Final answer:
The term 'white slaves of England' during the Industrial Revolution typically refers to factory workers who endured oppressive and exploitative conditions.
Step-by-step explanation:
During the Industrial Revolution in England, the term “white slaves of England” is often associated with the factory workers. These individuals, including men, women, and children, worked under oppressive conditions that involved long hours, low wages, and unsafe work environments. However, this term can also extend to other laborers such as child laborers, coal miners, and agricultural laborers, who all faced harsh and exploitative work conditions. In the context of the early nineteenth-century textile mills, the best characterization of textile mill workers is D. young farm women whose behavior was closely monitored. Factories at the time employed unskilled laborers, leading to a workforce that included vast numbers of landless people who flocked to cities looking for work, while the regulation of their behavior and lives was stringently controlled by employers who enforced specific work rules known as shop-floor discipline.
The plight of these workers became a subject of social critique, as reflected in the literature of the time by authors like William Blake and Charles Dickens. Although workers were technically “free” to leave their jobs, the economic realities of the time meant that many had little choice but to continue toiling in hazardous conditions for subsistence wages. This contributed to a widely held perception that workers were functionally tied to their work in a manner not dissimilar to slavery, hence the rueful nickname “white slaves.”