Opium and the Industrial RevolutionThe Industrial Revolution brought social change and economic growth to Britain. This era provided the ideal environment for a new social class to emerge from urban squalor. During the Industrial Revolution, a group of citizens breathed polluted air, drank toxic water, worked fourteen-hour days in dimly lit factories, and lived in cramped spaces. This group is known as the working class. In Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto, he predicted that the development of modern industry will undermine the very foundations on which the bourgeoisie (the upper class) produces and appropriates products. The bourgeoisie therefore produces above all its gravediggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat (the working class) are also inevitable (Marx, 5). However, the working class revolution predicted by Marx would never come to pass in England. It is astonishing that a large social group consisting of a large majority of a country's population has never started a rebellion in the streets of cities. One of the major contributing factors during this era was the large quantities of mind-altering "drugs" readily available to the country's poorest people. Without the Industrial Revolution, we may not have been as technologically advanced in the modern world. However, opium provided the solution to all these men and their problems. Opium created an escape and made life tolerable for the working class, preventing them from rebelling, which enabled the success of the Industrial Revolution. In order to get into the minds of the working class, it is important to have a good understanding of current living conditions. The cities were extremely overcrowded and smoky, with completely inadequate sanitation, by...... middle of paper ......BibliographyBurnett, John. “The Annals of Labor: Autobiographies of the British Working Class.” » Editorial. Indiana University Press 1974: n. page. Internet. .Chepaitis, Elia V., Dr. Children's Opium: Domestic Opium and Infant Drugs in Early Victorian England. Diss. University of Connecticut, Print.Courtwright, David T. Forces of Habit: Drugs and the Making of the Modern World.Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2001. Print.Dore, Gustave. Dudley Street Seven Dials. 1872. London.PaintingGreenwood, James. In Strange Company: Being the Experiences of a Traveling Correspondent. London: Vizetelly &, 1883. Print.Strayer, Robert W. Ways of the World: A Brief Global History Second edition / Robert W.Strayer. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2013. Print.