Before the Industrial Revolution, people worked in small-scale businesses. The two primary and predominant examples, are farming and artisan handicrafts. Those social structures had basically remained unchanged, since the Middle Ages.
Life was lived in small to medium sized villages. Travel beyond a person’s village was rare. Then, during the middle decades of the 18th century, Britain and other European countries saw a rise in their population. In order to serve this increased number of people, a gradual transformation from villages and small-scale production into a large, mechanized system of higher productivity took place. Read more about this transformative time in history: Source: National Geographic
