A variety of factors have worked together in making Great Britain the first nation to initiate the industrial revolution. One of the key factors, however, was that Britain had a number of resources other countries lacked. Firstly, it had access to a good number of natural resources, including different types of metals. This allowed for the production of various mechanized machines and advances in automation.
Secondly, Britain had established trade routes with other countries all around the world, ensuring its economic stability and growth. Lastly, and most importantly, Great Britain possessed many colonies, which offered a combination of political power, cheap resources, and labor, which were all necessary for an industrial revolution.
I want to look at the industrial revolution from the worker’s point of view. I think that the event has had a number of positive and negative consequences for this group, which make it difficult to assert whether the revolution was evil. For many, it represented terrible exploitation and mistreatment, as people were forced to work at factories without any sufficient safety standards. Even children were exploited for profit and forced into labor that adults were not capable of doing. Some were replaced by machines and driven out of their fields of occupation. Others, however, can be said to have benefitted from the change.
The creation of qualified workers and their education created a new type of working class, who used their skills and competencies in order to secure better positions. Many talented or knowledgeable individuals have had opportunities to build up wealth and improve their lives on a generational level. For contemporary workers, capitalism was most likely a novel concept, one that showed promise of a merit-based society and development. In more recent years, however, it has become clear that the capitalist regime is exploitative at its core.
Promoting the accumulation of wealth by those who are already rich and limiting opportunities for the poor, both of these trends are especially prominent in current capitalist nations. Unregulated businesses destroy the environment with pollution, and governments are unwilling to stop them. Such problems unavoidably do capitalism evil.