Why the Industrial Revolution Was Largely a Failure
Evaluate the impact of the Industrial Revolution. Was is a success or a failure?
The Industrial Revolution was one of the greatest shifts in the history of mankind, with massive urbanization and technological advancement. However, most of the population worked in terrible conditions during it. These same people lived in slums where basic services did not go and disease was prevalent. The Industrial Revolution also has resulted in environmental problems, which will be some of our world's greatest struggles to fix in the future. The rich exploited the poor and made decisions that have hurt our environment, so I believe that the Industrial Revolution was a failure.
Factory owners didn't care at all for the workers that made the Industrial Revolution possible. They hired poor women and children and payed them very little compared to what they made because only women and children would accept so little. They made children as young as seven work in the nooks and crannies in between machines, and they hired overseers to beat them if they idled. Often, workers would lose digits, limbs or even their lives while working in factories. In mines, workers often would inhale toxic gases or they would die or get severely injured in accidents. Most poor workers worked for twelve to sixteen hours a day, and being weary from lack of sleep was one reason workers would do something wrong and get injured or die on the job. The craziest thing is that the rich said that the poor were responsible for their own situations when they were the ones causing the misery of the poor.
The lack of care for the poor by the rich made the poor live in horrible conditions. The common people lived in crowded, dirty tenements (apartments), and had no access to sewage or running water. It was common for people to throw their waste out the window because there was no other place to put it. Most of the poor children were not able to go to school because they had to work to feed their families. It took mass popular movements and protests for rights to be given to the common person. The divide between rich and poor was continued because of the Industrial Revolution, and is one of our biggest problems today.
Our world's environment has greatly suffered as a result of the Industrial Revolution. Trees have been cut down all over the world for fuel and to make products, and this deforestation has resulted in the loss of habitat for animals. Many species have gone extinct because of this. Other natural resources besides trees have also been depleted. Emissions of carbon dioxide and other harmful gases have polluted our water and air (causing rivers to turn black and acid rain to become common) and warmed our planet. This warming is causing glaciers and ice caps to melt, and oceans are rising because of this. In the future when sea levels climb to more severe heights (which is inevitable to some extent) coastal towns and cities (which include some of the biggest cities in the world) will be in danger of going underwater. Cleaning up our environment, protecting our coastal cities, and cleaning up our environment are things we will need to do to prevent worldwide disaster. Factory owners' not caring about the environmental impact of their actions caused these worldwide problems.
Many of the social worries of the past and the economic worries, and especially the environmental worries, of our time have directly resulted from the Industrial Revolution. These outweigh the economic benefits (that have mostly gone to a select few) that this revolution in industry has brought. The poverty and homelessness of today and the mentality of many of the rich not caring about the common person and seeking only monetary gain for themselves stems from the Industrial Revolution. The environment has been severely damaged by pollution from the factories and exploits of industry and its leaders. In conclusion, the huge industrial shift of the past few centuries is largely a failure.