All disabled people have a right to be recognized as persons before the law on an equal basis with others (CRPD Article 12) and to work on an equal basis (CRPD Article 27). Understanding how industrialization created modern ableism—the idea that some bodies and minds are "normal" and others are "defective"—helps explain why these rights remain contested today. This page centers disabled people's expertise and is informed by disabled-led organizing globally.
Industrialization radically reshaped human labor, value, and social organization. Before factories, many societies found flexible ways for disabled people to contribute. With industrialization, bodies were measured against a new standard of speed, efficiency, and productivity.
Many modern disability issues trace directly back to this period: the "ideal worker" model still shapes hiring, scheduling, and workplace culture. Disability benefits and eligibility categories come from industrial-era ideas about "fit" and "unfit." Institutionalization and segregation remain common in new forms. Understanding this history helps explain why changing laws alone is not enough—the deeper structures were built over centuries and require structural change to dismantle.
Between about 1750 and 1900, industrialization:
In many pre-industrial societies:
For more detail, see Pre-Industrial Disability.
Factory work introduced:
Disabled people who did well in flexible systems often could not meet these new demands. Employers saw them as "unreliable," "unproductive," or "unfit," creating new forms of exclusion.
In the 1800s, governments and scientists increasingly used:
These tools created a statistical "average" or "normal" person. Anyone who fell too far from that average could be labeled "feeble-minded," "defective," "unfit for work," or "degenerate."
Once "normal" existed as a scientific category:
These ideas still shape modern disability systems.
Industrial cities grew faster than social support systems. Many governments responded by expanding poorhouses and almshouses for poor, elderly, and disabled people; workhouses where people had to perform labor to receive food and shelter; and asylums for people labeled "insane," "idiots," or "imbeciles."
Disabled people were often placed in these institutions because they were seen as unable to compete in the labor market, considered a burden on families or communities, or feared or misunderstood under new medical and moral frameworks.
These institutions segregated disabled people from community life, imposed strict rules, routines, and punishments, turned support into a tool of social control, and created new professional roles (doctors, superintendents, inspectors) who claimed authority over disabled people.
Many of the practices and attitudes developed in this period continued well into the 20th century.
Industrial work involved unprotected machinery, explosions, collapses, and fires in mines and factories, toxic chemicals, dust, and fumes, and long-term strain on backs, lungs, and joints.
Many workers became disabled through amputations, blindness and deafness, lung diseases and chronic pain, and traumatic brain injuries.
Instead of redesigning work to be safer and more inclusive, many employers fired injured workers, treated disability as personal misfortune, and pushed injured workers into poorhouses or onto families.
Over time, some countries created early workers' compensation systems, pensions for injured workers and veterans, and new legal categories like "industrial injury" and "occupational disease." These systems were often limited and paternalistic, but they did recognize that work created disability and that employers and states had some responsibility.
Industrial powers (such as Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, the Netherlands, and later the United States) spread their ideas about disability through colonization.
Colonial authorities introduced European-style hospitals, asylums, and schools; framed local and Indigenous disability practices as "superstition" or "ignorance"; used disability, illness, and "fitness" to justify racial hierarchies; and classified colonized peoples as "strong," "weak," "degenerate," or "primitive" based on racist and ableist ideas.
This often replaced or undermined community-based care systems, roles for disabled people in spiritual, cultural, or economic life, and collective responsibility models for support.
In many colonies, people were disabled by forced labor on plantations, mines, and public works. Injured workers were easily replaced and rarely compensated. Disability from colonial violence, famine, and disease was common but not tracked or acknowledged as such.
Industrial capitalism and colonialism together produced large populations of disabled people while denying them resources, recognition, or rights.
By the late 19th century, fears about "degeneration" and "racial decline" grew in many industrial societies. Elites worried that poor and disabled people were having "too many" children, that the "quality" of the population was declining, and that welfare and charity were "propping up" people they considered "unfit."
This created the conditions for eugenics, which would expand in the early 20th century. Eugenic ideas framed disability as a threat to the health of the nation, encouraged segregation, marriage restrictions, and institutionalization, and targeted poor, disabled, racialized, and immigrant communities.
The next page in this history series picks up here: Eugenics and Institutionalization (1880–1945).
Even during this period of rapid change and growing control, disabled people:
History often hides this resistance, but it laid important groundwork for later disability rights and independent living movements.
This page centers disabled people's expertise and is informed by disabled-led organizing globally. For questions or to suggest additions, see How to Contribute.