Sanitary conditions before the Industrial Revolution
Last updated: 2026-08-22
This article is part of the Intermediate course on Libertarianism and the Austrian School of Economics -> The Industrial Revolution
Sanitary conditions in England before the Industrial Revolution (mainly the 17th and 18th centuries) were extremely precarious by any modern standard. There was no “golden age” of rural or urban cleanliness. Dirt, water contamination, and infectious diseases were a daily part of life for the great majority of the population.
1. Water, waste, and streets
- There were no modern sewer systems. The open ditches of the cities were used as latrines. Chamber pots were emptied directly into the street.
- Butchers killed animals in their shops and threw the offal into the public way. Animal carcasses were left to rot where they fell.
- Cesspits (latrine pits) were dug near wells, systematically contaminating the drinking water.
- The rivers (including the Thames) functioned as open sewers. In 17th-century London the air was already described as “an impure and thick mist… that corrupts the lungs.”
- Pigs and other animals wandered freely through the streets, adding more manure to the surroundings.
Lawrence Stone, in his classic study of the English family between 1500 and 1800, sums up the urban picture:
“The city ditches, often filled with stagnant water, were commonly used as latrines… the result of these primitive sanitary conditions was constant outbursts of bacterial stomach infections, the most fearful of all being dysentery.”
2. Mortality: figures that speak for themselves
- Life expectancy at birth at the national level: around 35–40 years at the beginning of the 17th century. It worsened between 1650 and 1740 (reaching levels close to 30 years in some periods).
- Infant mortality (deaths in the first year of life):
- National: frequently between 150 and 200 per 1,000 live births.
- In London in the mid-18th century: between 300 and 400 per 1,000 (that is, one in three or almost one in two babies died before turning one).
- Even in small market towns (2,000–3,000 inhabitants) rates of 209–270 per 1,000 were recorded.
- Many children did not reach the age of five. In London, fewer than half of those born reached that age in certain periods.
Cities were “demographic sinks”: they only maintained themselves or grew thanks to constant migration from the countryside, because urban mortality exceeded the birth rate.
3. Housing, personal hygiene, and diseases
- The dwellings of the poor usually had dirt floors, thatched roofs, little ventilation, and were sometimes shared with animals.
- A full bath was rare. Woolen clothes were washed infrequently, which favored lice and fleas.
- Chronic and epidemic diseases: dysentery, typhus, smallpox, tuberculosis, malaria in marshy areas, intestinal worms, and every kind of gastrointestinal infection from contaminated water and food.
- The cemeteries of the poor (“poor holes”) were open pits in which corpses were stacked until they were filled; the stench was proverbial.
4. Austrian and historical perspective
From the Austrian and libertarian tradition a key point is insisted upon: these conditions were not created by industrial capitalism (all of this consists of events prior to capitalism and the industrial revolution). They were the normal state of preindustrial society.
The Industrial Revolution concentrated more people in cities and, in its first decades, made some sanitary problems more visible.
However, the increase in productivity and in real wealth generated by capitalism was precisely what made it possible, from the mid- and late 19th century onward, to finance the great systems of drinking water, sewers, and housing improvement that finally reduced mortality drastically.
The idea of a “clean and healthy” preindustrial past is a romantic myth.
The reality was dirty, smelly, full of infectious diseases, and with an infant mortality that today is found only in the worst areas of extremely poor countries.
This article is part of the Intermediate course on Libertarianism and the Austrian School of Economics -> The Industrial Revolution
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Last updated: 2026-06-03
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