What was the situation of a coal miner in England in the 1800s? How much freedom did he have to make life choices, or escape the background into which he had been born? What of those forced into child labor in countries such as England, pushed before the age of ten into dangerous textile factories or agricultural work? As one recent author on slavery conceded, the life expectancy for slaves in Demerara was exactly twice the life expectancy of an industrial worker in Lancashire or Yorkshire at the same time. Is there anything to learn from this? In the case of that particular historian, the
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