Industrial Revolution

In Kyle’s wiki, the Industrial Revolution is catalogued through Sapiens, where Yuval Noah Harari enumerates its cascade of social upheavals: “Adapting to industrial time is just one of them. Other notable examples include urbanisation, the disappearance of the peasantry, the rise of the industrial proletariat, the empowerment of the common person, democratisation, youth culture and the disintegration of patriarchy.” Harari pairs this with one of his counterintuitive claims about the individual under industrial modernity — that “the state and the market are the mother and father of the individual,” not the adversaries of romantic literature: “the individual can survive only thanks to them.”

Context: The Industrial Revolution (roughly 1760–1840, beginning in Britain) was the transition to mechanized manufacturing, factory production, and steam power that reshaped economic and social life — driving mass urbanization, wage labor, demographic change, and the rise of industrial capitalism.

Where this appears

• Sapiens — Harari enumerates the Industrial Revolution’s upheavals (urbanization, disappearance of the peasantry, democratization, disintegration of patriarchy) and argues the state and market became “mother and father of the individual.”