> The Industrial Revolution - the greatest thing ever to happen - required the British govt to deploy more troops against Luddites than they had fighting Napoleon at the same time
Source of this claim?
Source of this claim?
It is admittedly a specific cherry picked point in time at which this was true, but useful to illustrate the issue.
>“In the summer of 1812 there were no fewer than 12,000 troops in the disturbed counties, a greater force than Wellington had under his command in the Peninsula.”
But for that year Wikipedia has
>Wellington's 48,500-man army... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Salamanca
The point being made by use of colorful anecdote is however that industrialisation led to internal unrest which required considerable force to manage, and whose ultimate outcome (unprecedented rise in living standards) is much preferable to it being stopped in its tracks. A story that repeats itself again and again, check the American longshoremen union for an especially crass recent example of it.