Editing Industrial Revolution (section)

==The appeal of the Industrial Revolution==
This era produced many things modern people take for granted and have difficulty considering life without. The rise of film and audio recording during this era and mass printing of advertisement and newspapers during this era mean there is no shortage of records of daily life, so this era is fairly well understood. Of particular note is that the late 1800s printed mail order catalogs started being printed, and these now provide quality information on everyday items, complete with cost and illustrations, that simply don't exist in earlier eras. Those researching earlier eras for this kind of thing have to go through the rare surviving records of estate sales, government orders and business transactions to get a ''fraction'' the understanding a layman can obtain from viewing a simple public domain catalog. These have proven such good resources some historically set RPGs outright say to find catalogs from companies like Bannerman (A surplus arms dealer so successful he built a castle on a private island next to West Point as an advertisement, since everyone traveling the Hudson had to see the sign on it), Montgomery Ward, and Sears Roebuck to fill in the blanks of the equipment list. Before this period, historians were mostly concerned with Big Things: wars, generals, kings, nobles, priests and the occasional artist, merchant, architect, engineer or inventor thrown in, often because there was so few records of the common man. In the Industrial Revolution historians became able and willing to adequately research the way people lived their lives day to day, from well-to-do merchants and skilled tradesmen to factory workers to scavengers picking through garbage for bones, rages, scraps of metal and dog turds to sell.

The Industrial Revolution allowed for inventors to not only create meaningful new creations, but see them become common overnight. [[Adeptus Mechanicus|Before the Industrial Revolution changes generally happened slowly with various small tweaks on things and methods, the compilation of said tweaks rolling over and the occasional breakthrough like the water wheel or gunpowder every once and a while which would take centuries to come into it's own]]. A peasant would assume that his children, grandchildren and great grandchildren would till the soil just as he did with what changes that did happen in his lifetime being largely minor stuff that tweaked the board but did not change the game. Industrialization changed all that, lives were changed for better or worse by mechanization suddenly and totally. Progress became an idea that would drive the world, even if problems were also mounting. People came to understand that the past was not just the present which happened beforehand and the future could be more than just more of the same. It's not surprising that science fiction started up in the 19th century, as did horror: Jules Verne, HG Wells, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Mary Shelley, and Edgar Allan Poe were all active writers of the era.

This time was also one of upheaval socially and politically. Before the Industrial Revolution people generally operated on the idea that one should "Know One's Station", that society was divided into classes that were (with various degrees of legal formality enforcing this) hereditary, static and instead of trying to get out of them they should stay in them, stay out of the affairs of people of other classes and obey their betters. If you were a peasant you'd work for your lord, obey his orders, treat him with reverence as a higher form of human, be jolly grateful to have such a man as your master and avoid thinking about all that politics stuff which is none of your business. While this had not died out in the Industrial Revolution (see all of England's class stuff), it was on the decline both from gradual erosion and active resistance.

The source of wealth shifted from farms and fields to factories and companies which the merchant classes/bourgeois now owned. To be a noble you needed a peerage at least (in England that is, the rest of Europe, especially Spain and Germany remained static feudal societies at heart, while the French and eventually the Russians abolished it in a literally cutthroat fashion) and preferably a dozen generations of pedigree which your fellow nobs would respect even if you were broke, to be a captain of industry you just needed a lot of money invested in the right companies. It was possible for a poor man to rise to the highest echelons of society in the Industrial Revolution, see Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller. The downside of it was that these rich buggers tended to view the poor which could not rise from rags (ignoring of course how most of these ''nouveau riche'' then made it as difficult as possible for anyone to actually join their ranks) as being lazy incompetents that were only fit for ruthless exploitation and that attempting to help them out (beyond providing them with just enough education for them to do whatever work the rich needed them to do and healthy enough to keep working) was not only useless, but an active evil in the long term since it meant only more of them in the long run. To quote Charles Dickens' ''A Christmas Carol'':

''"Many cannot go there [Workhouses and Prisons] and many would rather die."''

''“If they'd rather die, they'd better do it and decrease the surplus population."''

The Industrial Revolution people had oppressive rigid order and stability swapped out for opportunities to excel and thrive or crash and burn. You could be born dirt poor and rise to riches, or you might start out as a skilled tradesmen who ends up as just another disposable factory worker.

That attitude about the poor went doubly so for the colonial subjects and non-white people in general. In 1876 there was a drought which led to crop failure in much of India, instead of importing food to feed the affected masses (which they'd done not long before successfully) the Raj Government allowed merchants to stockpile grain and sell it abroad to drive the price up. The result was famine and starvation which killed 6-10 million people. [[Grimdark|The Belgians in the Congo Free State made this look saintly by comparison.]]

Such treatment of the working class, combined with the belief that since the working class were the actual producers of wealth they should be the ones with the right to decide how the machines and materials used to make said wealth were used, would lead to Karl Marx writing the ''Communist Manifesto'':, creating [[communism]], one of the most notable ideologies of the 20th century and also one of the most [[skub|controversial]].

Ideologies aside you can boil down the Industrial Revolution social movements to the average human thinking: "Hey, we can actually make tons and tons of wondrous gadgets to make life better, but why is that I can't get some of the gadgets too so I can have a better life?". While this meme emerged first in West Europe and North America it inevitably expanded to the colonies and independent nations until it eventually covered the entire planet.

The Industrial Revolution is the start of the Modern World and many of its issues still persist to this day. People can relate to an Industrial Revolution era person more easily than that of a peasant in the Middle Ages, a serf in the Dark Ages, a citizen soldier of the Classical Era, a scribe at a pharaoh's court, a priest king in the Fertile Crescent or Grug and his rocks. The downside of this is that these issues are still politically charged to this day.

===Fantasy Relevance===
As a tangent from the historical to the literary, the Industrial Revolution is something which often looms in the background of Fantasy at a meta level (aka as Intertext) with various degrees of overtness. The implication is that sooner or latter as the elves in splendid cities and ancient forests weave their spells and loose their arrows, the dwarves delve and hold the line to defend their mountain homes, the orcs sound the drums of war and sharpen their blades for battle, dragons soar, necromancers scheme, kings reign, adventurers set out on epic quests and all that fantastic wonder, somewhere someone notices a pot on the boil rattling its lid and imagines how the force of pressurized steam could be used, setting in motion the end of that era. Yes, that's a gross oversimplification of a centuries long processes with many intermediate steps that culminated with Locomotives and the Crystal Palace. The point still stands that in a world where people like us exist, eventually observant souls, those inclined to tinker, those looking to make work easier and increase productivity and those who can see the work of such inventive souls as the keys to wealth and power will figure these things out and move a society beyond the 15th century with those which refuse to move with the times getting rolled over.

In [[Tolkien]]'s work this fact is dealt with mostly in subtext of disdain (the industrialists of [[Middle Earth]] were villains and the results of their labors were ruin and destruction) and a sense of melancholy as past ages end. In other fantasy settings such as [[Forgotten Realms]] there are forces working to stop this, ranging from organizations like the harpers to the Gods enforcing [[Medieval Stasis]]. Some settings, like [[Discworld]] and to a smaller degree [[Warhammer Fantasy]], accept that this will happen and have the transition woven into their worldbuilding. In fact you can see Pratchett's later works as an answer to Tolkien's criticism towards modernity, while oversimplified in some aspects the  Moist von Lipwig Trilogy makes some good explanations towards how industrialization emerged and how it works as well as its potential flaws and shortcomings without going full ludite.