Lancashire · 1815–1880 · Three generations
The 1812 Survival Simulator
Lancashire, 1815. You are 22, a skilled handloom weaver. The mills run day and night, and every year the cloth merchant pays you less. This game spans three generations: you, your children, your grandchildren. Thirty decisions. See where your family ends up.
StartFree · No sign-up · About 6–8 minutes
Data & sources
- The Blanketeers' march, March 1817.
- Chadwick, E. (1842). Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain.
- The Great Chicago Fire, October 1871.
- The 1832 cholera epidemic in Britain.
- American Civil War, 1861–1865.
- The Corn Laws, 1815–1846.
- The Lancashire Cotton Famine, 1861–1865.
- Grain markets during the Crimean War, 1853–1856.
- Handloom weavers and the depression of 1837–1842; see also Bythell, D. (1969). The Handloom Weavers.
- Elementary Education Act 1870.
- Steerage fares to Quebec on returning timber ships, roughly £2–3 per adult in the 1830s–1840s (e.g. Cowan, H. I. (1961). British Emigration to British North America).
- Factory Act 1833.
- Destruction of Stocking Frames, etc. Act 1812 (52 Geo. 3 c. 16), the Frame-Breaking Act.
- The 'grain invasion' and the British agricultural depression from the 1870s.
- The Grange (Order of Patrons of Husbandry), founded 1867.
- The Great Exhibition, 1851.
- Grosse Île and the 1847 typhus epidemic.
- Homestead Act of 1862.
- The Great Famine in Ireland, 1845–1849.
- Liverpool and Manchester Railway, opened 15 September 1830.
- Rocky Mountain locust plagues, 1873–1877.
- Luddites: the York Special Commission, January 1813; 12,000 troops (Hobsbawm).
- Manchester Mechanics' Institute, founded 1824 (forerunner of UMIST).
- Overend, Gurney and Company collapse, May 1866.
- The Panic of 1825.
- The Panic of 1857.
- The Panic of 1873 and the Long Depression.
- The Peterloo Massacre, 16 August 1819.
- The 1842 general strike (Plug Plot riots).
- Poor Law Amendment Act 1834.
- Lancashire power-loom riots, April 1826.
- Preemption Act of 1841.
- The Preston lockout, 1853–1854.
- Railway Mania, 1845–1847.
- Reform Act 1867.
- First transcontinental railroad, completed May 1869.
- Trade Union Act 1871; Conspiracy and Protection of Property Act 1875.
- Land Act of 1820: US public land at $1.25 per acre.
- Acemoglu, D. & Johnson, S. (2024). Learning from Ricardo and Thompson: Machinery and Labor in the Early Industrial Revolution, and in the Age of AI. Annual Review of Economics (citing G. H. Wood's handloom weavers' wage series).
- The Year Without a Summer, 1816.