Fotos Históricas – Crianças escravas

 

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Britain's child slaves. They started at 4am, lived off acorns and had nails put through their ears for shoddy work. The tunnel was narrow, and a mere 16in high in places. The workers could barely kneel in it, let alone stand. Thick,choking coal dust filled their lungs as they crawled through the darkness, their knees scraping on the rough surface and their muscles contracting with pain. Many would die from lung cancer and other diseases before they reached 25. Robert North, who worked in a coal mine in Yorkshire, told an inspector: 'I went into the pit at seven years of age. When I drew by the girdle and chain, my skin was broken and the blood ran down … If we said anything, they would beat us.' . But coal mining was just one industry in which children worked during the 18th and 19th centuries. . The Industrial Revolution brought immense prosperity to the British Empire. Not only did Britannia rule the waves, she ruled the global marketplace, too, dominating trade in cotton, wool and other commodities, while her inventors devised ingenious machinery to push productivity ever higher. . But, as a new book by Jane Humphries, a professor of economic history, shows, a terrible price was paid for this success by the labourers who serviced the machines, pushed the coal carts and turned the wheels that drove the Industrial Revolution.

Uma publicação partilhada por Historical Photos (@historyatlas) a 11 de Abr, 2018 às 1:21 PDT