A new Renaissance, or a new Industrial Revolution?

A wool carder in Florence in 1470 did not know he was living in the Renaissance. A cotton spinner in Manchester in 1820 did not know she was living through the Industrial Revolution. Neither name existed yet.

The French historian Jules Michelet first used “Renaissance” for a whole era in 1855, and Jacob Burckhardt made the idea famous with The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy in 1860. “Industrial Revolution” became the usual English phrase after Arnold Toynbee’s Oxford lectures were published in 1884, a year after his death.

Eras get their names from people who already know how things turned out. AI is being given both names before anyone knows. Some call it a new Renaissance: a flowering of creativity and knowledge. Others call it a new Industrial Revolution: hard years for workers, then abundance. Each name carries a promise, and each skips over what most people actually lived through.

So before picking one, we went back to a plainer question. What did each era do to the lives of ordinary people? And how did it change what they expected from their work, their time and their future?

For most people, the Renaissance began with a catastrophe

The story usually starts with painters and scholars. For most Europeans it started with the Black Death. The plague arrived in 1347 and kept returning for generations. By the end of the 1300s, Europe’s population had fallen by almost a third.

The survivors found that their work had become scarce, and so valuable. England’s rulers tried to hold wages at pre-plague levels by law, first in 1349 and again in the Statute of Labourers of 1351, which also tried to stop workers leaving for better pay. The law could not hold the market down for long. Across most of Europe, the economic historian Şevket Pamuk finds, real wages roughly doubled between the 1340s and the middle of the 1400s.

Workers also pushed for a say. In Florence in 1378, wool workers who had no guild and no vote, the Ciompi, briefly took over the city government. In England in 1381, anger at a new poll tax and the labour laws became the Peasants’ Revolt. Both risings were put down. Still, the century after the plague is remembered as a good one for working people, and the reason is worth noticing. Ordinary people’s best decades in this era came from a shortage of people, not from a flowering of ideas.

Who got the Renaissance?

The art, the buildings and the rediscovered classical learning were real achievements. They were also paid for by a small circle: banking families such as the Medici, the Church and princely courts. The wool workers whose cloth made Florence rich were not part of that circle. Most Europeans still lived on the land and farmed by the season, much as their grandparents had.

In 1977 the historian Joan Kelly asked a question that still unsettles the textbook version: “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” Her answer was no. Looking at noblewomen, she argued that the period narrowed freedoms they had held in the Middle Ages. Later scholars have challenged parts of her case. Her question has lasted because it applies to any golden age: golden for whom?

Then the gains slipped away. As the population recovered in the 1500s, food and land grew dearer and labour grew cheaper. Pamuk traces real wages falling across most of Europe through the sixteenth century, until much of the gain after the plague was gone. The century we remember for Michelangelo was, for many labourers, a century of getting by on less.

The machine that copied ideas

One part of the Renaissance does look a lot like today. Around 1450, in Mainz, Johannes Gutenberg began printing with movable metal type. Until then, every book was copied by hand. The economic historians Eltjo Buringh and Jan Luiten van Zanden estimate that Western Europe produced about 5 million manuscripts in the whole of the 1400s, and about 12.6 million printed books in the few decades after the press arrived. They count conservatively, so the true numbers were probably higher. (Our World in Data charts their estimates.)

The press changed where opportunity grew. Jeremiah Dittmar found that European cities that adopted printing in the 1400s grew about 60 percent faster between 1500 and 1600 than similar cities that did not. A new trade of printers, paper-makers and booksellers grew up around the machines.

It also changed who could know things. When Martin Luther challenged the Church in 1517, printers carried his arguments far beyond his town. From 1518 he wrote mostly in German for ordinary readers, not in Latin for scholars, and townspeople could buy, read and argue over cheap pamphlets.

The same machine spread fear just as well. The Malleus Maleficarum, a manual for finding and convicting witches, was first printed in the 1480s and reprinted many times. A 2024 study of 553 Central European cities found that witch trials tended to begin after such books were printed, then spread from city to city as neighbours followed one another. Tens of thousands of people were executed as witches across Europe. The Reformation was followed by decades of religious war.

