> When the industrial revolution brought things like power looms to the UK, it wasn’t exactly fun times for all. It was still a step up from the previous condition of serfdom and subsistence farming.

Serfdom effectively ended in the UK and France somewhere around the 1300s, with the Black Death probably being the single biggest impetus towards ending Serfdom. Queen Elizabeth outlawed serfdom for good in England in 1574, well before the Industrial Revolution.

Intriguingly, while serfdom was dying off in Western Europe, it was starting in Central and Eastern Europe, where it was only killed off by the Revolutions of 1848. But, as we all should know, the Industrial Revolution had its birth not in Germany but in Britain.

I'm not an expert on the Early Modern economy in the UK, but I also think that subsistence farming would be an adequate description for the UK rural economy in the 18th century. A lot of people would have been employed in the putting-out system for fabric manufacture. Given that farming itself being mechanized doesn't happen until the late 19th century, well after we see the rise of the industrial factories in concentrated cities, there had to be enough agricultural surplus from the rural areas to sustain large urban centers, so that doesn't seem like it would be subsistence agriculture.