Last week I gave you the positive spin on the way capitalism developed in America in the 1920s. Well, this week we’ll be looking at the worrying side, the dark side even. It shows that there are always, or nearly always, two ways to look at things, and it also shows the shortcomings, even the danger, of capitalism

Herbert Hoover, in accepting the Republican nomination to run for president in 1928, said ‘One of the oldest and perhaps the noblest of human activities has been the abolition of poverty … we in America today are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of our land.’ And that’s what were setting off to look at next: capitalism in America.

Intro and outro music curtesy of slip.stream:

https://slip.stream/tracks/58fb6726-c035-4d10-a8e8-eba70e5164ad

This week, I'm going to take a deeper look at capitalism and present a sweeping history of it from the first industrial revolution in nineteenth-century Britain to today. And I'll leave you with a question: should capitalism be controlled by government?

The focus for this, and the next episode will be the economic and political system that formed the basis for the first industrial revolution in Britain and looks ahead to the development of Western economies: capitalism and the profit motive.

The industrial revolution created a new class: the working class, with its own experiences, its own culture and its own needs. It is a class that has come a long, long way since that first industrial revolution in Britain and this episode sets out to sketch that journey.

As well as bringing about the rise of the city, the industrial revolution brought about a social revolution that utterly transformed society. It developed a middle class and created a working class, giving shape to the society we live in today. In this episode I will focus on the development of the middle class.

In 1801 25% of British people lived in towns, 75% in the countryside; by the middle of the century, it was roughly 50-50; by the end the century those first figures were reversed with 75% of the population living in towns and cities and only 25% in the countryside. But what was life like in those towns and cities.

Having tried to explain why Britain was the first industrial nation and how an industrialised world began to take shape, in this episode I want to go further into what changed and not just describe what it was like for those who lived through it but show how the miserable lives of the foot soldiers of industrialisation, focusing particularly on agricultural workers, factory workers, coal miners, with a spotlight on children, was a result of the profit motive.