Actually conditions were utterly miserable for “the crofters of Scotland and tenant farmers of Ireland.”
The crofters were in most cases quite literally forced off their farms by landlords who wanted to use the land more profitably.
The Irish were in many cases forced to leave when unable to pay their rents due to the Famine. (Although it’s not widely known that Scotland had a Potato Famine of its own.)
Both groups (or the survivors and descendants thereof) were in the long run MUCH better off. But that didn’t ease the misery of those directly affected.
Should also be noted that, in England anyway, a great many of those who migrated from the farms to the factories were landless farm laborers. For most of them, doing so was a considerable step up.
Rural poverty is dispersed and less in-your-face than urban poverty. But it’s no more fun for the poor themselves. City life offers at least the illusion of possibility of improvement. Life as a farm laborer does not. As can be seen by the continued migration to cities around the world.
IOW, it’s complicated, and to my mind you’re both partly right and partly wrong
The industrial revolution was disruptive, and there were winners and losers, but absolutely no one alive in an industrialized country today would be better off living the life of a landless farm laborer in the early 19th Century.
1.No one was “forced off the farms”, people flocked to factories because the wages and working conditions were so vastly preferable.
And
2.OMG, you swallowed the Marxist interpretation of the Industrial Revolution whole!
The second is as thoughtless as the first.
