S08E03

Welcome to Echoes of History, the place to explore the rich stories from the past that bring the world of Assassin's Creed to life. I'm Matt Lewis. Today we're continuing our journey into the underbelly of Victorian London, home to Assassin's Creed Syndicate and exploring an event that defined the era. The Industrial Revolution began in Britain in the late 18th century, giving birth to an industrial age that continued for over 200 years. The period was characterised by rapid economic, social and technological growth. These innovations completely overturned the way of life in Britain and later spread across Europe and the rest of the world. But what was life like for those living through history's most rapid and radical period of technological, economical and social change? To start, let's follow Syndicate into the smoggy heart of the revolution. The stink. It's overwhelming as you step into the street. The great stink of London. This close to the river Thames, the air is thick with the smell of sewage. Along the street, the muskier animal smell of horses, tobacco from the cabman's pipe and of course, the ever-present industrial smoke. The year is 1868 and it's early in the morning. The city around you is just waking up. Gas streetlights guide you down the road. The sun has not yet fully risen but the working day will soon begin. You join the bustle of the morning traffic, the tide of men, women and even children who shuffle deeper into London's East End. These are London's working poor. Many have come from the countryside to find jobs in the warehouses and factories that chug out plumes of grey-green smog. Some have come from Europe, some from even further away, from the farthest reaches of the mighty British Empire. They live in the cramped tenement housing you walk past, the most unfortunate in slums. The wealthy meanwhile, living comfortable townhouses, often right next door, jostled by a passerby, you sidestep into a muddy puddle. It splashes up over your boots, a reminder of why you prefer to travel the city by carriage. Over the thrum of the morning rush, you hear the scream of a steam train engine in the distance. Great hulking locomotives carrying people and goods to and fro across the country. You look up in wonder to see the trail of steam above the tightly packed rooftops. Seeing small street vendors and women holding infants on doorsteps, you overhear two workers chatting. There's a new Prime Minister, they say. Although they didn't vote for him. They can't vote. They don't own enough property. They can't read the newspapers or pamphlets that lay trampled at the side of the road. But nonetheless, they talk about trade unions, about the promise of improving working conditions. During the corner, your eyes start to burn, smoke blowing into your face. You can feel ash and soot coating your skin and your clothes. Chimneys tower above you, reaching from long brick factory buildings. The workers are being called through the gates. Dockers carry on towards the river, ready to welcome cargo from across the world into London's ports. You linger along the edge of the street, watching people as they hurry to beat the whistle. That signals the start of a gruelling 12 hour shift. Today on Echoes of History, I'm joined by Tom Furber of the London Archives, which is owned and funded by the City of London Corporation. Together, we're going to be talking about how Victorian Britain was shaped by the Industrial Revolution, delving into some of the inventions that changed ordinary people's lives, how they responded to those changes, and why London ended up at the centre of it all. Welcome to Echoes of History, Tom. It's fantastic to have you here. Thank you very much for having me. I'm delighted to be here. I can't wait to get into this episode all about the Industrial Revolution because this is my neck of the woods. You know, I, my family is from Willinall, firmly in the black country, and I am sitting here not too far away from Ironbridge. So this is an area that's really protective about its Industrial Revolution history. So this is one I'm really looking forward to finding out more about. Wonderful, and me too. And I'm quite parochial, I must say, as I work for the London Archives. So I'm quite London focused. But hopefully between the two of us, we can put our hats together, put our hats together, and we can cover all the areas of the Industrial Revolution. In our introduction, we've tried to paint a picture of industrial London where the syndicate takes place. What would life have been like in Britain, kind of on the eve of the Industrial Revolution, before all of this really kicks off? Yeah, so that's a really good question. And not for the first time today, you're going to hear me saying, well, that depends when you start something. So one of the things I'm sure we'll kind of touch on a lot of the conversation unfolds is how history and sort of disagree about when this happens, when that happens, or the disconnect, what you call a certain thing. So it's hard to say exactly when the Industrial Revolution starts. But a safe bet, I'm not going to get into too much trouble if I say about 1750 is sort of a common date around 1750 as a start of the Industrial Revolution. So what was life like in London and the UK before 1750? Well, the first thing to say is it would be far more rural. That is, most people lived in the countryside and far more agricultural. So most people would have worked on the land. Around 1500, we can say about 75% of people worked in, worked on agriculture, worked in farming. But another sort of, a little under 20%, we might say, sort of 18% would have worked in the countryside or not in the land. And only about 7% of people would have worked in an urban setting, so town or city. By 1750, that's starting to change. In rough numbers, 25% of people live in towns and cities, and the rest live in the countryside. But interestingly, the proportion of people working on the land, as opposed to working in what might call a proto industry, has changed. So about 45% of people work on the land and the rest work in the countryside, but in sort of small domestic workshop settings. Okay, so the profile of people across the country is beginning to change even before we hit the Industrial Revolution period proper. Absolutely. So one of the things that we will find is that it's a gradual process. So we can kind of always go kind of further and further back and look at antecedents of things are changing. But that's right. There is a changing pattern of work. And many historians think that that's the key to why the Industrial Revolution happened in Britain, kind of grows out of that. Yes, I think there's always a danger to think that one day someone out in the field somewhere struck a bit of coal in the ground, and