Here's one for you. A king seated at a table in his lavish banquet hall in his lavish castle in East Anglia. In front of him are three goblets. Two of the goblets are full of wine; the third is empty.  What’s the King's name?

There have been many Industrial Revolutions - it's a handy phrase which we aren’t quite sure what it means. Historically, a whole wrath of Industrial Revolution have taken place, this being marked by the shift from non-energy using to fossil fuel consumption. Also, the usage of labor and tools by humans and the subsequent machinization of work. Modern complex computer machines have the capacity to be programmed to multi-task, in a somewhat similar way humans are able to do so. Machines lack the ability to be manipulated or used as humans and tools do.

The past 300 years have been full of Industrial Revolution’s, many countries are still in the process. Many kinds of pre-industrial societies. The h-g’s may seemed to be a pre-industrial society, even though they are not agricultural, they are in fact, radically distinct from usage of tools and complex power systems. Native Americans, frontier societies, feudal societies have them all: the complex heIndistrial Revolutionarchical systems that are a precurser to the Industrial Revolution of any society. Their occurances all being very different, the very event of one Industrial Revolution in a specific country has a large impact on the Industrial Revolution of any other country or socieity, as they will impose industrial processes on another society or colony. Also, the fact that an Industrial Revolution is taking place in another society or country makes others around the world aware of the fact that they may posses this "power" and make this "progress."

Chouces are made by governments to take on the Industrial Revolution themselves. Japan, former USSR, many other countries where central governemnts have decided to organize, structure, and promote the emergence of industrial productive structures. The are cvariances in this structure of the actual event, they all go about it in theIndustrial Revolution own way, under the control of a separate and distinct faction (party, regime, organization etc.)

The actual transition in Great Britain

Pre industrial world didn’t necessarily mean small. You can have organizations as large as the Roman Empire and the Mongal Empire with large social structures. Most of the things that they consumed were from the world immediately around them, made by local artisans. There is also substantial amounts of trade, however it was peripheral to the day to day lives of the people. These societies had trade routes that took their goods and services long distances. They were also quite sophisticated. Art, philosophy, poetry, science, mathematics: PRE INDUSTRIAL. Pre-industrial doesn’t mean small or unstructured.

Our society is completely different. Look at the tag on your shirt. Buy local!

The accumulation of wealth is seemed as being done for the reasons of fun, power, prestige. People get money in order to spend it on themselves or to display it. Materialism.

Convertible to pleasure, power, status. Not necessarily the ability to make more wealth, because it can be translated into these other things. It does mean that most property and land in a feudal society is not owned in the way we believe ownership to be. Instead it is possessed by the people who live on it but owned by a higher heirarchical system that owns the whole landscape. There might be one person ruling over this land but the peasants, serfs, etc, are allowed to live on it by paying taxes and being subject to the ruler’s imposed laws and decisions they make on the destiny of the property.

Pre-industrial societies usually have communal public land.

People and land are bound together. People are of a place.

Hunter-gatherers and feudal lords are both bound to the land, there place in the world is a fixed and settled place. Nearly everyone has a fixed and settled place. This is unlike most of us today, we have the ability to go anywhere and live anywhere. That kind of choice doesn’t exist in that world, it’s not what you can do. Even is an individual or even several can do it, there is now way for all of society, the general population of people are not able to do this. They can’t imagine a world in which they exist that doesn’t look like the one they inhabit. hahaha

"People tell me I have a beautiful view" (man in Scotland)

Implication is that the man doesn’t know if it’s a beautiful view, it just is. People like us, who go around collecting views, judging the views. To him, it’s just what life is.

Pre-industrial people were local, the world just was what the world just was.

Also, almost everything is made out of wood, stone, sometimes smelted metal, and at some points glass. Almost nothing else that things are made out of, no plastic, no pertoleum products, no real steel or very little of it, no motors, electricity.

Matt’s ring is the only thing on his body that could have been made in a pre-industrial society.

Industrialized worlds are very pervasive.

Hunter-gatherer and agriculturalist societies are very different from each other and exist in different places but they must be observed seperately from our industrial society.

Differences between industrial and commercial worlds:

To engage in the production of goods as commodities, large scale, in which people are trading in a system that sustains their economic lives, which has a lot of characteristics of a modern capitalist society. Money is used not only for luxury goods, prestige, power, wealth. It is the gathering of money in order to gather more money.

