Riflebird M

“If this organizational competence strikes one as surprising, remember that both Babel and the British government made a great mistake in assuming all antisilver movements of the century were spontaneous riots carried out by uneducated, discontented lowlifes.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel, or The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution

“Is it really as bad as all that?’ Robin asked Abel. ‘The factories, I mean.’ ‘Worse,’ said Abel. ‘Those are just the freak accidents they’re reporting on. But they don’t say what it’s like to work day after day on those cramped floors. Rising before dawn and working until nine with few breaks in between. And those are the conditions we covet. The jobs we wish we could get back. I imagine they don’t make you work half as hard at university, do they?”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel, or The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution

“In 1833, the surgeon Peter Gaskell had published a thoroughly researched manuscript entitled The Manufacturing Population of England, focusing chiefly on the moral, social, and physical toll of silver-working machinery on British labourers. It had gone largely unheeded at the time, except by the Radicals, who were known to exaggerate everything. Now, the antiwar papers ran excerpts from it every day, reporting in grisly detail the coal dust inhaled by small children forced to wriggle into tunnels that adults could not, the fingers and toes lost to silver-powered machines working at inhuman speeds, the girls who’d been strangled by their own hair caught in whirring spindles and looms.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel, or The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution

“The silver industrial revolution had decimated both the textile and agricultural industries. The papers ran piece after piece exposing the horrific working conditions inside silver-powered factories”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel, or The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution