“The fact that life before the modern era was more violent, squalid, ignorant, and dangerous is perhaps the most important realization that an educated person should command because it underpins everything that makes life meaningful today: knowledge, universal human rights, and the confidence that human ingenuity and fellow feeling can improve our condition. Yet most people are unaware of how life was lived before modernity, seduced by romantic images or misled by revisionist quibbles and asterisks. This richly researched and vividly written book sets the record straight. Every student and intellectually curious person should read it.”

– Steven Pinker, Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology, Harvard University, and author of Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (2018)

“Too many of us have a view of the past, and particularly the premodern past, as somehow better than the present. Even if we accept that it was poorer, surely that was compensated for by greater meaning or stronger social connections? This is the definitive answer to such sentimental nonsense. . . . Read this and give thanks for your good fortune in being alive now and not in the grim old days.”

– Stephen Davies, historian and author of The Wealth Explosion: The Nature and Origins of Modernity (2019)

“This book is a rich feast of horrors: a detailed, scholarly but eloquent account of just how cruel, violent, filthy, prejudiced, and tedious life was in the past for almost everybody, even the rich. Chelsea Follett reminds us to dispel nostalgia and stop taking the wonders of the modern world for granted.”

– Matt Ridley, scientist and author of The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (2010)

“In 1954, F. A. Hayek edited Capitalism and the Historians, a book that refuted the myth that capitalism banished a green and pleasant pre-industrial existence. Now comes Chelsea Follett with an even more powerful demolition of capitalism’s critics. Read it and rejoice that the enemies of progress lost their argument against economic freedom.”

– George F. Will, columnist, Washington Post

“In this engaging and richly documented account of daily life of common people in the past, Follett eviscerates the widely believed myths of the good old days. Life before industrialization was, as Hobbes once put it, ‘poor, nasty, brutish, and short.’ It was also uncomfortable, disease-ridden, insecure, and painful. Anyone believing the idealization of past days, so common in circles of ‘de-growth,’ should regard this book as mandatory reading.”

– Joel Mokyr, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics (2025), Northwestern University