Between 1770 and 1840, average real wages were stagnant and even falling for those at the lower end of the income distribution, while output per worker grew by 46%. As craftsmen’s incomes vanished and as their jobs were replaced by machines, poorer nutrition meant that people grew shorter by the generation. The gains of growth went to industrialists, who saw their rate of profit double. This famously led Fredrick Engels, who co-authored the Communist Manifesto together with Karl Marx, to conclude that the machine-owning industrialists grew “rich on the misery of the mass of wage earners.”

Indeed, the Industrial Revolution began with the construction of the first factories and ended with the publication of the Communist Manifesto. Revolutionary technologies lead to political strife.

Why did working people agree to participate in the industrialization process if it reduced their utility? The simple answer is that they didn’t. They petitioned to parliament to bring the installation of machines to a halt. And they rioted against the mechanized factory. While much popular commentary has focused on the Luddite uprisings of 1811-1816, they were only part of a long wave of machinery riots that swept across Britain, France, Germany and China, among other places.