My interest in history is the mundane detail of everyday life [View all]

What people ate, how they came by it, how they cooked it. What they wore and how they prepared their garments. How did they build their houses, why they were sited in a particular way.

History seems to be passed down to us as a sucession of battles and conquests. As today, the common people are divorced from the excuses to go to war yet they are the victims of power lusts, land grabs and violence.

To have a real understanding of history we must look beyond the warlords. The actions of the greedy and power-hungry have written most of our history from times BC until the present day. The lives of peasants, serfs, labourers (lay brothers) give us a glimpse of how the wealthy took command of the single most important resource in early industrialism: the labour of workers.

Richard Arkwright precipitated the modern industrial age with his steam and water powered cotton mills. At the same time, English landowners were realizing that having families of tenant farmers was not a paying concern and it was more profitable to turn large swathes of land over to managers to dedicate it to cattle, sheep or other types of specialised farming.

Tenant farmers, thrown off their land had no option but to move to the cities, find employment in mills and take the best accommodation available. Thus the advent of slumlords.

Nowadays, history is taught as a linear sequence of battles and conquests. Little attention is paid to the vast majority (yes the 99%) who had no say in their future, no choice but to follow the work.

My particular interest in history is industrialisation and its effects on the working populace. Greed, avoiding laws, taking advantage of the vulnerable are not new character traits. They have been evident since the beginning of written history. It seems humans have changed very little in five or six thousand years.

The rise of unions did a great deal to alleviate the utter misery of the 'industrialised' worker. Progress was slow as it was opposed at every step by the influential factory owners; their wealth was a direct result of cheap labour. Wanting to appear 'great beneficiaries' of the workers, they built cheap accommodation for their workers but did not baulk at several families sharing a room or basement with no water, light or sewerage. They had done their bit!


These are the people who truly represent our history. Not the warlords, the kings or the generals but the common working person.