Tyrrell—an associate of John Locke, a critic of absolutism, and a believer in limited political authority—noted in 1681, “There never was any government where all the promiscuous rabble of women and children had votes.”

Illiteracy often not only limited women’s ability to engage with society but also increased women’s vulnerability. “An illiterate maidservant whose place was five or ten miles from home was cut off from her parents and her brothers and sisters,” effectively unable to send them messages and alert them if her employer physically abused her or sexually assaulted her (as was, sadly, common).

Instead of learning to read, many children began work at shockingly young ages. Laslett informs the reader that, as John Locke noted in 1697, poor children were expected to start working at age three, contributing in what capacity they could, often through apprenticeships. The apprentice’s contract typically went thus: “He shall not absent himself by night or by day without his master’s leave.” Some apprentices “stayed subordinate to a master in a master’s house for the whole of their lives,” far beyond the initial terms of their contract.

Not only could children start work at age 3, but by age 12, they were considered old enough to help run businesses. In 1699, at an alehouse in Harefield, Middlesex, run by Catherine and John Baily, 6 of their 10 children still living at home “were above the age of twelve, . . . old enough to help run the family establishment.”

In England grooms could legally be as young as 14 and brides as young as 12, although Laslett notes that thankfully that was relatively rare in practice. Early marriages did occur, though. In 1623, a London parish clerk wrote disapprovingly of the wedding of a 17-year-old boy working as a threadmaker to the 14-year-old daughter of a porter, calling them a “couple of young Fooles.”

A rather offensive (to modern sensibilities) form of divorce known as “wife-selling” sometimes occurred among those who could not afford a formal dissolution of marriage. The Ipswich Journal records such a sale occurring in 1789:

Oct. 29, Samuel Balls sold his wife to Abraham Rade in the parish of Blythburgh in his county for 1 [shilling]. A halter was put around her neck and she was resigned up to this Abraham Rade.

Such bizarre episodes “reveal something of the slightly quizzical attitude of ordinary people to the official marriage code,” with local customs and practices varying wildly. Upon settling down typically, a man tilled land with the aid of his wife and children. Picture the “hard-working, needy, half-starved labourers of pre-industrial times,” who toiled nonstop and yet never produced enough to live comfortably.

Here was an economy conspicuously lacking in those devices for the saving of exertion which are so marked a feature of our own everyday life. The simplest operation needed effort; drawing the water from the well, striking steel on flint to catch the tinder alight, cutting goose-feather quills to make a pen, they all took time, trouble and energy. The working of the land, the labour in the craftsmen’s shop, were infinitely taxing. [The peasantry would] shock us with their worn hands and faces, their immeasurable fatigue.

Those who didn’t work in agriculture were often servants. The percentage of workers employed as servants in the population varied from as low as 4 percent to as high as a third of the population in relatively wealthy times and places, such as London and parts of Norwich in the 1690s. “Everywhere work of all kinds varied alarmingly with the state of the weather and of trade, so that hunger was not very far away.” Many had no employment and begged. “Wandering beggars . . . were . . . a feature of the countryside at all times.”

Any increase in the cost of food staples could prompt social discord. “Right up to the time of the French Revolution and beyond, in Europe the threat of high prices for food was the commonest and most potent cause of public disorder.” Public panic about food was often warranted, as the threat of hunger was all too real. In 1698 in Scotland, contemporary accounts say, “[m]any have died for want of bread, and have been necessitate to make use of wild-runches draff and the like for the support of nature.” A runch is a common weed.

Laslett makes clear that England, being wealthier than much of Europe, saw relatively few famines by the late early modern period. Still, England’s harvest year of 1623–1624 was devastating, and in some locations, such as Ashton, the number of recorded burials was over two-and-a-half times the typical level. Numerous burials record the cause of the death as starvation. The deaths recorded in the Register of Greystoke in England, in 1623, put names to some of these victims of starvation, including, “A poor hungerstarved beggar child, Dorothy,” and “Thomas Simpson, a poor hungerstarved beggar boy,” as well as “Leonard . . . which child died for want of food,” and 4-year-old “John, son of John Lancaster, late of Greystoke, a waller by trade, which child died for want of food and means.”

