Evening Lecture: Have We Been Here Before? New Technology, Changes In Daily Life, And Lessons For Today From The Industrial Revolution - Nick Collins

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Part of the DEI's 2025-26 series of evening lectures, responding to the theme of "A New Leaf"

Join us for a drinks reception from 6pm. The lecture will start at 6.30pm and afterwards there'll be time for questions.

In the classic view, the Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was a time of upheaval not just for the English economy but for daily life. Temporal routines were smashed, gender and family relations radically reshaped, long-standing work practices corralled into factory discipline, and popular culture scythed to stubble by urbanisation and commercialisation. That view holds in the popular imagination and has received support from many historians, particularly during the twentieth century. Since then, other historians have begun to reassess individual aspects of that narrative. Some have argued that regular working routines were well-established long before industrialisation, and others that the new commercial popular culture was the preserve of only a small part of the population.

This paper aims to bring together some of those existing ideas, along with original research based on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century court documents, to argue that for many people the apparent transformation of daily life was gradual and incomplete rather than rapid and overwhelming. After making this argument, the paper offers an explicit reflection on what we can learn from the past for our current situation. New technology threatens work and aspects of daily life today just as it did in the eighteenth century, and the change this time is likely to be much more rapid. We should not assume that everything will happen in the same way this time, but nor should we ignore what we might learn from past experience. Some aspects of life might well be transformed in the next few years, but it is likely that many others will endure. It is also likely that there will be benefits from new technology, some of which may as yet be beyond our imagining. Turning a new leaf can be frightening, but it can also be for the best.