then suddenly everyone moved to the city and it was all smoggy and that's it. It happened overnight. Exactly that. And then maybe the term itself has something to blame, Industrial Revolution. That does imply something that happens quite quickly. Maybe the term is a bit misleading. I think we could think of it as a gradual change and the revolution comes in with the significance of the change, not necessarily the speed of it. What, like an Industrial Evolution? Indeed. I believe undergraduates across the land have to write essays on Evolution or Revolution. Yeah. And what are some of the factors that are contributing to that change? I mean, the build up to the Industrial Revolution, what is causing people to move away from working the land and towards town and city life more and more? So there's quite a few. It's quite an exhaustive list that kind of all kind of come together at the same time. We can start with changes on the land itself. So before the Industrial Revolution, historians often talk about an agricultural revolution. So the agricultural revolution starts in the 17th century, the upshot of which is that the land is more productive in general. A given bit of land is more productive. More land is brought under cultivation. So less people are needed to work the land and each of those people working the land can produce more stuff. So lots of good things. That comes about for kind of quite a few reasons. It's to do with better seeds, better soil preparation through selective breeding, selective breeding of animals. This allows fields to be no longer left fallow. So it used to be to make sure you got all kind of the proper nutrients in your soil to make sure that the soil was super productive. You would leave your field fallow. You wouldn't grow any plants every four years. But basically advances in understanding how you can regenerate your fields by planting turnips, planting clover, rotating your crops meant that you could eradicate that fallow process so more food could be grown. There's also another very important factor here that was very contentious at the time of the people that lived through it and is now contentious in quite what it means for the agriculture revolution productivity. And that's something called enclosure. And this is actually one of these things. There's a real folk memory in some sort of parts of British society about the dangers of one of the dangers, the evil consequences of enclosure. So what was enclosure? As the name suggests, it was when fields were fenced off. So it used to be before enclosure that there was things called common fields. So people in agricultural society, they had a bit of field that they could farm for themselves to feed themselves, feed them family. Maybe some surplus would be sold for profit. And then throughout the 17th century, these are enclosed. So that means they're brought together. The idea being this is more efficient. You don't have people kind of plowing one bit of land on this side of the village, other bit of land on that side of the village. These kind of new process that we've talked about can be applied across the fields as a whole. All well and good, except if you don't have legal claim to your to your your bit of common land, you might get kicked off that land and you're no longer able to farm it. So what enclosure does is it means there's lots of people that used to work in the countryside who no longer who no longer can. That's very important as well. And I guess that also contributes to our current picture of England as this kind of the patchwork of fields and the hedgerows and all of that kind of stuff that we think of as quite a romantic image of Britain. But it's actually a hangover of land being taken out of people's hands, rights being removed from people who had enjoyed those rights for centuries. It's a kind of physical scar, albeit we think of it as quite an attractive scar, but it's a physical scar of that change. Absolutely. So that if you if you fly over Britain one more minute and you look down there is that distinctive that distinctive fill pattern. If you look closely or if you look at aerial photography, you can actually sometimes still see the individual stripes of the of the older fill patterns. It's quite interesting. You hit on something I think really important and talk about romanticization. So it's easy to think of a bucolic vision of the countryside working in tune with the land. We're going to talk about some of the hardships of moving to a practice to later, I'm sure, but we shouldn't underestimate the hardship of working in the land. You could work very, very hard and not have any food at the end of the end of the season. Hunger was a common experience pre-agricultural revolution. Absolutely right to not sort of romanticize that. I love it when I accidentally make a good point. It's good. Yeah, me too. Monkeys and typewriters for me comes to mind. Not for you, of course. Yeah. So we have the agricultural revolution. So what this means is that more people, less people are required to work the land and this frees people up to work work in the city. If less people are needed to work on the land, a smaller rural population can support a bigger urban population. And one of the factors in industrial revolution is we see population grow. But before about 1750, population is remarkably steady, around about five million with a big old blip for the Black Death and the medieval period. But it's about five. It's about five million people. After 1750, it grows and grows and grows and grows and grows. It's about 17 million by 1851 and continues growing again. Of course, it's about 67 million today. And that's a really important consequence of industrialization. So there's changes afoot in the countryside. There's also changes afoot in the kind of political system. So 17th century is a very tumultuous century in British history, reformation, civil war, beheaded kings, all those sorts of grisly things. But from about 1689, it largely settles down. There is still some, a few important rebellions, the so-called Jacobite rebellions. But largely speaking, we have a stable political system from 1689. And this is really important because what comes to mind when you think of industrialization, factories, machines, improvement, all that is investment. You don't invest your money in something expensive and stationary if you don't think it's going to be around. If there's civil war and there's rebellion, stuff gets damaged, stuff gets stolen, all that sort of thing. You're not going to be investing in buildings and stuff. So this political stability is very important as well. It's a fascinating collection of building blocks that almost needed to be in place for this to happen that all seems to have aligned at around about the right time, all in the