Of these myriad new professions that emerged when people congregated in cities, two entirely new classes of work were especially important. The first was a by-product of the invention of writing, and the second of the emergence and increasing power of the merchants who controlled the allocation and distribution of energy and other resources procured from the countryside.
Related Quotes
It was because in the pulsing, plural hearts of big cities, people found companionship and comfort among others who did similar work and so shared similar experiences, with the result that in cities peopleās individual social identities often merged with the trades they performed.
The embrace of conspicuous consumption was at first confined to the aristocratic and well-to-do merchant classes, but as more and more people became dependent on cash wages rather than the product of their own labors, consumption became more influential in shaping both the fortunes and the aspirations of what would later be referred to as the working classes.
Over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the desire of poorer people in cities across Europe to consume what were once luxuries enjoyed only by the very rich was just as influential in shaping the history of work as the invention of technologies to exploit the energy in fossil fuels. Without it, there would have been no markets for mass-produced items, and without markets the factories would never have been built. It also rewrote the rules by which much of the economy operated. The growth of Britainās economy increasingly came to depend on people employed in manufacturing and other industries reinvesting their wages in the very same products they and their factory workers manufactured.
He was also the first to realize that in the modern era most people went to work to make money rather than products, and that it was the factories themselves that made actual things.
For much of human history, these immediate social networks took the form of multi-generational communities that were rooted in shared geography, expressed through the intimacy of kinship, shared religious beliefs, rituals, practices, and values, and were nourished by working and living in the same environments and experiencing similar things. But in densely packed cities, most individualsā extended social networks take the form of complex intersecting mosaics of relationships cobbled together from our involvement in a whole series of sometimes very different interests and hobbies. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, for many of us our regular social networks are made up of people we have worked with or encountered at work.