> Also, industrialization saw the rise of the skilled workforce. People started earning more the more they could use their brain.
Not neccessarily. The whole Luddite revolution/movement was trying to fight industrialization _because_ it required less skills, and reduced workers' wages. For example, before the automatic looms were introduced, cloth was produced by hand, by people of significant dexterity and skill. After automation, it was mainly produced by machines which needed only very basic (and low paid) human input here and there.
You make a good point, skilled craftsmanship definitely saw a dive, and certainly factory workers didn't need to be as skilled. But, big picture, each individual became vastly more productive thanks to industrialisation, which made room for more people to get educated and have more intellectual professions (which I think is what OP meant by "skilled", since he made reference to "using their brain"). All in all, I think that the net proportion of skilled labour grew significantly.
> All in all, I think that the net proportion of skilled labour grew significantly.
I'm not so sure. Before industrialization, most jobs were skilled. For one, most people were farmers, and it required a lifetime of knowledge (usually passed on from previous generations). Whereas today, lots (most?) of people are employed in jobs which don't require much training. In factory work jobs, it's enough that you are literate and can do basic arithmetic. In many office jobs and service jobs, it's that plus possibly some basic computer skills. The actual training often takes one day and teaches you everything you need to know to perform the job well.
Maybe industrialization reduced wages for some craftsmen who were forced to become factory workers. But for almost all new factory workers their wealth, working conditions and working hours were a huge step up from their previous occupations as sheep herders, unskilled agri-labourers and subsistence farmers (with side hustles in proto-industrial home work).
Pretty soon the demand (and pay) for skilled craftsmen rocketed back up because the newly affluent workers could now afford to buy more items and some of those were not yet mass-producable.
> But for almost all new factory workers their wealth, working conditions and working hours were a huge step up from their previous occupations as sheep herders, unskilled agri-labourers and subsistence farmers (with side hustles in proto-industrial home work).
That’s the exact opposite of reality. They worked 12-16 hour shifts for unlivable wages, crammed several families per room, and lived without any of the infrastructure that makes high densities livable like modern sewer systems. It was the age of cholera and truly awful living conditions.
People didn’t move into the cities because it was better for them but because industrialization forced them to. Peasants didn’t start asking for worker’s rights until the industrial revolution because it was so much worse than working conditions in subsistence farming.
From what I recall reading, there was a grow in population during XIX century that to this day is still hard to explain by historians. A lot of that surplus population couldn't live off the land, since it was already at capacity in most of the Western Europe, so they moved to cities, hoping to find a living there. This resulted in "infernal cities" of XIX century, as described by Dickers, Zola etc - people dying of starvation of right on the streets of London or Paris, hordes of underage prostitutes roaming the streets etc.
> A lot of that surplus population couldn't live off the land, since it was already at capacity in most of the Western Europe, so they moved to cities, hoping to find a living there.
Weren't inclosure acts a big reason why people moved to the cities, at least in England?
A combination of enclosures (which had be going on for centuries and peaked in the 18th century with the Inclosure Act), and the Agricultural Revolution which greatly reduced the labour required in the fields (so if you had transitioned from working the commons to getting wages for working private land, you just stopped getting enough work).
So you had industrialists setting up factories needing cheap labour to run the machines, and a mass exodus of the countryside population to the cities desperate for work. Hello Dickens.
This is how you get an explosion in petty crime, disease, poverty, hulks, and eventually, transportation of the troublesome poor to Australia.
The industrial revolution was so destabilising to society that colonialism was a very convenient solution. Just go somewhere else, shoot the natives who resist, and the poors can have that land.
Not neccessarily. The whole Luddite revolution/movement was trying to fight industrialization _because_ it required less skills, and reduced workers' wages. For example, before the automatic looms were introduced, cloth was produced by hand, by people of significant dexterity and skill. After automation, it was mainly produced by machines which needed only very basic (and low paid) human input here and there.