Theme 2: Industrialization Produces Both Prosperity and Misery

This is one of the great moral tensions of modern history. Industrial economies generated vast wealth and eventually raised average living standards higher than at any previous time in human history. But the early decades concentrated that wealth in the hands of a few while subjecting workers (including children) to brutal conditions. Maria should be able to evaluate industrialization from multiple perspectives, neither romanticizing it nor dismissing its real achievements.