one place too. You mentioned before that 1750 is quite a safe date to go for for the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Safe-ish. Ish, ish, ish, ish. What is it in particular that happens around then that makes it a good point to kick things off at? A good point. So what I might do is I might duck that for a minute and we might talk about why the, what we're really talking about when we talk about the Industrial Revolution. And then with that in mind, we can say, well, why actually is it quite tricky to kind of put a date to it? Why are historians so kind of broad in their estimation of their date? So at the heart of the Industrial Revolution is this idea is finding kind of new forms of power. So new ways to kind of fuel activity to kind of create useful stuff. We talked about life before the Industrial Revolution. It was hard work. If you wanted something doing, the few exceptions around water and windmills, it needs to be muscle power, either your own or animal power. But the Industrial Revolution brings in new sources of power to do useful work. The starts in the British context is coal. Coal is used to heat steam. Steam is used to drive an engine. So this is what it comes down to, this new source of power. Kind of running in parallel to that, there's a sense that you can, even if you don't have an extra source of power, you can make your kind of muscle power more efficient by the use of machines, by mechanization, through clever use of machines, gears, pulleys, all those, those various things that we think about when it comes to Industrial Revolution, we can kind of get more work out of, we can be more efficient in the way we use our time to produce raw materials, particularly in cotton and wool and cotton in particular at this stage. So we've got new power and new machines. We can then use the new power to power the machines. And now production is massively, massively increasing. But because we need steam to drive, we need big steam engines to drive our machines. We can't work on our homes anymore. We can't work in these literal cost industries anymore. We need to bring people together. And that gives birth to the factory system. Steam doesn't travel in the way electricity travels. If you need that power, you need to be local. So these three things combined, new sources of power, mechanization, and kind of bring people together, leads to our kind of our final output of weak industrialization. And that's when manufacturing, making stuff, takes over from growing stuff as the kind of the main source of the economy when manufacturing takes over the macro culture. Yeah, I guess I'm struck slightly on the human level here that people have dealt with the agricultural revolution that's meant less people are required to do the same amount of work in the countryside, which has driven them to towns. And then all of a sudden, once they're there, they're faced by a situation where there are now changes in technology that mean that less people are required to do the muscle work there because machines are beginning to take over. And so this is all about a kind of reduction in the importance of individuals in these things as well. Everywhere people are being replaced by technology. Absolutely. So it's in a French context rather than English context, but it's quite a symbolic moment when a French factory owner put some flowers on a machine saying, that was my most productive worker of the week, where we have employee of the week, he was giving his machine employee of the week. And absolutely right. And there was a real sense that something had changed and something was changing people, not overnight, over a course of generations, but people were learning a new way of working. And there was a lot of early resistance to this. There was quite a sort of harsh discipline on the terms and quite a harsh discipline when it came to getting people to learn this new way of work. So one obvious thing there is people had to learn what's called clock time. We take it for granted that we can tell the time we have watches, we have clocks on our phones, computers, all this sort of thing. Actually, you didn't need to know the time to that level of accuracy. We talked about agricultural work. You got up when it was light, you kind of went to bed, maybe when it was dark, maybe you had some lighting, but not basic lighting. That was that. It doesn't matter if you start working your field at 10 past six or 10 past seven, loosely speaking. But the factory owners were keen that people would work from a fixed time, often six till six, and a minute late was a minute too late. So factory discipline is really important. Often factories had clock with clock towers. And the first thing that you would do when being brought into this factory system is you'd be taught how to tell the time. And you'd learn that if you were that minute late for work, you'd be fined half a day's pay, for example. There's this idea that because so much money and capital has been put into the machines, they have to keep on working, they have to keep working for very long days. I don't know about you, but if I'm trying to justify an expensive purchase, I might be... Now, what's the cost per wear? What's the cost per use? And if I can say, well, actually, this might be more expensive, but if I use it more often, the cost comes down. A similar logic is at work by the factory owners. They've paid for these machines. They need to keep them working. And it's the machine that sets the pace and not the person. Yeah, fascinating. And I think it's striking, again, how you can see the slow gradual move from a situation in which the people are in control, albeit regulated slightly by nature. But then all of a sudden thump, the machines are in command and the people are now having to work to the rule of the machine and the factory owner. And I guess that's where we will eventually get lots of industrial relations problems because the people are starting to not matter as much as this inanimate object that is driving everything. Absolutely right. And there is one of the facts that just a revolution is the work becomes less interesting. You have less ownership of it. You're de-skilled. It becomes monotonous. And there are benefits for workers. We shouldn't go too far the other way. But one definite downside is that work becomes boring. It's not something that's much harder to enjoy and there's risks associated as well. So you're really only doing it because you have to do it. And there's a sense, I think, that the early industrialists with their kind of harsh discipline, their factory discipline, really set back later sort of industrial relations because it was really that us and them sort of environment that was set up. Yeah. And I guess the last question, I'm conscious that we still