Preindustrial people also froze. Indeed, in cold climates such as those of northern and western Europe, “the necessity of gathering round fires and sharing beds, make it obvious that the privacy now regarded as indispensable, almost as a human right,” was once rare, with the masses forced to sleep next to each other and their farm animals for body heat.

If there was one thing that was better about the past, it was perhaps that people were—by necessity—tougher. London’s suicide rate circa 1660 is estimated as somewhere between 2.5 and 5 per 100,000 people, low by modern standards.¹ But on the whole, what Laslett calls “the world we have lost” is not a world we’d want back.

According to the most recent data from Britain’s Office of National Statistics, London’s suicide rate now stands at 7.3 per 100,000 people, while England and Wales have a suicide rate of 17.4 per 100,000. According to the most recent year of OECD data, only one OECD country has a suicide rate of under 5 per 100,000: Turkey, at 4.8 per 100,000. (In recent years, only two or three OECD countries typically manage to keep suicides below the upper bound of the estimated level seen in 17^th-century London).

Blog Post | Human Development

The Grim Truth About the “Good Old Days”

Preindustrial life wasn’t simple or serene—it was filthy, violent, and short.

Chelsea Follett — Mar 6, 2026

Summary: Rose-tinted nostalgia for the preindustrial era has gone viral—some people claim that modernity itself was a mistake and that “progress” is an illusion. This article addresses seven supposed negative effects of the Industrial Revolution. The conclusion is that history bears little resemblance to the sanitized image of preindustrial times in the popular imagination.

When Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, declared in 1995 that “the Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race,” he was voicing a sentiment that now circulates widely online.

Rose-tinted nostalgia for the preindustrial era has gone viral, strengthened by anxieties about our own digital era. Some are even claiming that modernity itself was a mistake and that “progress” is an illusion. Medieval peasants led happier and more leisurely lives than we do, according to those who pine for the past. “The internet has become strangely nostalgic for life in the Middle Ages,” journalist Amanda Mull wrote in a piece for The Atlantic. Samuel Matlack, managing editor of The New Atlantis, observed that there is currently an “endless debate around whether the preindustrial past was clearly better than what we have now and we must go back to save humanity, or whether modern technological society is unambiguously a forward leap we must forever extend.”

In the popular imagination, the Industrial Revolution was the birth of many evils, a time when smoke-belching factories disrupted humanity’s erstwhile idyllic existence. Economics professor Vincent Geloso’s informal survey of university students found that they believed “living standards did not increase for the poor; only the rich got richer; the cities were dirty and the poor suffered from ill-health.” Pundit Tucker Carlson has even suggested that feudalism was preferable to modern liberal democracy.

Different groups tend to idealize different aspects of the past. Environmentalists might idealize preindustrial harmony with nature, while social traditionalists romanticize our ancestors’ family lives. People from across the political spectrum share the sense that the Industrial Revolution brought little real improvement for ordinary people.

In 2021, History.com published “7 Negative Effects of the Industrial Revolution,” an article reflecting much of the thinking behind the popular impression that industrialization was a step backward for humanity, rather than a period of tremendous progress. But was industrialization really to blame for each of the ills detailed in the article?

“Horrible Living Conditions for Workers”

Were horrible living conditions a result of industrialization? To be sure, industrial-era living conditions did not meet modern standards—but neither did the living conditions that preceded them.

As historian Kirstin Olsen put it in her book, Daily Life in 18th-Century England, “The rural poor . . . crowded together, often in a single room of little more than 100 square feet, sometimes in a single bed, or sometimes in a simple pile of shavings or straw or matted wool on the floor. In the country, the livestock might be brought indoors at night for additional warmth.” In 18th-century Wales, one observer claimed that in the homes of the common people, “every edifice” was practically a miniature “Noah’s Ark” filled with a great variety of animals. One shudders to think of the barnlike smell that bedchambers took on, in addition to the chorus of barnyard sounds that likely filled every night. Our forebears put up with the stench and noise and cuddled up with their livestock, if only to stave off hypothermia.

