AHC less brutal Industrial Revolution

In England the Industrial revolution was linked to extreme exploitation of people driven from the land by enclosures.


Stalin's methods are well known.

Coudl a nation have industrialized whilst offering early factory workers humane conditions?
 
From what I can think of, a gentle industrial revolution needs the workers to be valued highly enough that any health risks must be avoided for the good of the workers. For this, I think you need a nation with a population shortage, or an incredibly hands on and rediculously humanist ruler. Maybe have a great war style war kill off some incredibly high number of the young men in a country, and then have an industrialization drive as part of the post war resolution to be stronger and not suffer like that again.
 
I'd say it depends on your definition of humane. No preindustrial society can produce the surplus to allow a growing population what we would consider a decent life. Any industrial revolution depends on both a sufficient customer base and available wage labour, so even if you posit the customers are elsewhere, you will have to have a lot of poor people, and being poor in a premodern world is a very bad thing to be (non-poor will not be wage labour because the early industrial developments cannot pay enough to compete with other forms of earning a living).

The best chance I could see would be the industrial revolution taking its beginnings in an export-oriented industry (maybe the Flemish textile manufactures of the late medieval period?) where the wage labour is largely provided by dependents as a way of supplementing family earnings. That way, you would not have as much of an issue with an emerging proletariat.

There was a system like that in the early United States, with young women working in factopries for a limted period to earn dowries and seasonally employed men doing manufacturing work in their downtime. Of course, the industrial revolution did not start there, and it's not likely that under the circumstances it could have. But if you are just looking for a way in which a country can industrialise without being very nasty, a society with a surplius of land and natural resources is a good starting point. Employers in the USA had to compete with freeholder farming in terms of the standard of living they offered. Hence their strong interest in securing populations excluded from the settler boom (underprivileged immigrant groups were appreciated).
 
And to reinforce what CB implied, conditions available in general are pretty inhumane. Or at best, desperate.

Living as anyone who isn't fairly well to do before about 1900 (at OTL's pace for Europe and the USA) just plain sucks.
 
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