Cheap copies of ideas did not, by themselves, make people wiser. Over the next two centuries Europe built the habits and institutions that helped readers sort sound knowledge from rumour: printers and editors with reputations to protect, schools, libraries, and learned societies such as London’s Royal Society, founded in 1660, whose journal set a pattern for science publishing. The press made knowledge plentiful. People had to build the means to trust it.

What the Renaissance taught people to expect

The deepest change was in expectations, and it arrived slowly. Counting signatures on court records, the historian David Cressy found that in seventeenth-century England roughly 30 percent of men and 10 percent of women could write their names. Nearly all the gentry could, but only 15 to 20 percent of labourers and poorer farmers. More people could read than write, since reading was taught first. Still, a new idea had taken hold: knowledge did not have to come from someone above you. You could read it, check it and argue with it.

A second idea was about the self. In 1486 the young scholar Giovanni Pico della Mirandola wrote that people, unlike other creatures, could shape what they became. In 1550 Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists celebrated painters and sculptors by name, as individuals of genius rather than anonymous craftsmen. The person with a life to make and a mind of their own became someone to admire.

Notice which way the Renaissance faced, though. The word means rebirth. Its thinkers looked back to Greece and Rome as the high point to recover. The expectation that each generation would live better than the last was not yet common sense. That came with the next revolution.

The Industrial Revolution: growth that took two generations to share

From the 1760s, Britain began to make things in a new way: spinning machines, power looms, coal-fired steam engines and the factories that gathered them under one roof. Output grew faster than it ever had. For the people doing the work, it did not feel like abundance.

The economic historian Robert Allen measured the gap. Between 1780 and 1840, British output per worker rose 46 percent. Real wages rose 12 percent. The difference went mostly to profits, which paid for more factories. Allen named it Engels’ pause, after Friedrich Engels, whose 1845 book The Condition of the Working Class in England described those years from Manchester.

Life in the new towns was hard on the body. In his 1842 sanitary report, the reformer Edwin Chadwick put the average age at death for labourers in Manchester as low as 17, against 52 for gentry in rural Rutland. Those averages are dragged down by the deaths of babies and small children, which is the point: in crowded towns without clean water or sewers, children died young. Life expectancy at birth in England and Wales was about 43 in 1850, and barely higher thirty years later. Studies of recruits’ heights suggest the poorest Britons grew shorter in the 1830s and 1840s, though historians still argue over that evidence.

Children worked. The mills relied on them because they were cheap. The Factory Act of 1833 barred children under nine from textile mills, limited those aged 9 to 13 to 48 hours a week, and required them to get two hours of schooling a day. Parliament appointed four inspectors to enforce it across some 4,000 mills, and the law was widely evaded.

Skilled workers watched their trades collapse. A handloom weaver in east Lancashire could earn up to 23 shillings a week at the start of the 1800s. By 1826 it was 5 to 8 shillings, and families worked 16-hour days for it. The weavers went on strike, petitioned Parliament for a minimum wage, and finally, in April 1826, broke power looms.

The Luddites, who broke machines in Nottinghamshire, Yorkshire and Lancashire from 1811, are remembered as people who hated technology. The record is more specific. They were mostly skilled textile workers protesting employers who were using new machines to replace them and drive down wages. In 1812 Parliament made machine-breaking punishable by death. Troops were sent to the affected counties, and in January 1813, 17 men were hanged at York.

Time itself changed hands. The historian E. P. Thompson described how work moved from “task” time, where you worked until the job was done, the harvest was in or the cloth was finished, to clock time set by an employer and enforced with bells and fines. Railways then pulled the country onto one clock. Most British lines ran on Greenwich time by 1848, and the law made it the national standard in 1880.

And people moved. By 1851 more than half of Britain’s people lived in towns and cities, making it the first society to become mainly urban.

