by Kevin Reilly
Toward Economic Modernity
Machines and Factories
New Wealth
Urbanization
Capitalism
Death Rates and Birthrates
Humanity and Nature
Class and Industrial Society
Aristocrats and Peasants
“Only a Weaver”
“Middling Classes”
Working Classes
Women, Factories, and the Home
New Views of the “Home”
Children
Politics and War
The Political Revolution
Kings and Commoners
Making New Societies
The “Enlightenment”
Liberalism
Who Benefited?
The Revolution beyond America and France
Slave Rebellion and Independence Movements
Challenging Old Oppressions
Variations on a Theme
The British and French Paths
The German Path
The Path of the United States
The Russian Path
New Identities, New Conflicts
Socialism
Utopian Socialism
Marxism
Socialist Parties
Nationalism
Nationalism as a Modern Idea
The Origins of Nationalism
Creating Nations
The Power of the National Idea
Feminism
Roots of Feminism
Feminist Beginnings
The Achievements of Feminism
Backlash
Conclusion: Modernity as Revolution
WORLD HISTORY seldom turns sharp corners, especially in as little as a century or two. But in 150 years, roughly between 1750 and 1900, two distinct and related processes marked a decisive turn in human affairs. One was the breakthrough to distinctly “modern” societies, a process that occurred first in western Europe and derived from the English industrial revolution and from the political revolution that swept England, France, and North America. These upheavals unfolded in the second half of the eighteenth century, and their example and influence echoed in varying degrees elsewhere in Europe and the Americas, Russia, Japan, and other parts of the world in the nineteenth century and after. This modern transformation gave rise to enormous changes in virtually every aspect of life, raising some individuals, groups, and nations to dizzying heights of power and wealth while casting others, at least temporarily, into new forms of poverty and dependence. Virtually no one and nothing remained unchanged.
Nor did its influence stop at the borders of those countries that experienced it most fully, for this breakthrough to modernity clearly made possible the second major process—the unprecedented global extension of European and North American political, economic, and cultural power over the rest of the planet. The peoples of Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and elsewhere now found themselves threatened by Europe’s unsurpassed military might, increasingly drawn into economic networks centered in Europe, confronted by ideas (both secular and religious) that derived from Europe, and incorporated against their will into European colonial empires. Never before had one region of the world exercised such extensive power and influence.
In exploring the making of the first modern societies, the spotlight of world history focuses temporarily on the western tip of the Eurasian landmass, where that transformation was first experienced. Western Europe became for a time the global center of technological, economic, and cultural innovation much as other regions had played that role in earlier periods. Mesopotamia and Egypt had long ago pioneered advanced agriculture and urban civilization (around 3000-3500 BCE). The ancient Greeks developed ways of thinking and political organization that had a profound influence in the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern regions (500 BCE-200 CE). India had generated Buddhism, advanced mathematics, and numerous agricultural innovations, all of which spread widely in the first millennium CE. The Arab people gave rise to a new religion (Islam) and to an expanding and enormously creative civilization (600-1600 CE). China was clearly the global leader in technological innovation between 1000 and 1500 CE and exercised a profound influence throughout the Eurasian world.1 All these “flowerings” produced ripples of influence and circles of interaction far beyond their points of origin. So too did the modern transformation of western European societies. Theirs was a unique but not an unprecedented process.
Why Europe?
A Historian’s Debate
At the heart of the breakthrough to modernity was the industrial revolution. But why should western Europe in general and Great Britain in particular have been at the center of this enormous disturbance in human affairs? Few people living in 1700 or 1750 would have predicted that the endlessly quarrelsome societies of western Europe would soon lead the world to a wholly new kind of economy and to a greatly altered balance of global power. But in the nineteenth century, Europeans did precisely that. In doing so, they have presented historians, especially world historians, with one of their most sharply debated questions: how to explain this European breakthrough to an industrial society and the global power that followed from it. Why Europe?
Was Europe Unique?
One kind of answer lies in some unique quality—or combination of qualities—lying deep in Europe’s history, society, culture, or environment that gave it a decisive advantage over all other regions and led inexorably toward the industrial revolution. For well over a century, scholars have argued about what, precisely, it might be.
A Favorable Environment? For some, the environment provided an important clue to European economic success: winters cold enough to kill infectious microorganisms that so infested Asian and African populations but warm enough to sustain a productive agriculture, plentiful and regular rainfall rather than the seasonal downpours of India and Africa, more limited exposure to natural disasters (volcanoes, earthquakes, cyclones, floods, and droughts) that afflicted less favored areas—and coal. A rich supply of that critical fuel, so important as a source of energy as firewood became more scarce and expensive, was located close to major centers of economic activity in Great Britain and certainly facilitated the first industrial revolution, whereas in China coal fields lie deep in the interior, far removed from population concentrations and urban centers near the coast.
