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Notes -
This might be a peculiarly modern phenomenon, though. My understanding is that while pre-modern society was much poorer, it afforded more time for leisure even for the average peasant and farmer — the Industrial Revolution provided working conditions that were much, much worse than what came before.
Even in ancient times there are jobs that are dreadful like salt mining, of course, but that wasn’t the norm.
Most of those memes about all the holidays medieval peasants had only take into account the time actually spent sowing and harvesting, and not all of the other work that farmers had to do constantly to keep everything in working order. Agricultural work is really, really hard. I've never done it myself, but I know people who have. And peasants always lived on the brink of famine. All it took was one bad harvest. Industrial laborers rarely starved. Pre-modern peasants might have had more "official" time off, but there's a reason they flooded the cities to become industrial workers in the first place.
Oh, no doubt agricultural work is very difficult, and I would much prefer my current lifestyle to that of a tenant farmer. But I am saying that the Industrial Revolution was uniquely bad for workers. I’m pretty sure I would drop dead doing factory work of a hundred to two hundred years past, but I’ve seen farm-work done before in rural China with limited modern equipment and amenities, for instance — it is hard work, but it is doable.
The risk of famine is well taken, though.
My understanding of why peasants flooded the cities was because of changing economic incentives — unemployment in farms due to industrialization and different crop preferences lead to massive unemployment amongst farmers, who migrated to cities to look for work.
My impression is that conditions varied greatly with population density, and that Industrial Revolution era Europe was unusually bad for Malthusian reasons. Pre-revolution China also sounded terribly grinding for similar reasons.
So I don't disagree that early 20th Century coal miners (and American cotton plantation workers, and men mining guano, and rice farmers) had it worse than men in a variety of other times and places.
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