I am glad someone is speaking up for the British contribution to improving conditions for people and their environments. It started earlier than 1780 but who is quibbling. The 1840 end includes the railway system which revolutionised travel throughout the entire world. The dark satanic mills eventually took human development from brutish, nasty and short to where we are today in a world of seven billion with lives vastly improved by medicine and increased nourishment.
Recommend exploring the book 'Networks of Improvement' by John Mee. "Working against the stubbornly persistent image of “dark satanic mills,” in many ways so characteristic of literary Romanticism, Jon Mee provides a fresh, revisionary account of the Industrial Revolution as a story of unintended consequences. In Networks of Improvement, Mee reads a wide range of texts—economic, medical, and more conventionally “literary”—with a focus on their circulation through networks and institutions. Mee shows how a project of enlightened liberal reform articulated in Britain’s emerging manufacturing towns led to unexpectedly coercive forms of machine productivity, a pattern that might be seen repeating in the digital technologies of our own time. Instead of treating the Industrial Revolution as Romanticism’s “other,” Mee shows how writing, practices, and institutions emanating from these industrial towns developed a new kind of knowledge economy, one where local literary and philosophical societies served as important transmission hubs for the circulation of knowledge."
I am glad someone is speaking up for the British contribution to improving conditions for people and their environments. It started earlier than 1780 but who is quibbling. The 1840 end includes the railway system which revolutionised travel throughout the entire world. The dark satanic mills eventually took human development from brutish, nasty and short to where we are today in a world of seven billion with lives vastly improved by medicine and increased nourishment.
Recommend exploring the book 'Networks of Improvement' by John Mee. "Working against the stubbornly persistent image of “dark satanic mills,” in many ways so characteristic of literary Romanticism, Jon Mee provides a fresh, revisionary account of the Industrial Revolution as a story of unintended consequences. In Networks of Improvement, Mee reads a wide range of texts—economic, medical, and more conventionally “literary”—with a focus on their circulation through networks and institutions. Mee shows how a project of enlightened liberal reform articulated in Britain’s emerging manufacturing towns led to unexpectedly coercive forms of machine productivity, a pattern that might be seen repeating in the digital technologies of our own time. Instead of treating the Industrial Revolution as Romanticism’s “other,” Mee shows how writing, practices, and institutions emanating from these industrial towns developed a new kind of knowledge economy, one where local literary and philosophical societies served as important transmission hubs for the circulation of knowledge."
Am I to understand I have only the option of listening to this? I prefer reading the Ruffian.
It’s a podcast, feel free to ignore it!