haven't even got the industrial revolution underway yet, but this is all such fascinating stuff. One of the questions I wanted to ask before we get it properly underway is why Britain? Is it too reductive to say empire equals the right environment for the industrial revolution? I would say so. But it's a really tricky one. And I must say I have a bit of trepidation about answering this question at all because it's still quite sort of heated and vociferous debate about how it's doing, what causes it. And it's not always entirely friendly debate either, but you know, false Russian angels hit theater tread. So here's my take on it. I'm quite persuaded by what's known as what's called the labor resources hypothesis. And this basically is pretty simple, arguably reductive, but I think it works. The industrial revolution of the background is all the things that we've talked about, agriculture revolution, capital, colonialism, all those sorts of things. What makes it happen in Britain or anywhere else is two quite simple factors. Fires are high and cold is cheap. We talked, didn't we, about 1750. People are starting to work in a different way. There's developments in the economy that already happened. The economy is quite sophisticated. And as a result of that, people are to charge, you know, demand for labor means they'll be able to charge a bit more. Around this time as well, Britain has been very heavily deforested. Wood was used for cooking, for building and that empire link again, building ships, warships and merchant ships as well. So wood's becoming very expensive. From about the 16th century onwards, people have started to turn to coal to heat their homes and things like that. And Britain is abundant in coal. Waders are expensive, coal is cheap. So actually in the long run, you can save money if you use coal to power your machines rather than people. Lots of things follow from that. That's not the only explanation I should say. It's not kind of, it's not as well, but there is a degree of support for that. And I quite like that one. I think it answers some of the counterfactuals. I think people do often respond very well to what's concretely in front of them, these kind of material conditions and the more sort of abstract things. They're important, but I think quite often people respond to say quite concrete things like that. Yeah. And these advances, I guess we can call them advances are driven quite often by individuals. There are some names that we associate quite closely with this period. James Watt, Alexander Graham Bell is someone that players of syndicate will encounter and interact with in the game. How important are some of those individuals and who are maybe some of the key individuals in driving this forwards? Yeah. So the individuals are very important. You can tell that one very popular way to tell the story of the industrial revolution is through a series of inventions and inventors. I think we've got to be careful leaving the people out entirely, the working people out entirely, but at the same time, there were some clever people out there and they invented some very clever things and someone had to invent it. So James Watt's a really good example and in many ways sort of he's a microcosm of what happens in terms of inventions and industrial revolution. So he's sometimes said to have invented the steam engine and that's not accurate. The steam engine was invented beforehand, but he improved the steam engine. This is what we see as a really important trend and of people, they take something and think this is good, but it could be better because and it moves forward. So going back to this idea of coal, the first practical steam engines, the so-called beam engine or the new new coming engine was used to pull water out of coal mines. So there's a lot of coal in the UK, as we've heard, but the mines are very prone to flooding. So Thomas Newcomen, Thomas Savory, the name's most associated with this, they created a steam engine, beam engine and what this does, and I'm not the most mechanically minded people, so please no one at home would be too cross if I get this wrong. I hope the details are at least okay, is you have a cylinder that's heated by a boiler, this creates steam, this drives a piston upwards, this cylinder is then closed with a valve and cold water is sprayed into the cylinder and this creates a vacuum which pulls the cylinder back down, the pressure of the atmosphere brings it back down. So another name you'll hear is an atmospheric engine. So we've got a piston that's gone up by the heating of steam and it comes down through cooling. Attached to this piston is a beam, hence beam engine, and this beam is then used to empty the coal mine on the other end. So that's the beam engine. So around about 1764, James Watt is tasked with repairing one of these engines and he works out, he spots this inefficiency and he builds a separate condenser to keep the heat going, so you lose less time, you lose less energy. So that's going to this idea of an improvement. And he then realizes that up and down is a useful motion, a sort of reciprocal motion is useful motion, but even more useful for driving machinery would be a rotary motion, so called sun and planet gear, and he adds a pressure gauge and other things as well. So you can see we have a technology from 1712, updated 1764, and so it goes on. So he's a useful figure and he's obviously remembered in The Watt, which is a unit of measurement of power. And Alexander Graham Bell as well, so he's a bit of a later, he's a later figure and he does appear in the game. One of my favorite ways to do the kind of the gang stronghold missions is to fire the hallucinate darts into the braces to thin the amount of enemies that you have to deal with. There's no evidence of that, sadly, but maybe in a particularly dark corner of an archival strong room, I might be able to find it and that would be a good day. No evidence of it so far doesn't mean it didn't happen. We can hold on to that idea. Exactly. Absence of evidence isn't necessarily evidence of absence as they say in a different context. So Alexander Graham Bell is another really interesting figure. He's touched on, he's touched on in the game. He spends Scottish-born early life in London and then his most celebrated discovery, invention, excuse me, is the telephone and that's really an American story, that takes place. We know that he has spent his early life working in elocution. He had some family connections with deafness, his mother in particular, so he was interested in devices that might help with that and he was more broadly interested in science invention as well. These come to a head in 1875. He invents the first working telephone. He's in this room, his assistant Watson is in the other and he simply says, Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you. That's the first word spoken on the telephone. It might be apocryphal, but we hear that he wanted the standard greeting on telephone not to be hello, that was Edison's idea. He wanted it to be ahoy, so he'd pick up the phone and it would be ahoy if Bell had had his way. And the other funny thing about Alexander Graham Bell on telephone is he refused to have one in his office because it was too distracting. That's something that we can all sympathise with today as phones have become grown and done manner of things that Alexander Graham Bell probably didn't imagine as well. Yeah, fascinating when someone invents something that they wouldn't touch themselves with a bargepole for reasons that we would utterly recognise and appreciate today. This is After Dark, myths, misdeeds and the paranormal. The podcast that takes you to the shadiest corners of the past, unpicking history's spookiest, strangest and most sinister stories. I'm Maddy Pelling and I'm Anthony Delaney. Join us every Monday and Thursday and we'll take a look at the darker side of history from haunted pubs to Houdini to witch trials and arsenic laced breakfasts. Follow After Dark, myths, misdeeds and the paranormal wherever you get your podcasts. Brought to you by History Hit. What are some of the main notable technological advancements? We've talked a bit about steam engines, which I guess lead to trains almost directly. We've talked about the telephone electricity we associate with this period as well. Are these all of the things that are building up to speed up the industrial revolution and keep ahead of steam going for want of a better phrase? Absolutely. So for me, the railways is the big one. I'm quite parochial in my historical interest these days. I'm very much sort of London focused and the railways have had such a massive impact on London history, on the kind of connectivity in London and the rest of the country and the world. So railways goes back to coal once again. Railways were used in coal fields as a way of before steam engines. Railways that is having a cart that runs on rails, run on the ground was used to help move heavy loads of coal from pit head to mine, that sort of a thing. But drawn by horse. And then that pattern we're going to see as well. We have one technology that works quite well. Another technology comes along that kind of sits into it, something labor saving that can be fueled, powered with a new technology, steam in this case. So James Watt steam engines could run machines, but they couldn't move. The figure that we associate with the first locomotive steam engine, steam engines that move is Richard Trevethic, a Cornish mining engineer that applied a lot of his trade in Wales but even got as far as Peru in quite an interesting life. So he produces the first locomotives, but a figure called George Stevenson, we talk of as the father of the railways. Because Trevethic was moved on from various projects. He didn't stay with one project necessarily to see it through to commercial fruition. So George Stevenson is the father of the railways. The first railways are really a northern phenomenon. So the Stockton and Darlington Railway is the first. It's part freight, part passenger. The freight was moved by steam. The passengers were moved by horses because they weren't quite sure it was safe yet. And then the London to Manchester Railway, here we're talking 1820s, the London to Manchester Railway is the first intercity railway. And in the 1830s, what was one of the most celebrated Victorian building projects is started and finished remarkably. So in five years, an engineering project, which the Victorians thought were on par with the pyramids, was finished. And this was the 112 mile London to Birmingham Railway. This is something called the first long distance intercity railway. And it was the first railway that linked London to other cities. And this is one of those things I think it's hard to sort of overstate how important this was. It just collapses the distance between cities. Pre-industrial revolution, two and a half weeks to get from London to Edinburgh. You can probably do it as that technology moves on. You can do it less and less and less. We complain it takes six to eight hours to get from Houston to Edinburgh or Glasgow. But a lot less time in two and a half weeks. So the railway brings people together, but also has other kind of impacts as well. Before pre-industrial revolution, Britain was a very regional place. There was a regional dialect, regional accents, even sort of local time zones, local customs. Bringing people together starts to kind of erode those distances between time and place. And the railway, as well as sort of bringing, being a kind of big capital project in itself, it also created sort of further investment. And the period from the 1830s to around 1860s is sometimes known as the railway mania, because people got wind and they had some money. You could invest it in the railway and you could often get a lot of that money, a lot of that money back. Often sort of returns high as 8% or something, something like that. So various private companies compete open more and more railway lines. And if people are familiar with London, you will know there's just a silly amount of stations. There's just all kind of all dotted rounds, the outskirts of central London. I grew up sort of just north of London in Watford. So I'm more familiar with the northern end on the Houston Road or near the Houston Road. We have Marlleburn, Houston, St Pancras and King Cross Station. They're not hugely efficient, quite annoying if you have to change trains quite quickly. And that's because they were all private lines. And one of, I think, the really quite special things about the Victorian Railways as well was the pride they took in their work. And you see this across all kind of Victorian engineering. They were celebrating the work that they did, sometimes called cathedrals of steam, the big stations. And Pancras could be, looks like the houses of Parliament, huge Gothic building. Houston Station sadly was remodeled after, in the 1960s, I want to say. But that was famous for a neoclassical design. So it looked like something out of ancient Greece or ancient Rome. It used to go through the Houston Arch. It was not so hot in my Greek mythology, but I believe there was a particular symbolic purpose of this arch. It was a signified journey from one realm or one zone to the other. Very symbolic, and very symbolic of what was happening on the joining of these two cities. Yeah, it's absolutely fascinating. And I guess, interesting for Assassin's Creed Syndicate that you would pick the railways when a lot of the game is centred around moving about the city using the railways and using a railway