How the gains finally reached people

After 1840 the pattern reversed. Between 1840 and 1900, by Allen’s figures, output per worker rose 90 percent and real wages 123 percent. Life expectancy in the United Kingdom rose from about 43 in 1880 to 57 in 1920 and nearly 69 by 1950. For the first time, most people in a whole country could expect to live longer and more comfortably than their grandparents had.

Economists still argue about why the pause ended. Allen’s own model puts the weight on technology and investment. Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, in Power and Progress (2023), stress power: who decided how the machines were used, and who shared in what they made. No account disputes that the gains arrived alongside decades of fights over the rules:

• Factory laws. After 1833 came the safety act of 1844 and the ten-hour day of 1847 for women and teenagers in the mills.
• Public health. The Public Health Act of 1848, and London’s sewers, built after the “Great Stink” of 1858.
• School. Elementary schools for every child from 1870, compulsory from 1880.
• A voice. Trade unions made legal in 1871, and the vote extended to many working men in 1867 and 1884. The Chartists had petitioned for it in 1839, 1842 and 1848, and been refused every time.
• A floor under old age. State pensions in Germany from 1889 and in Britain from 1908.

None of that came with the steam engine. People demanded it, often for most of their working lives, and many did not live to see it.

What the industrial age taught people to expect

Many expectations we now take for granted were formed in those decades.

• A job. Work became a place you went, for an employer, for a wage, during set hours. Home and work came apart.
• The clock. Being on time became a virtue, and time off became something to win: shorter days, then a half day on Saturday, then the weekend.
• Progress. The idea that your children should live better than you became an ordinary expectation, and its failure became a political problem.
• A say. Working people came to expect a voice, through unions and the vote, in the rules that governed their work.
• A floor. Schools, sewers, inspectors and pensions: the expectation that some protection is owed to everyone, not left to an employer’s goodwill.

So which one is AI?

In one way, AI is a printing press. It makes knowledge work cheap to copy, adapt and combine, and that can widen who gets to do skilled work. In one of the most careful studies of AI at work so far, customer support agents given an AI assistant resolved 14 percent more issues per hour on average. The least experienced agents improved by 34 percent, while the most skilled gained little. The assistant seemed to pass along what the best agents already knew. That is a Renaissance-shaped result: skill spreading outward.

In another way, AI is a steam engine. It can do paid work, and its gains can flow to whoever owns and directs the machine. Nothing in the technology guarantees that the people who use it, or the people it serves, will share in what it produces. That is the shape of Engels’ pause.

And like the press, it fills the world with words faster than anyone can check them, some sound and some not, before the habits and institutions for trusting them are in place.

So the honest answer is that AI can become either. The press did not make the Renaissance good for ordinary people, and the steam engine did not end Engels’ pause. People did, slowly, by changing what they expected and what they would accept.

What we can choose this time

History gives us one real advantage: we know the questions in advance. The Lancashire weavers had no inspector, no minimum wage and no vote. We can ask now, while these tools are still finding their place in our homes and businesses.

• Expect tools to explain themselves. The Renaissance taught readers that authority has to make its case. An AI tool should show what it can see, what it is allowed to do, where your information goes, and who can change its rules.
• Keep the gains close to the work. In a small business, the Renaissance version of AI helps your newest employee work like your best one. The industrial version treats the same tool only as a way to pay for less work. Which one you build is a choice.
• Don’t wait two generations for the rules. Mill children waited decades for an inspector. Questions about privacy, ownership, and who is responsible when a tool gets something wrong can be settled sooner, in the products we choose and the terms we accept.
• Build trust before you need it. Check sources, keep a person in charge of decisions that matter, and prefer tools you can replace. Plentiful answers only help when you can tell which ones to trust.

That is why Ethoic Inc exists. Our line is short: useful intelligence, human control. We would like to help build the version of this era that people later call a renaissance, and mean it for everyone.

Neither the press nor the steam engine decided how its era felt to live through. People did, through what they demanded and what they built. The name this era earns is still ours to decide.