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<\/figure>\n\n\n\nIn reality, today’s industrialized countries moved from agrarian to industrial societies in a fragmented and uneven manner. The old order did not disappear overnight. As new forms of production emerged, old ones persisted for a long time, displaying an inertia similar to what we see in T\u00fcrkiye today. Household production did not vanish in a single night. Not every sector mechanized at once. Not every region developed factories at the same speed. Even within a single country, some areas industrialized rapidly while others continued to operate according to older economic rhythms. This is why even the word ‘transition’ can sometimes mislead. Rather than one door closing as another opened, the process often meant that different production regimes coexisted for decades, just as they do in our own experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Nor was the transformation simply a matter of technical innovation. Steam power, machinery, factories, and rising productivity did not produce a neutral transformation on their own. The new system of production also brought the disciplining of labor. Time was measured more strictly. The pace of work became tied to the rhythm of machines. Workers’ control over the production process weakened. From the earliest factories, ‘factory discipline’ became decisive, and machine rhythms created new forms of control over labor\u2014much as AI is beginning to do today. This is why a history of the Industrial Revolution told solely as a history of technology is incomplete. We must also understand it as the establishment of a new order of power over labor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The social costs were considerable. The factory system meant more than increased output. Long working hours, unhealthy working conditions, child labor, rapid and disorderly urbanization, overcrowded living spaces, and new class tensions were all part of the process. Low wages, harsh conditions, and unhealthy cities became widespread during early industrialization. Even effective legal measures to restrict child labor arrived much later. In other words, the system was first built through the exploitation of labor, and regulations seeking to limit some of the resulting destruction followed afterward. That alone illustrates how harsh and uneven the transition was.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A further problem is the retrospective transformation of this history into a story of ‘inevitable success.’ Looking back from the present, we can say that industrial society generated long-term increases in output, income, and technological capabilities. The evidence does indeed indicate that the Industrial Revolution marked a major break with stagnation and eventually opened the way to substantial improvements in living standards. But this does not erase the difficulty, inequality, and frequent devastation experienced by broad segments of society in its early stages. When a story about long-term gains makes the short- and medium-term social costs invisible, history ceases to explain and becomes a myth of progress. AI, too, appears likely to have serious disruptive consequences in the short term.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The question, then, is not a simple choice between whether the Industrial Revolution was ‘good’ or ‘bad.’ The important issue is how we tell its history. If we present it as linear, orderly, and almost natural progress, we erase the conflicts that shaped it. We also erase the disciplining of labor, the hardening of property relations, the suffering that accompanied rural displacement, unhealthy and chaotic urban growth, the normalization of child labor, and the prolonged coexistence of old and new production forms. All that remains is the outcome. The process disappears.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A more accurate account of Europe’s transition to a production economy must acknowledge that the Industrial Revolution was a historical rupture that initiated a shift from agriculture and craft production toward industry. But that rupture was neither linear nor orderly nor socially peaceful. It was uneven across regions, fragmented across sectors, and conflict-ridden across classes. Old forms of production coexisted with new structures for a long time. Productivity increased, but the social costs of that increase were distributed very asymmetrically. Modern industrial society emerged not from a smooth march forward but through severe frictions, losses, conflicts, and institutional pressures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It is therefore hardly surprising that T\u00fcrkiye is experiencing similar growing pains during a transition that has lasted an extraordinarily long time\u2014several human lifetimes. The great difficulty is that successive technological revolutions are making the transition even harder and widening the gap we must somehow cross.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We want T\u00fcrkiye to move from a rent-seeking economic order toward one built on production and innovation. But how did Europe and the West historically establish their own systems of production? In an earlier article, I wrote that ‘with the Industrial Revolution, today’s advanced Western countries … moved during the nineteenth century from an economy […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4977,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,112,39,43],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5689","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ai","category-entrepreneurship","category-pol","category-tech"],"yoast_head":"\n