The novel Between Shades of Grey by Ruta Sepetys does an excellent job illustrating the troubling issue of child labor. The extent of child labor in a country is directly linked by the nature and extent of poverty within it. Child labor deprives children of their childhood, their potential and their dignity. It is detrimental to physical and mental development. Today, there are an estimated 246 million child laborers around the globe. This irritating social issue is not only violates a nation’s minimum age laws , it also involves intolerable abuse, such as child slavery, child trafficking, debt bondage, forced labor, and illicit activities. In Between Shades of Grey , Lina and her ten year old brother are unrightfully charged 25 years of labor at a work camp in Siberia. It prevented the children from going to school and used them to undermine labor standards. In the harsh winter and even worse living conditions, they watched their mother as she starved to death.
Christopher Hibbert’s The English: A Social History, 1066-1945, harshly reflects child labor. The author uses graphic details to portray the horrible work environment that the children, sometimes as young as four and five, were forced to work in. Hibbert discusses in much detail the conditions the children work in, the way they are mistreated, and what was done to prevent child labor.
The workers in this time of the novel experienced being used and abused in certain ways. They were worked vigorously, had no family, no place to call home, and treated with no respect.
In the feature article "The Destruction of Childhood," the author, Langdon Winner, explains the brutal childhood of many children living in Third World Countries. The author points out several facts and surveys done many groups such as United Nations that show
It was from the late eighteenth century that Britain bit by bit getting changed from an agrarian to modern culture, as the populace moved from nation to mechanical urban communities, looking for better wages if worse living condition. Victoria's England was a tyke overwhelmed society. All through her long rule, one out of each three of her subjects was less than fifteen years old. In the 1830s and 40s, poor kids toiled in material plants and coal mines, where working conditions frequently demonstrated dangerously. Youngster work was not new, but rather as industrialization proceeded with it turned out to be more unmistakable, as masses of worn out, hindered kids swarmed the city avenues.
The Victorian era in England marked a period of unprecedented technological, scientific, political, and economic advancement. By the 1840s, the English had witnessed remarkable industrial achievements including the advent of the railways and the photographic negative. They had witnessed the expansion of the Empire, and, as a result, were living in a time of great economic stability. Yet they had also seen thousands of people starving-and dying-due to the Irish potato famine and poor conditions and benefits in British factories and witnessed the entire order of society questioned as the working classes began to demand representation in Parliament. The English also experienced biological and scientific breakthroughs that challenged the once universally accepted beliefs in the authority of the Bible, the divine ordering of nature, and the gross exploitation of women and people of other races. It was a time of great achievement, yes, but it was also a time of great contradiction and uncertainty.
The British quickly moved to the forefront of the industrial revolution due to their investment in the coal and iron industries. England was also at the forefront of modern banking due to the large amounts of profit from commerce that the British experienced. In addition to the steam engine, some of the most notable British inventions in the late eighteenth century were the new spinning machines that revolutionized the textile industry. As a result of the technological advances of the steam engine and cotton machines, increasing amount of steel, coal and iron were now needed to fuel the new machines largely in use by the beginning of the nineteenth century. The various im...
In order to argue the positives and negatives of a broad and subjective term such as “industrialisation”, one must first define the terminology. The standard definition would allude to a “period of social and economic change”, the “Industrial Revolution”, which occurred from the 1760s onwards, to the mid-19th century. This move from an agrarian to an industrial society brought both positive and negative effects on the lifestyle of British people, from all backgrounds. Scientific advances in mass production and agriculture caused an expanding capital stock. Urban Britain soon became the factory of the world, with changes to health, housing and real wages seen at all levels of society.
England serves as the “birthplace” of the Industrial Revolution. This is because the small island country had a considerable amount of natural resources and a large population of workers. Industrialization also adds to England’s advantages. This process required the country’s abundance of resources in order to operate, construct, and/or provide transportation for machines and ships. Some of these resources included: water power, coal, iron ore, rivers, and
Jeremy Black and Donald M. Macraild, 19th Century Britain (New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) 100-104
“Many children are employed in horrible conditions in many countries around the world” (Sebastian, 1997). Child labour is a problem that was seen in not only England specifically, but exists in most third-world countries during the early stages of the eighteenth century. Child labour is an important issue because it affects the lives of millions of children around the world who are suffering from severe mental and health problems due to the poor working conditions with which they are forced to work in as well as the mistreatment they receive from whom they work for. Child labour dates back to the eighteenth century where children were forced to work in harmful conditions for extremely low wages, from as early as the ages of six or seven. Howeve...
During the late nineteenth century Germany and the USA began to overtake Britain’s industrial dominance, Eric Hobsbawm believes that ‘it is not surprising that Britain was unable to maintain the extraordinary position as workshop of the world’. This is due to a number of factors such as, more railways in other countries, decline in exports compared to other nations, the British government followed a policy of free trade and the production of materials like steel in Germany and the USA was far greater than what the British produced. However, even though other nations began to industrialise and catch up with Britain, she still remained a leading industrial power. This is because Britain was still in the world’s top three economies, exports were high during the 1870s also Britain
Within the first stanza of Browning’s “The Cry of the Children,” appeals to the reader’s emotions by the great emphasis placed on the children’s attitudes toward working in coal mines and manufactories. The
The Industrial Revolution of the late 18th and early 19th century reflected a remarkable and substantial period in history which represented the many ways European society and culture advanced and adapted to the changing new world. Under examination, the British Industrial Revolution conjures up a multitude of pre-conditions which all affected the outcome of this time period. Though there is no direct or conclusive cause or origin of the Industrial Revolution, Most substantially, the introduction of raw material, the demand for labor from a growing and changing urbanized population, and technological advances in transportation allowed for the prospects of the industrial revolution to spread not only throughout Britain but all of Europe.
Allen, Robert C., The British Industrial Revolution in a Global Perspective, New York: Cambridge Press, 2009. Pp. viii, 331.