Did the Changes Between 1750 to 1900 Make People’s Lives Better?

The industrial revolution was a period of great change for the entire world. As the name suggests the industrial revolution is when the world became more revolutionized. This brought upon many changes to the world, the way we used it, and the way we viewed it. Many technological advancements were made during the industrial revolution, many of them which made our lives easier, but when considering this question you have to realize all the effects caused by these new inventions. Inventions such as the car. We could go to places faster in them but they also made traveling by horse obsolete and it is considered one of the largest causes of global warming today. In my essay I will try to examine whether these changes made our lives better or not from both sides of the argument and come to a conclusion at the end of this essay One of the biggest reasons that say it did make people’s lives better was that these new advancements made our lives easier and improved our standard of living. In most good deeds they almost always also have something negative attached to them, and these new advancements were no exception.

As pointed out by my previous example of the car these did in fact make our lives easier. Cars let us go places faster and cranes let us build buildings higher. Most of these new inventions were made for convenience and therefore increase the ease at which we do things and therefore improve our quality of life. The inventions coupled with a demand for them combined with the invention of the new factory system created a myriad of jobs for people and changed the way we lived our lives. People were making more money and the inventions didn’t stop developing. So on the surface these new inventions were good and definitely did make peoples lives better. On the surface these words are qualitatively good and they brought upon nothing bad, this of course is false. The drastic change in the way we live our lives and the way we make money created as many problems as the conveniences it gave us. Agriculture definitely suffered when those who had farmed for generations left to the city to find different job opportunities. Farming was no longer the standard of living anymore and rural workers such as farmers and fishermen lived a 3rd class life, although they also could purchase many of the items produced by the factories.

The people that suffered the most from the new system probably were not the few agricultural workers who remained but rather those who didn’t. A small fraction of the people who left to obtain jobs in the city made a large improvement on their lives. When most of the people left to work in the cities they had not anticipated that millions of other people would have the same idea and would also flock into a city built to be inhabited by thousands of people but be inhabited by millions. Many of the peoples standard of living actually decreased because of 2 factors. The first were the jobs they had and the second was the homes they had. Before the unions were created to uphold the rights of workers the level of the factories they worked at were quite low. Few of the people worked at jobs where they were given a bearable work load that equaled the sum of many they were receiving as a salary. Many of them lived in clusters with dozens of other workers inside a single room attic or basement that more often than not lacked a toilet.

Although these new lives these former farmers led obviously had a large amount of negativity to go with it, it could be argued that when the good was weighed with the bad the good was greater. The people who lived in these cellars in an unsanitary environment dozens of other people and a few rats would become the rich of the future. The children of these people may lead the same lives but their children or their children’s children could lead lives of glamour inside a house that the rich of a century ago would be envious of. There is a lot to be said about how the industrial revolution decreased the quality of life and how it improved it. It would take more than 45 minutes to write down all my arguments for it and more than a week to write down all the arguments for it. The industrial revolution destroyed the lives people used to have and replaced it with a new one filled with opportunities and uncertainties. I hope that I have given you enough information to come to your own conclusion about the topic but in my opinion it was a combination of both. For most of the workers who migrated to the city to find a better life the quality of their lives probably had increased hardship and little improvement. But for the world around it and for the world that has yet to come It created a better world with a great quality of life.