skopia
Two revolutions, one political in France and one industrial in Britain, fused into a single upheaval that remade work, politics, art, and belief. Historians still carve up the nineteenth century along Hobsbawm's lines.
Etienne Lantier takes work in a French coal pit and talks the starving miners into striking. Zola went down a real mine to write this, and you feel the rock overhead.
Thompson follows English weavers, artisans, and radicals from the 1780s to the 1830s and shows them making themselves into a class. He wrote to rescue them from the enormous condescension of posterity.
Wealth is not gold in a vault but what a country produces, and specialization multiplies it. Smith begins with ten men making pins and every economic argument since descends from him.