Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Every era feels like the sharpest
People in earlier generations lived through events they thought were the most acute thing ever. An investor walking around on a rainy day in March or April of 2020, after a 10 or 11-hour marathon on Zoom, wondered whether his life could really coincide with a pandemic that would upend society as he knew it. He told himself the odds were very small. Then he remembered that many pandemics before that wiped out large parts of humanity, and humanity went on.
Living through a period is different from looking back at it many years later. The same thought comes up with the current technological progress, which feels very different, with a society 10 or 15 years from now that will look nothing like today. That was probably also true of the Industrial Revolution: 15 years after the steam engine became mainstream, society looked nothing like it did 15 years before. It raises the question of whether this is really that different or just continuous progress.
How did the Industrial Revolution reshape society?
Thomas Newcomen built the first widely used steam engine in 1712, and James Watt's improved design arrived in 1776. The first inter-city passenger railway, between Liverpool and Manchester, opened in 1830. By the 1851 census, more people in Britain lived in towns than in the countryside, the first time this was true of a large country. Factory work moved production out of homes and workshops.
How did earlier pandemics change societies?
The Black Death swept through Europe between 1347 and 1351 and killed an estimated third or more of the population. With so many workers gone, labor became scarce and wages in England rose. Parliament responded with the Statute of Labourers in 1351, which tried to cap pay at pre-plague levels. The shift in bargaining power between workers and landowners is one of the changes historians link to the plague.