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The Industrial Revolution

The moment human muscle stopped being the limit.

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Industrial Revolution

1760–1820

Beginning in Britain around 1760 and spreading to continental Europe and the United States by roughly 1840, the Industrial Revolution combined agricultural surplus, coal and iron resources, and a wave of textile and steam-power inventions to shift production from hand and cottage work to mechanised factories. Historians continue to dispute both how sharply this counts as a revolution rather than a gradual change and, more consequentially, when ordinary workers actually began to see rising living standards from it.

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