carriage as a base and all of that kind of thing. So really pulling in that idea that this is a revolutionary thing that is changing the country, the world. Absolutely. Indeed, it just, again, hard to use too many superlatives about the changes that it makes. Yeah. And just returning, if we can, we've talked a bit about some of the individuals and we don't want to move away too far from talking about the other people, everybody that was affected by this. How does kind of rapidly industrialising a nation and the changes that that brings, how does that impact normal working people? I guess you've got more of them being crammed into smaller spaces in the city, being forced to work in factories to this rule of a machine rather than any kind of rule of nature. But you mentioned earlier as well that there's an increase in consumerism. So we know there's lots of negatives, I guess. Are there some positives to balance those things out? Absolutely. And it's, I think it's one of those things where the average person does well. But if you're, that means people, that average means some people are doing very well and some people are doing badly. So the industrial revolution brings levels of kind of comfort and abundance that are unknown previously in human history. What the sort of, as I understand the kind of the econometrics, kind of the measures of what's happening when, from about history, I don't really know whether it was good or bad for your average person pre-1800. It's controversial from 1800 to 1850. And from 1850 onwards, there is a general rise in living standards. So your average person is doing, has more clothes, is better fed, has more money, all those sorts of things. But as we alluded to, that does disguise very great differences within that. But there is no doubt that people are doing better out of it in some way. And that life in the countryside is often crushingly poor as well. So that's really important to bear in mind. Yeah, I guess we are at risk again of romanticizing and idealizing that life in the countryside, you know, this was all skipping through fields, playing with the birds and all that sort of stuff. It was actually at least as much of a grind in the countryside as it was in the factories. It's just a different environment. Absolutely. One way I've heard it described is that you can be toiling all day in the fields and you won't get fed at the end of the season if the weather's bad. If you're toiling in the factory, you will get paid. Yeah, I mean, and that's a pretty stark, however hard the factories were, you're guaranteed money, which means food on the table. Indeed. And I mean, I'm always careful saying this because I wouldn't want to work in a factory. It sounded very, very difficult. A 12 hour days were the norm, noisy, dangerous. But the real problems came for people not so much when they were working, is when they weren't working. So it's the precarity of work or people that had only casual work. We're talking a bit later now, but there's a very famous figure in sort of London history called Charles Booth, who produced one of the sort of iconic documents, I think, of urban London 19th century called the Booth Poverty Map. And this is a color coded map of London with the various colors denoting the amount of wealth or poverty in London, ranges from gold all the way to black for the kind of people with the least resources. What he struck, and this is the result of a 16 volume survey into what's called life and labor in London. And what he found is the people that really suffered with the people that were out of work through injury, illness, old age, or that couldn't work often enough, a casual labor was a really big thing. And those are the people that really sort of suffer, I think, from just revolution, the people that can't get the work or can't get enough work. Yeah, the zero hours contracts in the gig economy. Nothing ever changes really, is it? There are definite striking parallels to today. Yeah. How did people then during this this period of fairly rapid but continual change, how did people react to that? Because we can we blame this period for the increase in political emancipation and the desire for people to have more say over what's happening? There is the emergence of things like trade unions. Is that a reaction to this dominance of the machine and the factory owner? I think I think so. So we can I think a very useful date, I think, is 1867. So 1867, lots of things happened that year with the three that I'm interested in. Make sure I get these right, the right order. The the Second Great Reform Act and what this basically gives some portion of the working population the vote. I say some portion because it's linked to how much income you have. So in 1832, that's the first Great Reform Act that allows the middle classes to vote. The Second Great Reform Act allows people who are determined by class to do the property ownership. So if you own property, you can vote. In the Second Great Reform Act of 1867, you can rent as people who rent are allowed to vote, but only to pass a certain price point. If you pay more than a certain amount of rent, you're allowed to vote. And this was deemed to be it shows if you were invested properly in society, you are responsible, effective that you weren't going to vote away private property and the property of the wealthy, that idea. So 67 is the Great Reform Act. So before then, a lot of sort of reform politics campaigning was dedicated to getting that. We talk about the Chartist movement and the Chartists come that name comes from the charter, the great charter, their list of demands of which voting was on them. But after we after we have the votes, there is more an emphasis on on getting better wages and kind of working within the system. So 67 we have the Great Reform Act. 67 is also the year that the first volume of capital, Karl Marx's Das Kapital is published, obviously a revolutionary tradition. The idea being that saying that capitalism is inherently exploitative and that the only way for sort of fairness to arrive is to work as family sees the means of production. Only going to get a fair deal if you own the factory, not as someone else owns the factory, to summarise a very, very complex book and a huge body of theory in that two sentences. So I hope that will be okay. Again, apologies to the Marxist scholars out there. So we have we have we have Kapital and then the other thing we have, I think interestingly is a real commission on trade unions. So trading is effectively broad terms, illegal up until up until this point. There's some gray areas around the side that we're not going to go too far wrong. We say trade unions are illegal in 67. A Royal Commission recommends the legalisation of trade unions because they say they're actually better