ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the comparison which was made frequently in England in the nineteenth century between the factory children of England and the slaves of the West Indies and the Americas. No social phenomenon of the industrial revolution in England has been used more than child employment as a moral measure of industrialization, of the factory owners, of the government of the day, and, finally, of those historians who have written about the effect of the industrial revolution on the working classes. The comparison between child labour and slavery, however, should not end here. There are also interesting and revealing similarities about the debates on these two social evils. The anti-slavery and anti-child employment movements described factory children and slaves as victims of a selfish and amoral society, and argued that it followed that the method of control and/or abolition should rest with society, with the state rather than with individuals.
