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#industrial revolution
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The rapid industrialization of Europe in the nineteenth century demanded millions of liters of refined palm oil annually, either on its own or in combination with other oils, as a means to cool and maintain industrial apparatuses in factories, public works, railways and more. It is likely not an exaggeration to say that the literal and figurative wheels of empire, from locomotives to steam engines, were greased with refined West African palm oil.
Max Haiven, Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire
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internetiquette · 29 days
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Mill ruins from 1786
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futurebird · 6 months
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I don't understand how lace is made, but looking at the bobbins and pins and patterns … listen buddy I know math when I see it. This is A Math Thing. Obviously.
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Right away I want to know:
Can I encode information in lace?
How much of an expert must one be to make your own patterns?
What about the creation of surfaces?
Knitting is more accessible, and people have been exploring math with knitting forever.
But what possibilities does lace offer?
What is the theory of lace?
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An excerpt from Mathematics Magazine Vol. 91, No. 4 (October 2018), pp. 307-309
Shows I'm hardly the first person to muse about this. Need to get my hands on the rest of this article, obviously.
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escuerzoresucitado · 1 year
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haggishlyhagging · 10 months
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“By 1900 child mortality was already declining—not because of anything the medical profession had accomplished, but because of general improvements in sanitation and nutrition. Meanwhile the birthrate had dropped to an average of about three and a half; women expected each baby to live and were already taking measures to prevent more than the desired number of pregnancies. From a strictly biological standpoint then, children were beginning to come into their own.
Economic changes too pushed the child into sudden prominence at the turn of the century. Those fabled, pre-industrial children who were "seen, but not heard," were, most of the time, hard at work—weeding, sewing, fetching water and kindling, feeding the animals, watching the baby. Today, a four-year-old who can tie his or her own shoes is impressive. In colonial times, four-year-old girls knitted stockings and mittens and could produce intricate embroidery; at age six they spun wool. A good, industrious little girl was called "Mrs." instead of "Miss" in appreciation of her contribution to the family economy: she was not, strictly speaking, a child.
But when production left the houschold, sweeping away the dozens of chores which had filled the child's day, childhood began to stand out as a distinct and fascinating phase of life. It was as if the late Victorian imagination, still unsettled by Darwin's apes, suddenly looked down and discovered, right at knee-level, the evolutionary missing link. Here was the pristine innocence which adult men romanticized, and of course, here, in miniature, was the future which today's adult men could not hope to enter in person. In the child lay the key to the control of human evolution. Its habits, its pastimes, its companions were no longer trivial matters, but issues of gravest importance to the entire species.
This sudden fascination with the child came at a time in American history when child abuse—in the most literal and physical sense—was becoming an institutional feature of the expanding industrial economy. Near the turn of the century, an estimated 2,250,000 American children under fifteen were full-time laborers—in coal mines, glass factories, textile mills, canning factories, in the cigar industry, and in the homes of the wealthy—in short, wherever cheap and docile labor could be used. There can be no comparison between the conditions of work for a farm child (who was also in most cases a beloved family member) and the conditions of work for industrial child laborers. Four-year-olds worked sixteen-hour days sorting beads or rolling cigars in New York City tenements; five-year-old girls worked the night shift in southern cotton mills.
So long as enough girls can be kept working, and only a few of them faint, the mills are kept going; but when faintings are so many and so frequent that it does not pay to keep going, the mills are closed.
These children grew up hunched and rickety, sometimes blinded by fine work or the intense heat of furnaces, lungs ruined by coal dust or cotton dust—when they grew up at all. Not for them the "century of the child," or childhood in any form:
The golf links lie so near the mill
That almost every day
The laboring children can look out
And see the men at play.
Child labor had its ideological defenders: educational philosophers who extolled the lessons of factory discipline, the Catholic hierarchy which argued that it was a father's patriarchal right to dispose of his children's labor, and of course the mill owners themselves. But for the reform-oriented, middle-class citizen the spectacle of machines tearing at baby flesh, of factories sucking in files of hunched-over children each morning, inspired not only public indignation, but a kind of personal horror. Here was the ultimate "rationalization" contained in the logic of the Market: all members of the family reduced alike to wage slavery, all human relations, including the most ancient and intimate, dissolved in the cash nexus. Who could refute the logic of it? There was no rationale (within the terms of the Market) for supporting idle, dependent children. There were no ties of economic self-interest to preserve the family. Child labor represented a long step toward that ultimate "anti-utopia" which always seemed to be germinating in capitalist development: a world engorged by the Market, a world without love.”
-Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts’ Advice to Women
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mapsontheweb · 4 months
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The spread of the Industrial Revolution through Europe in the 19th century
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coolnessgraphed · 6 months
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Barcelona, like other cities in urban Europe, was once a major industrial city full of factories. As economy has changed, nowadays most of those factories of the industrial revolution don’t exist anymore. When the city grew, they demolished the factories to make space for modern buildings, but often they have kept the chimneys as a reminder of the past. When you find a lone chimney among modern buildings, it’s the only remains of where there was once a factory.
