The Industrial Revolution was responsible for enormous changes in how people lived their everyday lives, not just how they made a living or how the things they used were made. Many of those changes were due to the spread of the transportation and communication technologies noted above. The speed of railway travel made everything "closer" together, and in doing so it started a long, slow process of tying together distant regions. People could travel to the capital cities of their kingdom or, later, their "nations," and the intense localism of the past started to fade. For the first time, members of the middle classes could travel just for fun - middle-class vacations were an innovation made possible by the railroad, and the first beneficiaries were the English middle class, who "went on holiday" to the seashore whenever they could. Simultaneously, new, more advanced printing presses and cheaper paper made newspapers and magazines available to a mass reading public. That encouraged the spread of not just information and news, but of shared written languages. People had to be able to read the "default" language of their nation, which encouraged the rise of certain specific vernaculars at the expense of the numerous dialects of the past. For example, "French" was originally simply the language spoken in the area around the city of Paris, just as "Spanish" was just the dialect spoken around Madrid. Rulers had long fought, unsuccessfully, to impose their language as the daily vernacular in the regions over which they ruled, but most people continued to speak regional dialects that often had little in common with the language of their monarch. With the centers of newspaper production often being in or near capital cities, usually written in the official language of state, more and more people at least acquired a decent working knowledge of those languages over time. Those capital cities grew enormously, especially in the second half of the nineteenth century. Industry, finance, government itself, and railroads all converged on capitals. Former suburbs were simply swallowed up as the cities grew, and there was often the sense among cultural elites that the only places that mattered were the capitals: London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, St. Petersburg, etc. One peculiar phenomenon arising from the importance of capital cities was that political revolutions often began as revolutions of a single city - if a crowd could take over the streets of Paris, for example, they might well send the king running for the proverbial hills and declare themselves to be a new government (which happened in 1830 and 1848). In some cases, the rest of the nation would read about the revolution in their newspapers or via telegraph after the revolution had already succeeded. While all of the cultural effects of the Industrial Revolution are too numerous to detail here, one other effect should be noted: the availability of food. With cheap and fast railway and steamship transport, not only could food travel hundreds or even thousands of miles from where it was grown or farmed or caught to where it was consumed, but the daily diet itself underwent profound changes. Tea grown in India became cheap enough for even working people to drink it daily; the same was true of South American coffee on the continent. Fruit appeared in markets half a world from where it was be grown, and the long term effect was a more varied (although not always more nutritious) diet. Whole countries sometimes became economic appendages of a European empire, producing a single product: for a time, New Zealand (which became a British colony in 1840) was essentially the British Empire’s sheep ranch.

Back in Europe, one unforeseen effect of the Industrial Revolution, tied to the misery of working conditions, was the creation of social classes. Until the modern era “class” was usually something one was born into; it was a legally-recognized and enforced “estate.” With industrialization, the enormous numbers of dirt-poor industrial workers began to recognize that their social identity was defined by their poverty and their working conditions, just as rich industrialists and tenement-owning slumlords recognized that they were united by their wealth and their common interest in controlling the workers. The non-noble rich and middle class came to distinguish themselves both from the working class and the old nobility by taking pride in their morality, sobriety, work ethic, and cleanliness. They often regarded the workers as little better than animals, but some also regarded the old nobles as corrupt, immoral, and increasingly archaic.

While they had little reason to consider it, the industrial workers of northern England lived in a state of misery that was tied to another that was even worse across the Atlantic: the slave-based cotton economy of the American south which provided the raw material. Despite the British ban on the trans-Atlantic slave trade in 1807, the existing population of African-American slaves was sustained by natural reproduction and remained locked in a position of complete legal subservience, enforced with brutal violence. In a startling parallel, the efficiency of cotton production increased to keep pace with textile manufacturing in Britain despite the absence of major new technologies besides the invention of the cotton gin in 1794. That increase was due to the application of ever-increasing degrees of brutality, as slaves were forced to pick and process cotton at unprecedented speed, spurred on by raw violence at the hands of overseers.

The living conditions, however, were abysmal. Whole families were crammed into one-room cellars, hovels, and cheap apartments. Pollution produced by the new factories streamed unfiltered into the air and water. Soot and filth covered every surface - early evolutionary biologists noted that certain moths that had a mutation that made them soot-brown survived and multiplied while their normal lightly-colored cousins died off. To deal with the pollution, factory owners simply started building taller smokestacks, which spread the pollution farther. Waste from mining (which was often toxic) was simply left in “slag heaps,” through which rainwater ran and from which toxic runoff reached water supplies. A coal miner who entered the mines as a teenager would almost certainly be dead by “middle age,” (40 at the oldest) since his or her lungs were ridden with toxic coal dust. Landlords in the cities took advantage of the influx of laborers and their families by building cheap tenements in which several families often lived in a single room. There was no running water and sanitation was utterly inadequate. Food was expensive, in part because of an 1815 act in the British Parliament called the Corn Laws that banned the importation of grain and kept prices up (the wealthy, land-owning gentry class had pushed the law through parliament). Given the incredible squalor, epidemics were frequent. In turn, wages were paid at a near-subsistence level until after (roughly) 1850. Whenever there was a market downturn, sometimes lasting for years (e.g. 1839 – 1842), workers were summarily fired to cut costs, and some starved as a result.

Likewise, the telegraph was invented in 1830 and used initially to warn train stations when multiple trains were on the track. Telegraphs allowed almost instant communication over huge distances - they sent a series of electrical impulses over a wire as "long" and "short" signals. The inventor of the telegraph, Samuel Morse, invented a code based off of those signals that could be translated into letters and, as a result, be used to sent messages. Morse Code thus enabled the first modern mass communications device. This was the first time when a message could travel faster than could a messenger on horseback, vastly increasing the speed by which information could be shared and disseminated. Simultaneously, steamships were transforming long-distance commerce. The first sailed in 1816, going about twice as fast as the fastest sailing ship could. This had obvious repercussions for trade, because it became cheaper to transport basic goods via steamship than it was to use locally-produced ones; this had huge impacts on agriculture and forestry, among other industries. Soon, it became economically viable to ship grain from the United States or Russia across oceans to reach European markets. The first transatlantic crossing was a race between two steamships going from England to New York in 1838; soon, sailing vessels became what they are today: archaic novelties.