Children were made to slave from dawn till dark. They probably were only prevented from carrying on due to the lack of light. Times were dreadful and people must have felt so hopeless for so long trying to eek out a living in order to survive against the odds. Disease, Starvation and lack of good water made things more complex to survive.
In the present employment climate with the world control brought down by the United Nations underling WHO with the gross over-reaction and response to a virus with flu like symptoms it would pay for people to remember the freedoms they are giving up under the guise that it is good for us all and remember just how hard our forebears fought for these freedoms. Largely small business has been destroyed during the Pandemic of Covid, and the response to it reminds me of the similar situation the craftsman cottage industries faced when they were destroyed by the industrial revolution This made beautiful hand made items a rarity and largely a thing of the past on a large scale. It is still there but at great cost.
Freedom as it is in the times post the 1930's depression / recession has been taken for granted because it only takes one generation to effect change in education so that largely its taken from the forefront of peoples minds.
Today's youth would likely not know how the Australian Federal Government stole the retirement funds all paid for by the blood and sweat of my grandparents and parents only to be squandered by the Government in my lifetime. I spoke out about it but people were blind to what was going on and what they were being told by the television and the bias presented therein. People were deceived in my opinion. Now our youth are schooled in how the elderly are wasting their resources and that they are gobbling up funds in pensions. This is such an altered version of what really happened. If people want to research all of this, of course its all there, but who does.
Please click through and read the full paper because it is so informative of life in those times during the industrial revolution evident in all of the workers ballads.
We have seen how the "organic community" of working people has never been a very stable or self-sufficient entity, at least during the period from the seventeenth century onwards when the occupational songs that survive were in the making.
One reason for this was, of course, the constant impinging of struggles in the world outside, through wars, periodic unemployment, the loss of common land, forced impressment into the navy for those living in coastal areas and, above all, the transformations of society brought about by the Industrial and Technological Revolutions.
Taken cumulatively, these changes gradually shattered long-established social structures. By the middle of the nineteenth century they can be said to have produced a new order of unprecedented extent:
The Industrial Revolution marks the most fundamental transformation of human life in the history of the world recorded in written documents. For a brief period [c. 1770-1850] it coincided with the history of a single country, Great Britain.Excerpt taken from
An entire world economy was thus built on, or rather around, Britain, and [it] therefore temporarily rose to a position of power and influence unparalleled by any state. . . . There was a moment in the world's history when ... Britain can be described as its only workshop, its only massive importer and exporter, its only carrier, its only imperialist, almost its only foreign investor. (Hobsbawm 13)
THE ENGLISH OCCUPATIONAL SONG
5. FORCES FROM OUTSIDE
linked here: https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:608919/FULLTEXT02.pdf
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