for workers and for owners and they're legalised in 71. And what we tend to see in the British sort of tradition, even the British social tradition is not a desire to overthrow the system, but a desire to sort of do better within that system, better wages, better conditions, all those sorts of things. And what social traditions they are tend to focus on gradual change often than always enacted through the ballot box. This might be a difficult question to answer, I guess, but why does London become considered the heart of the industrialised world? That's a really is quite a tricky question. It's quite a nuanced question as well, because up until quite recently, there was a prevailing view among historians that London didn't adjust to lies at all, which I think really kind of flies in the face of what we think of London. We think, you know, talking about syndicate, it's this quite smoky. I mean, I think it probably could be even be even dirtier, this sort of smoky kind of dense sense of production. So what does that so why? Why would you say it's not it's not industrialised? And then if it has been just lies, how can it claim to be the heart industrialised industrialised world? So the first thing to say is that was probably a bit of a a mischaracterisation that didn't industrialise at all. But the kernel of truth in that is that factories were less prevalent or less dominant parts of the London economy than they were in some of like Manchester, for example, where factories were kind of the cob cotton factories with a kind of dominant sort of economic economic form. There are factories in London, there are very big factories in London. But what we also see in London is a survival and indeed, almost a booster in boosting because of industrial revolution of an older system manufacturer, often in houses and small workshops. So London is famous, not necessarily for producing the raw goods of industrialisation, but for finishing, finishing goods. So there's that element to it. Jerry White, very famous London historian, talks about how districts of London almost act like factories. So Whitechapel, obviously one of the levels in the in Assassin's Creed is fame is famous associated with the textile trade, but not necessarily making cotton and cloth in the way of Manchester is, but in finishing that cloth, turning that cloth into usable, usable garments. So that's part of it. But really, London's claim to be the hard industrial world stands on two things. And it's the port and it's the city of London. So throughout the 18th and 19th century, London was the busiest port in the world. One of my favourite bits of Assassin's Creed is hopping from boat to boat across the Thames, because today we don't think of London as a port city. It still is a very big port, but that activity takes place quite far down the river, sometimes actually in Kent rather than in London in big container ships. But in the 18th and 19th century, that activity took place on the river. And there's a huge amount of trade going back and forth. And there is, of course, an imperial connection here. London's not just the capital of Britain at this point, it's the capital of the British Empire. And it's a real kind of central hub of all that trade coming through, coming to and fro. Yeah, I think as someone who's interested in medieval history, for me, you think of the rivers as being kind of the highways of the medieval age and the Thames would have been an incredibly busy motorway system almost. And by the time you get to the 19th century, we need to remember, I think, that the Thames is probably something like a log jammed motorway. You're sitting in traffic, it's just constantly packed with boats and ships. We'll see speedboats zipping up and down it today and tourist ships and stuff like that. But it would have been chocka with ships coming in and out to the point where you could leap across them as you do in the game. We forget how busy it was. And I think the nearest equation for me is like a motorway in rush hour kind of thing. Absolutely. We have some really wonderful photographs in our collections of the river looking just that of the docks being unloaded. Also just the sheer volume of river traffic is quite exceptional. One of the most famous London landmarks today is, of course, Tower Bridge, which people outside of London, the UK, might actually think of as London Bridge. This is the one that looks like a castle and that sort of opens up and down in the middle. Well, when that was built at the very end of the 19th century, it was that part of the Thames called the Pool of London. You couldn't build a bridge there that couldn't allow to open because too many ships, it would like be blocking, like you say, blocking the M1 or blocking the M25. Today opens once, about once a day, about 300 times a year, I think off the top of my head, not very often. But then it opened multiple times a day. You couldn't block the Thames. You had to put all this engineering effort into having it open. The Tower Bridge, of course, sits right by the city of London, right by the tower. The city of London is the other very important economic factor in this story. Throughout the 19th century, it becomes the financial center that we know it is today. Stockbrokers, insurance, banking, all those sorts of things start to concentrate in that area. And just as physical goods are going up and down the Thames, financial goods and financial products are flowing in and out of the city. Lots of the business of empire, those profits that are taking place are coming through the city at this point. Yeah. Yeah. And also, before someone turns my fader down, I'm going to give a shout out to the West Midlands as the industrial center of the world, but never mind. But the point is, you say that, but the point is the connection, isn't it? This is exactly the point of the distribution that it's, don't get me wrong, it's fun to sort of fly our flags through our little corner of the planet. But the very point is that goods from Birmingham are coming on the train to London, to the docks and going away again, and vice versa. Some of those little barges we're hopping on and off across on Assassin's Creed, they're coal barges. The coal is coming from the northeast of England. The Stockton-Dionton Railway is built to get that from the coal head to the River T, I think it is, to come down. The collary trade that comes down, the shipping trade on the east coast of Britain, it all connects. Yeah. And I'm being slightly facetious, just for the sake of it, really. But I think the point is really that London provides the hub of the wheel. All of these spokes come together and they pour into London. And London is where they're able to bring all of this together from every corner of the country and every corner of the