Homes were often so poorly constructed that they were unstable. The din of collapsing buildings was such a common sound that in 1688, Randle Holme defined a crash as “a noise proceeding from a breach of a house or wall.” The poet Dr. Samuel Johnson wrote that in 1730s London, “falling houses thunder on your head.” In the 1740s, “props to houses” keeping them from collapsing were listed among the most common obstacles that blocked free passage along London’s walkways.

“Poor Nutrition”

What about poor nutrition? From liberal flower children to the “Make America Healthy Again” crowd, fetishizing the supposedly chemical-free, wholesome diets of yore is bipartisan. The truth, however, is stomach-churning.

Our ancestors not only failed to eat well, but they sometimes didn’t eat at all. Historian William Manchester noted that in preindustrial Europe, famines occurred every four years on average. In the lean years, “cannibalism was not unknown. Strangers and travelers were waylaid and killed to be eaten.” Historian Fernand Braudel recorded a 1662 account from Burgundy, France, that lamented that “famine this year has put an end to over ten thousand families . . . and forced a third of the inhabitants, even in the good towns, to eat wild plants. . . . Some people ate human flesh.” A third of Finland’s population is estimated to have died of starvation during a famine in the 1690s.

Even when food was available, it was often far from appetizing. Our forebears lived in a world where adulterated bread and milk, spoiled meat, and vegetables tainted with human waste were everyday occurrences. London bread was described in a 1771 novel as “a deleterious paste, mixed up with chalk, alum and bone ashes, insipid to the taste and destructive to the constitution.” According to historian Emily Cockayne, the 1757 public health treatise Poison Detected noted that “in 1736 a bundle of rags that concealed a suffocated newborn baby was mistaken for a joint of meat by its stinking smell.”

Water was also far from pristine. “For the most part, filth flowed out windows, down the streets, and into the same streams, rivers, and lakes where the city’s inhabitants drew their water,” according to environmental law professor James Salzman. This ensured that each swig included a copious dose of human excreta and noxious bacteria. Waterborne illnesses were frequent.

“A Stressful, Unsatisfying Lifestyle”

Did stressful lifestyles originate with industrialization? Did our preindustrial ancestors generally enjoy a sense of inner peace? Doubtful. Sadly, many of them suffered from what they called melancholia, roughly analogous to the modern concepts of anxiety and depression.

In 1621, physician Robert Burton described a common symptom of melancholia as waking in the night due to mental stress among the upper classes. An observer said the poor similarly “feel their sleep interrupted by the cold, the filth, the screams and infants’ cries, and by a thousand other anxieties.” Richard Napier, a 17th-century physician, recorded over several decades that some 20 percent of his patients suffered from insomnia. Today, in comparison, 12 percent of Americans say they have been diagnosed with chronic insomnia. Stress is nothing new.

Sky-high preindustrial mortality rates caused profound emotional suffering to those in mourning. Losing a child to death in infancy was once a common—indeed, near-universal—experience among parents, but the loss was no less painful for all its ordinariness. Many surviving testimonies suggest that mothers and fathers felt acute grief with each loss. The 18th-century poem, “To an Infant Expiring the Second Day of Its Birth,” by Mehetabel “Hetty” Wright—who lost several of her own children prematurely—heartrendingly urges her infant to look at her one last time before passing away.

So common were child deaths that practically every major poet explored the subject. Robert Burns wrote “On the Birth of a Posthumous Child.” Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote multiple poems to his deceased son. Consider the pain captured by these lines from William Shakespeare’s play King John, spoken by the character Constance upon her son’s death: “Grief fills the room up of my absent child. . . . O Lord! My boy, my Arthur, my fair son! My life, my joy, my food, my all the world!” Shakespeare’s own son died in 1596, around the time the playwright would have finished writing King John.