Photo taken in Barcelona (Catalonia) by David Cardelús on Twitter.
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anarchistfrogposting · 7 months
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fadinhas · 2 years
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the industrial revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race
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racefortheironthrone · 3 months
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Not the original Anon but I think the rise of Europe meant that after the Black Death Europe underwent the Renaissance and Industrial Revolution and became a global power so did the former create the conditions for the others?
I sort of thought that was what anon was talking about, so I might as well answer it here. TLDR: there's a big debate about this, and historians have not come to a consensus.
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When I was an undergraduate, I took a course on the origins of capitalism by the late Professor J.W Smit, and one of his lectures was on the theory that the Black Death created the preconditions for the Commercial and then Industrial Revolutions, by essentially killing about 30-50% of the population while leaving their property (land, livestock, buildings, improvements, liquid capital, etc.) intact - thus creating a much higher rate of capital-per-capita that could then be invested in more capital-intensive, higher value-added industries.
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On the other hand, a lot of medievalists who study the High Middle Ages argue that the period from 1000-1300 saw substantial economic growth due to population growth that enabled both an expansion of agricultural production and the first wave of post-Roman urbanization, and that the Black Death was an enormous setback for huge swathes of Europe who would not recover their pre-Plague levels of population and economic production until the 19th century.
While this might sound like squishy centrism, I think the reason that there is no consensus is that both sides are simultaneously right and wrong. It is true that the Black Death made profound socio-economic change possible by disrupting serfdom, raising wages, and deepening capital pools. It is simultaneously true that the Black Death also created a downward spiral of lower population leading to lower production leading to lower population, which could cripple entire regions for centuries if they were unable to adapt to changing circumstances.
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An innovation that propelled Britain to become the world’s leading iron exporter during the Industrial Revolution was appropriated from an 18th-century Jamaican foundry, historical records suggest. The Cort process, which allowed wrought iron to be mass-produced from scrap iron for the first time, has long been attributed to the British financier turned ironmaster Henry Cort. It helped launch Britain as an economic superpower and transformed the face of the country with “iron palaces”, including Crystal Palace, Kew Gardens’ Temperate House and the arches at St Pancras train station. Now, an analysis of correspondence, shipping records and contemporary newspaper reports reveals the innovation was first developed by 76 black Jamaican metallurgists at an ironworks near Morant Bay, Jamaica. Many of these metalworkers were enslaved people trafficked from west and central Africa, which had thriving iron-working industries at the time. Dr Jenny Bulstrode, a lecturer in history of science and technology at University College London (UCL) and author of the paper, said: “This innovation kicks off Britain as a major iron producer and … was one of the most important innovations in the making of the modern world.” The technique was patented by Cort in the 1780s and he is widely credited as the inventor, with the Times lauding him as “father of the iron trade” after his death. The latest research presents a different narrative, suggesting Cort shipped his machinery – and the fully fledged innovation – to Portsmouth from a Jamaican foundry that was forcibly shut down.
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The paper, published in the journal History and Technology, traces how Cort learned of the Jamaican ironworks from a visiting cousin, a West Indies ship’s master who regularly transported “prizes” – vessels, cargo and equipment seized through military action – from Jamaica to England. Just months later, the British government placed Jamaica under military law and ordered the ironworks to be destroyed, claiming it could be used by rebels to convert scrap metal into weapons to overthrow colonial rule. “The story here is Britain closing down, through military force, competition,” said Bulstrode. The machinery was acquired by Cort and shipped to Portsmouth, where he patented the innovation. Five years later, Cort was discovered to have embezzled vast sums from navy wages and the patents were confiscated and made public, allowing widespread adoption in British ironworks. Bulstrode hopes to challenge existing narratives of innovation. “If you ask people about the model of an innovator, they think of Elon Musk or some old white guy in a lab coat,” she said. “They don’t think of black people, enslaved, in Jamaica in the 18th century.”
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evil-scientist · 3 months
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i am working on industrial scale clicker training which will involve using autoclickers with “random click rate” functionality. this technology will revolutionize the petplay industry
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thoughtportal · 1 year
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poverty and capitalism
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victusinveritas · 3 months
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Exposed wall of a tenement in Glasgow, (presumed), photography by Eric Watt.
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cutrateconjuration · 1 year
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Watching "Enola Holmes 2" and I like the inclusion of the matchstick girls.
Sometimes I wonder about the effects of middle class feminism's "women not being allowed to work" narrative and it's erasure of the exploitation of lower class single women in the industrial era, and the continued exploitation of working class women in the fashion, childcare, and janitorial industries throughout the 20th century.
(Which is also something I am pretty sure contributes to the income disparity issue between men and women but seems wierdly under addressed?)
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