The Advantage of Backwardness? Other candidates for the source of the “European miracle” abound. The relative “newness” of Europe’s civilization, emerging only after 1000 CE, may help explain European willingness to borrow from others—scientific treatises from the Arabs, mathematical concepts from India, the compass, gunpowder, and printing from China—while Chinese and Islamic societies, long accustomed to success and prominence in their regions, felt that they had little to learn from outsiders. It is what some historians have called the “advantages of backwardness.”
The Absence of Unity? The political character of European civilization—a system of separate and competing states rather than a unified empire such as China or the Ottoman Empire—may likewise have stimulated innovation and served as “an insurance against . . . stagnation.”2 And within these newly emerging states, urban merchants had perhaps greater freedom and security of property than their counterparts in the stronger and more solidly established states of Asia and the Middle East. Frequent conflict between the Catholic pope and various European monarchs and the further divide between Protestants and Catholics only added to the pluralism of European society. Thus, Europe’s “failure” to achieve consensus and uniformity in both religious and political life arguably heightened its dynamism and set it on the path to the industrial revolution.
Science and Engineering? Yet another possible internal source of Europe’s uniqueness lay in its scientific revolution and a culture of inventiveness. As early as the thirteenth century, mechanical clocks were becoming widespread in Europe.3 And in England, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, scientific thinking took a distinctive form with
an emphasis on precise measurements, mechanical devices, and commercial applications. The “engineering culture” that emerged among English artisans, craftsmen, and entrepreneurs helps explain the invention of the steam engine, which was so important in increasing the supply of useful energy for productive purposes.4 While much of early science was largely theoretical with few direct applications, by the later nineteenth century, science and technology became intimately related and have remained so ever since.
Society and Religion? Other scholars have discerned European advantages in certain social patterns. A tradition of late marriages and a celibate clergy arguably restrained European population growth. With fewer people to provide for, slightly higher per capita incomes followed. In India, by contrast, nearly universal teenage marriages may have held back the accumulation of wealth. European willingness to allow women to work outside the home may have permitted their employment in early textile factories, while Chinese refusal to do so perhaps inhibited their adoption of the factory system. And some have suggested that Christianity, with its sense of linear time and its command to “subdue the earth,” may have encouraged an aggressive and manipulative attitude toward nature and thus fostered technological development.
All these ideas point to internal features of European society that contributed to a longterm economic advantage. They suggest that Europe’s economic lead over the rest of the world started well before the industrial revolution of the eighteenth century. Technological innovations, including the water windmill, eyeglasses, mechanical clocks, and movable-type printing; the growth of markets in land, labor, and goods; the development of capitalist institutions, such as banks offering credit and partnerships for mobilizing capital; and overall per capita wealth—in all these ways, some scholars argue, a late-developing European civilization had caught up to and gradually surpassed the older civilizations of Asia and the Middle East. These eastern regions, in this view, suffered from the arrogance of long success, which made them unwilling to learn from the upstart Europeans and from powerful states that squelched the private entrepreneurial activities of their people. Thus, the industrial revolution both grew out of and continued a long-term pattern of European advantage and advance.
Critics of Eurocentrism
“Surprising Similarities.” But critics have challenged this point of view and made a serious accusation.5 It reflects, they say, a Eurocentric understanding of the past. They argue that such an account of the origins of the industrial revolution vastly exaggerates European uniqueness. They view western Europe before 1750 or so as one of a number of advanced agricultural societies including China, India, Japan, and the Islamic Middle East. All of them enjoyed relatively free markets, growing economies, wealthy merchant communities with money to invest, widespread and highly skilled handicraft industries, and a substantial amount of agricultural production for the market. Economic similarities across Eurasia in the eighteenth century included life expectancies, nutritional levels, wages, and overall living standards, which were generally comparable for the wealthiest core regions of China, Japan, India, and western Europe. Of course, each of these regions was unique with its particular mix of economic advantages and drawbacks, but none of them had a decisive lead, and none were poised for a major economic breakthrough.
Furthermore, features of European life, once regarded as uniquely favorable for economic growth, turn out to have counterparts in other regions. While Europeans, for example, limited their fertility through late marriages, Chinese families did so by delaying pregnancy and spacing births more widely within marriage. The growth of rural handicraft manufacturing in Europe, sometimes regarded as a precursor to industrialization, had distinct parallels in China, India, and Japan. As late as 1750, India and China alone accounted for more than 57 percent of world manufacturing output, while Europe and North America represented about 27 percent.6 Yet this “protoindustrialization,” common across much of Eurasia, was followed by an urban industrial revolution only in Europe.
And while European merchants are frequently regarded as uniquely active and independent of their state authorities, many West Africans, Arabs, Armenians, Indians, and South Chinese also operated as private merchants, often far from home. “The typical Asian port,” wrote one historian, “housed Gu-jeratis, Fujianese, Persians, Armenians, Jews and Arabs just as European trading centers housed separate groups of Genoese, Florentine, Dutch, English, and Hanseatic merchants.”7
Finally, China, Japan, and western Europe all experienced quite rapid rates of population growth after 1500 that put growing pressure on resources available from the land. Deforestation, erosion, and soil depletion were early signs of what some historians have seen as an approaching ecological crisis, limiting the possibilities of further economic growth. All this suggests that Europe’s divergence from the main patterns of Eurasian development was late, dating from 1750 or after, and not the consequence of some centuries old and deeply rooted advantage which Europe alone possessed.
Competition from Afar But if exceptional internal features of European historical development do not fully explain the industrial revolution, what does? For some historians, the answer lies in placing industrialization in a broader global context, highlighting the ways in which Europe benefited from a variety of international linkages. One such linkage lies in the example of and competition from foreign manufacturing. For centuries, India had dominated world cotton textile production. The fine quality and bright colors of Indian cotton textiles and the example of dyeing techniques from the Ottoman Empire stimulated among British textile manufacturers a search for machinery and processes that would enable them to match these Eastern products.8 The British government assisted the process in the late eighteenth century by levying substantial tariffs on Indian textiles, making them more expensive in the British market. Likewise in the iron industry, inexpensive imports from Sweden and Russia stimulated British technological innovation.
“The Decline of the East.” Another connection involves what some historians have referred to as the “decline of the East” as major Asian and Middle Eastern societies experienced political or economic setbacks that unexpectedly opened the way for the backward but energetic societies of western Europe to achieve a greater prominence. Examples of this “decline” include the withdrawal of Chinese maritime forces from the Indian Ocean after 1435; the weakening or collapse of the Ottoman, Mughal, and Safavid empires in the eighteenth century; a growing ecological and economic crisis in early nineteenth-century China; and perhaps a certain conservative turning inward on the part of Islamic and Chinese intellectuals. The “decline of the East,” in this view, made way for the “rise of the West.”9
The Advantages of Empire
But by far the most significant international linkage was that of the American empires that Europeans carved out after 1492. Here lies one of the most sensitive moral as well as intellectual issues involving the origins of Europe’s industrial revolution. Was Europe’s economic progress purchased at the direct expense of exploited peoples in Africa and the Americas? Did the resources gained from empire provide a crucial boost to Europe’s industrial development?
Not all empires are alike. The Chinese, Ottoman, and Russian empires, for example, did not generate the kind of economic windfall that Europeans gained from their American colonies. In at least four ways, Europe’s New World empires may have contributed to its industrial takeoff.
Gold and Silver . The first was plunder. The enormous treasures of gold and especially silver looted from Aztecs and Incas or mined with forced labor and smaller amounts seized in India finally gave Europeans something that Asians, particularly the Chinese, really wanted. It enabled backward Europeans to buy their way into lucrative Asian markets and stimulate their own economies in the process.
Markets and Profits . But colonies were markets as well, as both settlers and slaves became favored customers for Europe’s manufacturing industries. England’s colonial trade, for example, exploded in the eighteenth century
as exports to North America and the West Indies doubled between 1750 and 1790 and those to India more than tripled. This growing demand from the colonies certainly stimulated England’s capitalist economy and its emerging mechanized textile industry in particular. And the profits from the colonial trade in both products and slaves contributed to the pool of capital from which British and continental industrialists drew as they invested in new machines and factories.
Resources . Europe’s American empires also provided real resources: cod, timber, grain, sugar, and rice—some of it produced by slave labor from Africa. Especially important for an industrializing England was a ready supply of cotton. Here, some have argued, was Europe’s decisive difference. The resources of the New World enabled Europe alone to solve the problem, common across Eurasia, of a growing population and limited land on which to produce necessary goods. “An unparalleled share of the earth’s biological resources was acquired for this one culture,” writes historian E. L. Jones, “on a scale that was unprecedented and is unrepeatable.”10
An Industrial Model . Finally, the plantation system that was at the core of European expansion in the Americas may have modeled and pioneered patterns of economic activity that became central to industrial production. Sugar plantations, for example, involved large capital investment and a highly disciplined and regimented workforce aimed at the mass production of an increasingly inexpensive commodity for a mass market. Exposure to these new patterns of production and marketing arguably assisted European businessmen in developing an industrial factory-based system that operated on similar principles.