Commericial societies have arisen at various times in various places, they aren’t necessarily prompted by any type of society. It is a society structured around the idea of producing stuff, selling or trading stuff, in order to get more stuff.

m-c-m'

(m = money, converted to c = commodity, sold or traded for m' = more money; the difference between m and m' is the money made off of the product)

the process of this trade, what happens, is the move from one place to another. The way goods aquire worth is locational. If you can move endemic goods from where they are produced elsewhere, you can capitalize off of its higher value. In commercial society the accumulation of goods is not necessarily to make more goods, the capital made is siphoned off into prestige, power, wealth. The society that was arising in Great Britain and Western Europe were capitalist or proto-capitalist societies. Societies organize in a way where the state is actively involved in regulating and organizing the activities of merchant. The Hudson Bay Company, the East India Company, the Royal Africa Company. The king granted charters to different people to act as capitalists of certain parts of the world or colonies, and that this wealth would be somewhat distributed back to nation-state through the charters and taxation. These were capitalist structures used to accumulate specie (gold and silver), as a base of power by the state

The emergence of private property, land in large measure that becomes sellable You also have persons who, instead of being tied to their land, become labor.

Enclosure: the fundamental reality in the emergence of environmental crises.

Lord: taxed people in terms of the goods that they produced. A certain amount of anything was available to him because of his "coolness." He was also able to capitalize off of the labor available to him, by his command (obliged labor service). This prompted the taxation that we now know; modern taxation is done mores so with money in the place of labor.

Parliament would say joe blow, lord of whatever, gets to have the following perish in said domain, and is given full access over this land. He has the power, you don’t. He starts growing sheep on it, and shaering them for wool. What happens through this is an individualization of things- and individualization of commerce into villages and separate towns.

People become free laborers- kicked out of economic communities into private companies. That process is still happening today- when a major drug company sends a biologist to go out with a local villager in a rainforest and finds a drug to cure something, they bring that home and patent it and sell it on the market. It is the same during the industrial revolution- taking things out of a common world and putting it into a private right. From communal regulation to no regulation for the privateers.

In a commercial world, you start to develop urban realities- settings in which class status and social standing are not represented by amounts of land, as it was formerly. In the urban hierarchy, there is a power structure inside the city that has little to do with land- they form a separate interest from the land proprietor- there is a new competing social hierarchy developing during the industrial revolution. At the same time there are also the developments of poor houses and insane insyllums. Formerly, the "village idiot" was taken care of- people felt they had a responsibility to help him. When people are set free and "privatized", the "village idiot" has a hard time- no longer knows what to do. The advent on places for these people. What comes with urbanization includes prisons, schools, law systems. How do you transmit from one generation to another the skills necessary to live in society? In a peasant world, one learned from their mother- skills were passed on- built around personal relationships within the village, family, group, etc. In an urban setting, one must go to a school- skills are no longer passed down like so.

This commercial world is not yet an industrial world, but it’s getting there. Different factors.

• Land rights. Ownership rights and privatization of lands. A landowner has the right to say no, this is my land, you can’t use it. It allows a system of extortion to begin- the owner needs something in return for the use of his/her land. The land owner will trade for time worked- as the owner of the property, the goal is to get more out of the deal than the worker- the land owner has it, the worker wants it. If somebody is working for you, chances are you own the result of the work. If you are making widgets at the widgets factory, you do not own the widgets, the widget company owns them. It is so built into us that we rarely realize how odd it is. The right of the owner is more important and greater than that of the worker who made the widget. We just accept it in our society- do we ever think about it? If labor makes us valuable, why is it not that the laborer owns it? This is a critical condition of an industrial society! Aren’t there societies where this doesn’t exist? Not industrial societies. EMPLOYEE-NESS!!! Rita- what about worker owned businesses? You are both the worker and the owner.
• Trading areas are set up- it is no longer universal- separate, private, different.
• In an industrial society, people are forced into industrialism. There are strong "coersion factors". People are used and taken advantage of.

Marx- the idea of getting some stock pile of loot available to you to spend. You must have money to spend and invest- the only way the society will work. Muir relates to this a lot in the ideas of neutral trade in Reflections- shippers could make 400% profits on shipping- essential to industrial society.

In this sort of society, the explanation for things must be built around pre-modern science- you can explain things going on in this world with things that are here- without the existence of god or magic. Idea of trial and error- making things happen. This idea is not necessarily universal- people come into this understanding through a process. It is even something that is often forced on people. Another social force is called other worldly aestheticism- one of the things that makes for the rise of industrialism is the rise of the protestant endeavor. People need to somehow demonstrate their salvation and their favour in god’s eyes. In theory, there is no connection between your success in the world and your favour in god’s eyes. But if you’re living in a society where everyone holds this belief, that if you are successful, you begin to believe that if you are successful you are in more favour in god’s eyes. "Predestination". In puritanism, you can’t flaunt your wealth, but you keep making it anyway. Finally, the existence of lots of social mobility in society- the class of people who have been kicked out of their places- the ability to rise into a better place- more money, etc. That’s more than you ever need to know! –Matt