Only in the modern world has child loss changed from extraordinarily common to exceedingly rare. As stressful as modern life can be, our ancestors faced forms of heartache that most people today will never endure.

“Dangerous Workplaces” and “Child Labor”

Dangerous workplaces and child labor both predate the Industrial Revolution. In agrarian societies, entire families would labor in fields and pastures, including pregnant women and young children. Many preindustrial children entered the workforce at what today would be considered preschool or kindergarten age.

In poorer families, children were sent to work by age 4 or 5. If children failed to find gainful employment by age 8, even social reformers unusually sympathetic to the plight of the poor, would express open disgust at such a lack of industriousness. Jonas Hanway was reportedly “revolted by families who sought charity when they had children aged 8 to 14 earning no wages.”

For most, work was backbreaking and unending. A common myth suggests that preindustrial peasants worked fewer days than modern people do. This misconception originated from an early estimate by historian Gregory Clark, who initially proposed that peasants labored only 150 days a year. He later revised this figure to around 300 days—higher than the modern average of 260 working days, even before factoring in today’s paid holidays and vacation time.

Physically harming one’s employees was once widely accepted, too, and authorities stepped in only when the mistreatment was exceptionally severe. In 1666, one such case occurred in Kittery, in what is now Maine, when Nicholas and Judith Weekes caused the death of a servant. Judith confessed that she cut off the servant’s toes with an axe. The couple, however, was not indicted for murder, merely for cruelty.

“Discrimination Against Women”

The preindustrial world was hardly a model of gender equality—discrimination against women was not an invention of the early industrialists but a long-standing feature of many societies.

Domestic violence was widely tolerated. In London, a 1595 law dictated: “No man shall after the houre of nine at the Night, keepe any rule whereby any such suddaine out-cry be made in the still of the Night, as making any affray, or beating hys Wife, or servant.” In other words, no beating your wife after 9:00 p.m. That was a noise regulation. A similar law forbade using a hammer after 9:00 p.m. Beating one’s wife until she screamed was an ordinary and acceptable activity.

Domestic violence was celebrated in popular culture, as in the lively folk song “The Cooper of Fife,” a traditional Scottish tune that inspired a country dance and influenced similar English and American ballads. To modern ears, the contrast between its violent lyrics and upbeat melody is unsettling. The song portrays a husband as entirely justified in his acts of domestic violence, inviting the audience to side with the wifebeater and cheer as he beats his wife into submission for her failure to perform domestic chores to her husband’s satisfaction.

Sexist laws often empowered men to abuse women. If a woman earned money, her husband could legally claim it at any time. For instance, in 18th-century Britain, a wife could not enter into contracts, make a will without her husband’s approval, or decide on her children’s education or apprenticeships; moreover, in the event of a separation, she automatically lost custody. Mistreatment of women, in other words, long predated industrialization. Arguably, it was the increase in female labor force participation during the Industrial Revolution that ultimately gave women greater economic independence and strengthened their social bargaining power.

“Environmental Harm”

While many of today’s environmental challenges—such as climate change and plastic pollution—differ from those our forebears faced, environmental degradation is not a recent phenomenon. Worrying about environmental impact, however, is rather new. Indeed, as historian Richard Hoffmann has pointed out, “Medieval writers often articulated an adversarial understanding of nature, a belief that it was not only worthless and unpleasant, but actively hostile to . . . humankind.”

Consider deforestation. The Domesday Survey of 1086 found that trees covered 15 percent of England; by 1340, the share had fallen to 6 percent. France’s forests more than halved from about 30 million hectares in Charlemagne’s time (768–814) to 13 million by Philip IV’s reign (1285–1314).

Europe was hardly the only part of the world to abuse its forests. A 16th-century witness observed that at every proclamation demanding more wood for imperial buildings, the peasants of what are today the Hubei and Sichuan provinces in China “wept with despair until they choked,” for there was scarcely any wood left to be found.