empire. And therefore, that's where it is all focused. I mean, London is the centre. I said it. Can we give an end date to the Industrial Revolution evolution? Does it finish at any given time? I think, see my early comment about how hard it is to start, to give the start. If we can't start it, can we end it? Now, it's my turn to be facetious. One of the things that is a bit tricky about this time period is that we have general sense of what a word means. If I say Industrial Revolution, that means something to you, means something to most people, will probably mean something to most people listening to this podcast. It doesn't necessarily mean the same thing to historians who use it. They often have a technical meaning of what industrial means based on processes and econometrics, that sort of thing. And it overlaps just enough with our shared meaning of it that we think we know what they're talking about. But maybe we don't because they're talking about something quite specific. So you will read dates to the end of the Industrial Revolution as 1830, 1850, 1867. And this gets a bit confusing because if it starts in 1830 and finishes in 1840, according to different historians, I'm sure it lasts more than 10 years. That doesn't make any sense. So one useful way of this puzzle is to think actually in terms of not Industrial Revolution, but Industrial Revolutions. And one kind of version of that theory has first, second, even third and fourth living through the fourth Industrial Revolution. And now you might say that's linked to computer technology. I don't mean to be dismissive about that scholarship and something is important changing in sort of the middle of the 19th century, whatever we call it. And that's where this idea of first and second industrial revolution comes in. So something is sort of finishing and then something changes in the middle of that century. And what I think really important, that really important change is Britain stops being the sort of the center of Industrial Revolution around about the 19th century. If you like the Germany, excuse me, Germany and Europe more generally, North America, Japan as well, they start to industrialize on a scale as well. This is sometimes called the second Industrial Revolution. The first Industrial Revolution is about cotton, steam, coal. Different products drive the second Industrial Revolution. Probably latterly electricity is most important, but steel and the chemical industry are important as well. And then those raw materials are important, but new forms of production take place as well. Mass production and also this idea of interchangeable parts. So we talked about London as a place where things are finished as the second wave of Industrial Revolution goes on. More of those things can be manufactured that don't need to be finished by hand. And that kind of brings it on to another level. And people will often date the end of the second Industrial Revolution as the, it's a convenient date, as the start of the First World War in 1914. And we've talked about some of the negative side of the Industrial Revolution. The kind of the carnage, there's any other word with the First World War, is a direct product of industrialization. This is the first time that fully industrialized powers have gone to war on this scale. There's some hints of it in the American Civil War in the middle of the 19th century, but kind of the full horror of industrial warfare is sort of first comes through in the First World War. Yeah. I mean, I wanted to end by asking you whether there is a single standout legacy of the Industrial Revolution, but I mean, it sounds from our conversation like it has effectively crafted what we consider to be everyday life today, that we go to work at a certain time, that we finish at a certain time, that we check our watches all day, that we consume a lot more than we ever used to in the past, all of those facets of it. And to add into that kind of the industrialization of warfare, it sounds like some of the worst horrors of the 20th century were a legacy of the Industrial Revolution. I think that's right. I think that what it comes down to for me with the legacy Industrial Revolution is it's the most profound change in human history. Well, not probably. It is the most profound change in human history since we started farming 12,000 years ago. And something of that magnitude is going to encompass all the good and all the dark as well. To add one more not very cheery thing to the dark list as well, when we talked about the Industrial Revolution hinging on new forms of power, fossil fuels, we have to add climate change to that list as well. This is where I get slightly beyond my expertise, but my understanding is that climate change, some of it has already happened, some of it will already continue to happen. But depending on the sort of the political, economic and technological choices of the next few decades, we'll find out quite how much climate change we have. And then maybe at that point, we can sort of really say what the legacy Industrial Revolution was. Yeah, yeah, it's a slightly frightening one. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Tom. It's been fascinating to explore this all encompassing, huge shift in human history, I guess. And to have done all of that in less than an hour is testament to your ability to get that across. So thank you so very, very much for compressing all of that for us into an understandable portion. Where can people find more from you and more about your work? So I'm an engagement learner officer at the London Archives, which is owned and funded by the City of London Corporation. If you're interested in anything that happened in London from 1067 onwards to the present day, we'll have something that interests you in our collection. And one of the aspects of our collection that is very strong is around the Industrial Revolution, in particular, this idea of urbanization. So if you're interested in how those changes affected London and Londoners, this is a really good place to go. My suggestion as a place to start would be put a little search for either the London Archives or the London Picture Archive. The London Picture Archive will take you through to our image collection available online. It's about a quarter of an image from about 1600 onwards, something like that. And you'd be able to find out, you could probably even do frame by frame some of the cities of the game, what it looks like in the game, what it looks like, what it looked like in the 19th century as well. Well, that's the rest of my day sorted out. We're going to find some of that. Thank you very much for joining us, Tom. It's been an absolute pleasure to talk to you. No, the pleasure's all mine, Matt. Thank you very much. I hope you've enjoyed this episode of...