economic growth but much misery was created in the process.^59 Work
in the new industries was hard, unhealthy, and poorly paid. Women
and children as well as men worked extremely long hours, often in
cruel conditions. In a time when workers mostly walked to work,
industrial life also brought families to dwell in miserable housing,
packed into dense, dirty, polluted, and ill-equipped urban centers.
“Every day that I live,” wrote an American visitor in Manchester in
1845, “I thank Heaven that I am not a poor man with a family in
England.”^60 In 1832, the squalid conditions of British cities contrib-
uted to a cholera epidemic that killed around 31,000 persons. Between
1845 and 1850, famine killed up to a million people in Ireland, and
brought two million more to leave for England, where they contrib-
uted to depress the lowest wages.^61
Gradually, industrial workers were coming together and organiz-
ing, to protest such conditions. From the 1820s to the 1840s, riots,
strikes, and protests multiplied in Britain and on the continent, and a
number of working-class, trade unionist, and socialist movements
emerged. Workers fought for better labor conditions, for the right to
organize freely, and for the vote.^62 Intellectuals such as Henri de
Saint-Simon, Robert Owen, and Pierre Proudhon proposed socialist
objectives for this new age, based on the idea that all human beings
were equal in worth and entitled to the same rights. In their view, only
the replacement of capitalist exploitation by socialism could make it
possible to fully realize social justice and equality.^63 These early
socialists anticipated many of the conclusions that would soon be
developed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Their standpoint,
however, tended to be ethical and utopian more than analytical, and
their politics hesitated between reformism and conspiracy. Marx and
Engels broke with this tradition in both respects. They offered an
elaborate explanation of the economic and social forces at work in a
(^59) Robin W. Winks and Joan Neuberger,Europe and the Making of Modernity,
60 1815–1914, Oxford University Press, 2005, pp. 113–14.
61 Quoted in Hobsbawm,Industry and Empire, p. 95.
Christopher Harvie, “Revolution and the Rule of Law (1789–1851),” in
Kenneth O. Morgan (ed.),The Oxford Illustrated History of Britain, Oxford
62 University Press, 1986, pp. 445–51.
63 Beaud,A History of Capitalism 1500–1980, pp. 102–5.
Leszek Kolakowski,Main Currents of Marxism: Its Origins, Growth and
Dissolution. I. The Founders, Oxford University Press, 1978, pp. 218–21.
98 Left and Right in Global Politics