For most of history, human labor has been performed with human muscle. We cut, hauled, sewed, dug, chopped, threshed, pushed, and pulled. For the simplest things we could use animals, but for any physical work that required higher intelligence, the human body was a necessity. Labor, while intrinsically physical, therefore did require intellect, and often quite a bit of cognitive skill. But outside the clergy, ‘knowledge work’ would have been an anachronistic concept.
Around the 17th century, beginning in England, that started to change. Mankind was awakening to a new kind of science that emphasized mechanistic inquiry into the workings of all things. People, particularly elites among the burgeoning capitalist and mercantile classes of Europe, began to see the world through the abstractions of Newton, Bacon, and Descartes. Matter—whether it be the heavenly bodies or leaves detaching from trees—was undergirded by forces that pushed and pulled. They quickly began to use this fundamental insight about nature to re-imagine their own activities of commerce and industry, building machines to push and pull, to take advantage of force, inertia, acceleration, and mass.
These machines came to predominate in industry with time, and multiplied tremendously in variety. Humans who had done things the manual way found themselves losing ground to the humans who learned to collaborate with machines. For the inventors, tinkerers, and conductors of the early Industrial Revolution, this period must have felt wildly dynamic and pregnant with opportunity. For the laborers who had to learn to accommodate the machines, these early decades of economic transformation were often unpleasant: wages remained stagnant, working conditions worsened, and hours labored increased.
