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"We Hear InFormed that you got shear in mee sheens [shearing machines] and if you Dont Pull them Down in a Forght Nights Time Wee will you Damd infernold dog." —Luddite threat found on paper, 1803 (245) Wherever we may sit, wherever we may stand, or wherever we may lay, chances are that we are surrounded by plastics. With few exceptions, we no longer hold knowledge of basic farming or hunting without the aid of machines. We consume food containing synthetic substances made to resemble the food that our ancestors once ate, blithely packaged with images of lush farms that do not exist, masking the reality of the mud and filth of factory farming. For the first time in recorded history, obesity is at epidemic levels. The year is 2011, we live in the West during the Third Industrial Age, and our days are filled with few elements that are not a result of the Industrial Revolution. Yet what led to this point in human history? What elements came together to open the gates to our towering factories, to our assembly lines, to our fast food, and to our newly found ability to destroy the Earth? What was the world like before these things? Peter Laslett's "The World We Have Lost" examines what led to these developments. Specifically, "The World We Have Lost" is a general overview of the era just before the coming of the first Industrial Revolution (beginning around 1750), at times contrasted with post-industrialized England, but sometimes also reaching back to the beginning of the early modern period in the 16th century. This pre-industrial world, and the values, ways, and lives of the people that lived in it, are what Laslett refers to as The World We Have Lost. The book is divided into twelve chapters. The first chapter of the book examines what is known of the patriarchal household that existed just before the Industrial Revolution, chapter 2 presents an overview of the somewhat murky world of social divisions that existed in England at the time, and chapter 3 lends an eye to the structure of life within English village communities. Chapter 4 takes a glass to various misconceptions Laslett has encountered surrounding the practices and beliefs of the English during the pre-industrial period, chapter 5 examines birth and death statistics in the same period, and chapter six handles death rates (or lack thereof) due to starvation among the English peasants from the early modern period into the Industrial Revolution, concluding that starvation appears to have been very rare in England prior to industrialization. Chapter 7 provides perhaps the clearest window into English society at the time. Laslett examines the constant of bastardy among the English, and sexual conduct among the English peasantry before and during the English Industrial Revolution, and how the English Church handled English society's "sexual nonconformism". This lively chapter is followed by chapter 8, consisting of an examination by Laslett of the potentiality of an "English Revolution" occurring at the onset of the English industrial period (of which Laslett is skeptical), which is followed by chapter 9, where a social and political obedience are looked at, and the reasons for a lack of violent peasant uprising are examined. Chapter 10 follows, which examines the importance of literacy and the workings of social mobility. Chapters 11 examines life after the full-scale onset of industrialization in England, and how class divisions seemed to be ever more apparent and poverty levels appear to have risen under industrialization. The brief final chapter of the book, chapter 12, consists of reflections on understanding the material presented earlier in the book from a contemporary perspective and the perils thereof. "The World We Have Lost" was originally published in 1965, later seeing a revised and updated edition in 1984 (with the addition of Further Explored to the aforementioned title), and finally seeing another updated edition in the year 2000 (with the same title as the 1984 edition). The latter two issues contain new content and added introductions, and it is the 1984 edition that this book review focuses on. The majority of Laslett's sources consist of records contemporary to the time periods he examines. Easily the most readable and fascinating elements of the book, these sources consist of the distillation of thousands upon thousands of local tax records, surveys, deeds, marriage records, law codes, correspondence among the upper class, contemporary works such as William Harrison's 16th century Description of England, and even a strip of cloth (bearing the message appearing at the beginning of this essay). These historical records range from bare-boned, just-the-facts items, to far meatier material, such as gossip among the townsfolk and commentary by record keepers about youths getting married at too young an age. These records are, however, quite incomplete, and Laslett makes it clear that people commonly slip in and out of history. Modern academic sources are also cited throughout the work, though less extensively, and responses to these works are generally kept to a minimum, resulting in little more than demographic graphs and charts appearing throughout and brief commentary in footnotes. The first edition of "The World We Have Lost" has been received as a landmark work and the various editions thereafter have remained influential. Laslett himself seems aware of this when he comments that "it has occurred to no other historian before the 1960s to try to see if the registers could tell us whether our ancestors did in fact sometimes die of starvation" (283). Laslett has been cited as recently as 2001 as "one of the main pioneers in the creation of a field of family history and historical demography", where "The World We Have Lost" is listed first in examples of Laslett's groundbreaking work in this field (Wall, et al. 2001:387). Scholar Adrian Wilson lists "The World We Have Lost" as second on his list of "the most influential [...] calls for a new social history" (Wilson 1995:74). A Google Books search for "The World We Have Lost Laslett" seems to confirm this conclusion; Laslett's works appear to be frequently commented on in certain scholarly circles, "The World We Have Lost" in particular. Partially due to this glowing praise, it was with baited breath that I took hold of this book. However, after the first few chapters, that interest began to fade. This is due the unfortunate observation that, while the wealth of material that Laslett presents is impressive, the volume is greatly hindered by its presentation; "The World We Have Lost - Further Explored" is riddled with long-winded sentences, banal Latinates, and vague organization. Sentences sometimes wander into borderline nonsense. For example, page 81 bears a sentence reading ". . . it divides up the population of the country in such a way as to show that more than half the people when alive were to some degree dependent . . ." (italics added for emphasis). These troublesome constructs are further peppered with inkhorn terms of the worst sort, such as "imprecation" (78), "ineluctable" (102), and "vicissitude" (124). Further organization would also be of much use for the reader; chapter four, for example, handles several well-defined concepts hidden in a murk of information and could well use further subdividing. The result of these issues is a book that is less a thought-provoking walk down a fact-filled path, but more a poorly-prepared, if nutritious, meal that provides little pleasure to chew. A notable omission in this work is any mention of pollution, perhaps the single most important result of industrialization. Pollution is now a very serious problem on this planet, and even the most remote organism bears the mark of it, and yet here Laslett makes absolutely no mention of this most damning element of industrialization anywhere in his overview. After all, what more lost a world than one than can bear no life? Interestingly, elements of Laslett's own world bleed into the book throughout; few pages seem to go by without Laslett mentioning communism, a subject that would undoubtedly receive less mention were the then-world not becoming more and more red by the day. In fact, there is little doubt that this topic was something of a minefield for writers at the time; much ink has been spilled on the issue of class and capitalism by Marxist writers. The result of these references is that, while Laslett's book may be a document studying a world long lost, Laslett's own world has since disappeared, and thus, on some level, Laslett's work here is itself something of a time capsule. Laslett's attitude towards Marxism here is, however, difficult to make out. Regardless of how the reader may feel about the industrialized society of modern times, the cogs continue to turn, and so get smaller and smaller and more "advanced" as our world moves on to be replaced by other, newer worlds. Barring some unforeseen Ragnarök, there seems to be no going back. While evidently a crucial study of a crucial point in history, and evidently of continued use to historians handling this particular point in history, Laslett's book falls flat in presentation, and is completely unapproachable for the general reader. It is the author's humble opinion that many lessons can be learned from The World We Have Lost, but Laslett's work is not the place to begin a search for them. Bibliography: * Wall, Richard (Editor). Hareveen, Tamara K. (Editor) Ehmer, Joseph (Editor). Cerman, Markus (Editor). "Family History Revisted: Comparative Perspectives (Family in Interdisciplinary Perspective)" (University of Delaware Press, 2001). * Wilson, Adrian. "Rethinking Social History: English Society 1570-1920 and Its Interpretation" (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995).

2022-10-26 05:34