What can I learn about the society that produced this document?

After having read Ure’s work the first thing I can learn from the document is how society in these times was being divided. It was divided into two general and basic groups which were: the workers that were being replaced by the machines and the manufacturers that were looking to gain wealth with machines. What I can also learn about the society is that the merchants were abusing the working class, and what I mean by this is that they were being overworked and underpaid, and by no means were the workers taking care of their employees because the second that the machines started rolling in the merchants simply started firing and replacing their workers with no prior warning. This document is a predecessor to the events leading up to the revolt of the working class because these machines were taking away their jobs and livelihood. Ure writes from the perspective of someone who is in favor of machines and them being a part of the labor world from now on, it gives us an insight into what the wealthier people of this time saw this industrialization as, which was an opportunity to get more work, of better quality, for less money, which in turn makes them wealthier because they don’t need to hire skilled workers like they used to do. The more obvious thing you can learn from this document is who was in favor of industrialization and who was not. The social stratum that produced this document, the society that Ure was a part of was in favor of this because they saw this industrialization as an economic opportunity, not thinking of the working class. Ure says that the workers that did everything by hand had deteriorating health because of their arduous work as sort of a way to justify leaving them jobless as if it were a favor merchants were doing for the working class by giving them less arduous work, but this just shows that this social stratum has this superiority complex where they felt like everything they were doing was for the good of the classes “inferior to them” when in reality machines were something that mostly benefited them at the beginning. Something else I learned about the society that produced this document is that they guided themselves with knowledge and science, something that Ure proves time and time again with remarks like trying to prove biblical happenings with geology and other sciences, as well as talking about machines as “physio- mechanical science bestowed upon society. what this document leaves the clearest to me are the intentions this stratum of society had, meaning that they were constantly looking for the means to remain in power and with wealth, and machinery and reducing skilled work was the way to do this in these times, with little to no regard for the quality of life of the working class. Although this society was indeed looking for further improvement of the way things were done in this time, and to actually modernize and move forward, rather than going back to time by employing more and more workers to work by hand, this stratum of society was more into modernizing and improving the ways of life for an easier and more efficient future for mankind, despite their economical intentions behind some of this modernization.