Despeciation is also nothing new. Humans have been exterminating wildlife since prehistory. The past 50,000 years saw about 90 genera of large mammals go extinct, amounting to over 70 percent of America’s large species and over 90 percent of Australia’s.

Exterminations of species occurred throughout the preindustrial era. People first settled in New Zealand in the late 13th century. In only 100 years, humans exterminated 10 species of moa in addition to at least 15 other kinds of native birds, including ducks, geese, pelicans, coots, Haast’s eagle, and an indigenous harrier. Today, few people realize that lions, hyenas, and leopards were once native to Europe, but by the first century, human activity eliminated them from the continent. The final known auroch, Europe’s native wild ox, was killed in Poland by a noble hunter in 1627.

Progress Is Real

History bears little resemblance to the sanitized image of preindustrial times in the popular imagination—that is, a beautiful scene of idyllic country villages with pristine air and residents merrily dancing around maypoles. The healthy, peaceful, and prosperous people in this fantasy of pastoral bliss do not realize their contented, leisurely lives will soon be disrupted by the story’s villain: the dark smokestacks of the Industrial Revolution’s “satanic mills.”

Such rose-colored views of the past bear little resemblance to reality. A closer look shatters the illusion. The world most of our ancestors faced was in fact more gruesome than modern minds can fathom. From routine spousal and child abuse to famine-induced cannibalism and streets that doubled as open sewers, practically every aspect of existence was horrific.

A popular saying holds that “the past is a foreign country,” and based on recorded accounts, it is not one where you would wish to vacation. If you could visit the preindustrial past, you would likely give the experience a zero-star rating. Indeed, the trip might leave you permanently scarred, both physically and psychologically. You might long to unsee the horrors encountered on your adventure and to forget the shocking, gory details.

The upside is that the visit would help deromanticize the past and show how far humanity has truly come—emphasizing the utter transformation of everyday lives and the reality of progress.

This article was published at Big Think on 11/19/2025.

The Update | Labor & Employment

The Long Decline of Night Work

Feb 25, 2026

“Since the Industrial Revolution, our jobs have gradually improved, becoming better paid, more interesting, and less dangerous. Economists Jeff Biddle and Daniel Hamermesh detail another aspect of this development: that fewer and fewer Americans are working in the evenings and at night…

Together, these studies suggest that the share of Americans working in the middle of the night has fallen by more than 50 percent since the 1970s.”

From The Update.

Axios | Labor & Employment

AI Is Creating More Work, Countering the Doomers for Now

Dec 18, 2025

“The fund giant Vanguard has released an intriguing analysis finding that both wage and job growth increased over the past two years in the occupations most exposed to AI, compared with those with less exposure.

A separate survey, meanwhile, found that most institutional investors and CEOs expect AI to drive an increase in hiring across all levels in 2026…

Vanguard looked at a Labor Department database with detailed information on nearly every occupation in the U.S. — things like skill and knowledge requirements and day-to-day responsibilities.

It identified jobs where people perform tasks that can be augmented or replaced by AI — data analysis, for example— as well as roles with low exposure to AI, like construction or cleaning.

What they found: Real wages increased 3.8% in the occupations with the highest AI exposure from the second quarter of 2023 to the second quarter of 2025, compared with 0.7% in all other occupations.

Job growth was up 1.7%, compared with a 0.8% gain.”

From Axios.

The Guardian | Labor & Employment

Thailand to Let Refugees Work to Counter Labor Shortages

Oct 23, 2025

“Thailand is setting a regional precedent this month by giving refugees permission to work in the country in an effort to tackle aid cuts and its own labour shortages.

More than 87,000 refugees living in nine refugee camps along Thailand’s border with Myanmar have been totally reliant on handouts of food and foreign aid.

Many of them have not left the camps of makeshift shelters in the four decades since, as ethnic minorities in Myanmar, they were driven out by a violent military regime.

But now shrinking foreign aid budgets, especially from the US, which had supported the refugee camps, and a border dispute with Cambodia, has pushed Thailand to reconsider its approach.”

From The Guardian.