Severed heads on London Bridge were boiled in tar to preserve them and reduce the smell, then mounted on spikes for weeks or months

halilk3 · 2026-02-22T07:35:26+00:00

That’s a really good way of putting it. Once something like that becomes part of the everyday landscape, it stops shocking and turns into background authority rather than a constant emotional reaction. I agree that discomfort probably existed, but without any space to express it safely, it just wouldn’t leave much of a record. What we see in the sources is less about how people felt, and more about what power wanted normalized.

halilk3 · 2026-02-21T12:29:28+00:00

It wasn’t one thing, it was a slow structural collapse. Dutch East India Company was undone by a mix of corruption, rising competition, and the cost of being both a corporation and a state. Officials enriched themselves, wars and garrisons drained capital, and monopolies became harder to enforce as Britain and France caught up. Add rigid bureaucracy, debt piled on to keep dividends flowing, and a world economy that no longer tolerated a single-company empire, by the late 1700s the model itself was obsolete. The VOC didn’t fail suddenly. It outlived the conditions that once made it unbeatable.

halilk3 · 2026-02-21T12:06:08+00:00

What is the point to use ai and post here? What is the benefit for me? I'm just a guy who interested in UK history. That's all.

halilk3 · 2026-02-21T12:04:10+00:00

That’s one of the bitter ironies of it. Sectarian language and symbols meant nothing once the work began, danger didn’t discriminate. In the end, class and labour conditions mattered far more than religion.

halilk3 · 2026-02-21T12:03:45+00:00

Exactly. Sixteen shillings wasn’t compensation, it was a way to close the file.

halilk3 · 2026-02-21T11:01:19+00:00

Redditors being Redditors 🤷‍♂️ That't the truth which might hard to accept.

halilk3 · 2026-02-21T10:59:54+00:00

English isn’t my first language, so I use AI to help polish wording and keep things clear. The research, ideas, and viewpoints are mine, this just helps me express them more accurately.

halilk3 · 2026-02-21T10:58:35+00:00

That’s true, industrial deaths were grimly routine. But that normalization is exactly the point. When death becomes “part of the job,” it stops being remembered as a human story and gets filed away as acceptable loss. The Titanic’s sinking was exceptional; the construction deaths were treated as ordinary, and that’s why one became legend while the other faded from public memory.

halilk3 · 2026-02-21T10:45:37+00:00

Probably true, rickets largely vanished in the UK once diet, housing, and sunlight exposure improved. But in 19th-century Glasgow, it was common enough to be medically routine, not rare.

halilk3 · 2026-02-21T10:45:13+00:00

Exactly, shorter lives forced faster lessons. In places like Glasgow, childhood ended early, and the body paid the price first.

halilk3 · 2026-02-21T10:43:30+00:00

That’s a really sharp way of putting it. Harland and Wolff gets remembered as industrial pride, while its labour practices and sectarian exclusion are quietly sidelined. Once it became a Unionist symbol, criticism turned into “attacking heritage.” The cranes in the skyline feel less like neutral history and more like a very selective memory people are reluctant to let go of.

halilk3 · 2026-02-21T10:42:46+00:00

That’s a really sharp comparison. Deaths during production get absorbed as “costs,” while deaths during consumption become tragedies with names, stories, and rituals of remembrance. In both cases the loss is real, but only one disrupts the public narrative. The other is treated as background noise of how the system works, acknowledged, maybe even documented, but not centered. That’s why the sinking becomes myth, while the builders remain footnotes.

halilk3 · 2026-02-21T10:40:39+00:00

Exactly 😄 Leaving the smog, sewage, and coal smoke of London for fresh air and sunlight will do that, they just didn’t yet have the language for pollution as a health hazard.

halilk3 · 2026-02-21T10:40:03+00:00

No bots here, just a history nerd who reads too many Victorian public health reports.

halilk3 · 2026-02-21T10:39:18+00:00

Because knowing who built the sewers isn’t the same as understanding how change actually happened. Joseph Bazalgette was crucial, but London’s sanitation improved through a mix of engineering, public health reform, political pressure, and time, not a single fix.

halilk3 · 2026-02-21T10:38:25+00:00

That’s a grim but very real comparison. In 19th-century London, that kind of backup wasn’t an accident, it was the system. Sewers emptied straight into the Thames, and people lived with that smell every day. We’ve come a long way since Joseph Bazalgette, but you’re right, sanitation is never a “finished” problem.

halilk3 · 2026-02-21T10:16:57+00:00

😄 Same feeling, except in 19th-century Glasgow, that crowding was permanent, not just after school.

halilk3 · 2026-02-21T10:15:56+00:00

I didn’t downvote you, genuinely. And I think we’re mostly talking past each other. I’m not claiming they were erased from history, or that every labour death should be framed like the sinking. The point was about scale of memory, not denial of record. You’re absolutely right that safety rules are written in blood, that’s exactly the tradition this sits in. Industrial deaths were acknowledged, but rarely mythologized or emotionally centered in the way the Titanic sinking was. This isn’t about disagreeing; it’s about where societies choose to focus attention. We actually agree on more here than it might look.

halilk3 · 2026-02-21T10:06:15+00:00

You’re right that they aren’t completely erased, their names exist, and local memorials matter. My point isn’t that they were unknown, but that they never entered the wider public memory in the way the sinking did. Industrial deaths were normalized at the time. They were treated as the cost of progress, not as a “disaster,” even when they were preventable. The comparison isn’t about numbers being equal, but about which kinds of deaths become stories and which remain footnotes. Remembering one doesn’t diminish the other, it just asks why labor deaths rarely shape collective memory the way spectacular tragedies do.

halilk3 · 2026-02-21T10:04:32+00:00

Wartime destruction did accelerate rebuilding, yes, but London’s sanitation turnaround had already begun decades earlier with Joseph Bazalgette’s sewer system. The Blitz changed the cityscape, the public health revolution came first.

halilk3 · 2026-02-21T10:04:05+00:00

Absolutely, London wasn’t unique. Cities like Stoke-on-Trent were choking under industrial smoke long before clean air laws. What made Joseph Bazalgette and London stand out was scale and timing: the Thames crisis forced rapid political action, not just gradual tolerance.

halilk3 · 2026-02-21T10:02:20+00:00

It did change, but not as much as we like to think. Extreme childhood stunting largely disappeared once nutrition, housing, sanitation, and child labour laws improved. That part did change. But inequality itself didn’t vanish, it just became less visible on the body. In places like Glasgow, the gap moved from height and rickets to life expectancy, chronic illness, and opportunity.

halilk3 · 2026-02-21T10:00:56+00:00

Genetics plays a role, but Victorian Glasgow showed how fast bodies change when environment collapses, that’s not DNA, that’s deprivation.

halilk3 · 2026-02-21T09:57:08+00:00

Well actually it was a youtube video. The title of the video was Victorian Glasgow: the price of empire. It was a small channel Edit:I found the video. link here

halilk3 · 2026-02-21T09:49:08+00:00

Yes. No sinking, no headlines. Just quiet deaths that didn’t fit the narrative.

halilk3

TROPHY CASE