by Kevin Reilly
So the argument about the “why Europe?” question shapes up as a debate between those who emphasize Europe’s internal uniqueness and those who stress distinctive international circumstances, especially the bounty of empire. But the two approaches are not mutually exclusive. Even if Europe gained much of value from its overseas empire, some countries were able to make use of these resources more effectively than others. If the wealth of empire was decisive for an industrial takeoff, why were Spain and Portugal, the first beneficiaries of that bounty, among the most backward and least industrialized of European countries even into the twentieth century? And why were some parts of the world able to follow the early example of British industrialization quite rapidly (France, Germany, the United States, and Japan), while others lagged far behind. Perhaps the serfdom of eastern Europe, the Confucian culture and powerful state of China, the military despotism of the Ottoman Empire, or the frequent political upheavals of Latin America inhibited their industrialization. Did these internal features of other regions hold back their modern development? The debate continues.
The Industrial Revolution
While the origins of Europe’s industrial revolution remain controversial, its significance is hardly in doubt. Its place in world history can be compared only with the agricultural revolution around 10,000 BCE. Like that earlier transformation, the industrial revolution was rooted in a series of technological breakthroughs that gave humankind a new degree of control over nature, created vast new wealth, transformed the daily economic activities of most people, and opened up unimagined possibilities for social and cultural life. But while the agricultural revolution occurred separately in a number of places over thousands of years, its industrial counterpart had a single point of origin—late eighteenth-century England—and spread from there to the far corners of the earth too quickly to allow for independent invention elsewhere. And whereas agriculture has become an almost universal and apparently permanent feature of human life, industrialization is very much an unfinished process with many parts of the world still struggling to acquire the technology, wealth, and power that it promises. Since industrialization has been under way for little more than two centuries, it remains an open question as to whether it represents a viable long-term future for the planet. Is it possible to imagine that people 500 years from now might view the industrial revolution as a temporary and unsustainable burst of human creativity that petered out after several centuries? Or will the entire planet resemble the currently most urbanized and industrialized societies?
Toward Economic Modernity
Machines and Factories . At its heart, the industrial revolution was a matter of technology. Machines now did what only men, women, and animals had done before. During the eighteenth century, innovations in the British cotton textile industry led the way, speeding up the weaving and spinning processes. But the real breakthrough was the steam engine, which provided for the first time a huge, reliable, and inanimate source of power that could replace human and animal muscles by converting heat into useful work. That power could drive textile machinery, pump water out of mines, and propel locomotives and ships. Later in the nineteenth century, electricity and internal combustion motors provided new power sources, while petroleum joined coal as a fuel. Industrialization began in the textile industry, but it soon spread to other fields: ironworking, railroads, and steamships by the 1840s; electrical and chemical industries a few decades later; and cars, refrigerators, radios, airplanes, and electronic products as the twentieth century accelerated the cumulative process of technological development. And beyond technology, industrialization involved dramatic changes in the organization of work, symbolized by the modern factory with its large-scale facilities, its minute division of labor in the assembly line, its dependence on wage-earning workers, and its centralized and highly disciplined management. The peasant farm or the artisan’s workshop must have seemed worlds away.
New Wealth . The changes induced by the industrial revolution were neither immediate nor uniform, but over the course of a century or more, not so long in terms of world history, they fundamentally transformed the conditions of life in those societies most directly affected. The most obvious change, perhaps, lay in sustained economic growth, a continuous increase in the amount of goods that it was now possible to produce. It took traditional hand spinners in India 50,000 hours to produce 100 pounds of cotton yarn; steam-driven machinery in England in 1825 could produce the same amount in 135 hours.11 Iron production in Britain jumped from 68,000 tons per year in 1788 to some 4 million tons in 1860, an almost 60-fold increase. So enormously productive were industrial economies that visionary thinkers, such as Karl Marx, could begin to imagine the end of poverty as a necessary condition of human society. Living standards did begin to rise, albeit unequally, and by the mid-twentieth century, many quite ordinary people in industrialized societies lived materially more abundant lives—and longer lives—than anyone could have imagined two centuries earlier.
Urbanization . The location of these manufacturing processes likewise changed. No longer scattered in numerous farmsteads or in artisans’ workshops, industrial production became concentrated in urban centers that pulled millions of people into city life. In 1800, about 20 percent of Britain’s population lived in sizable urban communities of 10,000 people or more; in 1900, 75 percent did. Here was the beginning of a continuing trend toward city living that by the end of the twentieth century brought fully half the world’s population into urban centers. In its impersonal social relationships, its blending of different peoples, and its cultural creativity, urban life has given a distinctive flavor to modern societies.
Capitalism . The industrial revolution also extended the principle of the market—buying and selling based on supply and demand—to far more people and to a far greater range of goods. New urban residents had to depend on the market to provide their daily needs (food, clothing, and furniture), whereas their rural ancestors had been much more self-sufficient. Wealthy entrepreneurs wielded much of the capital that financed industrial production. As working for money wages became widespread for the first time, most people were selling their own labor on the market as well. As market relations penetrated European society more deeply, the hold of tradition, family, rulers, and the church on economic life diminished, and the values of the market—risk taking and innovation, individualism and competition, accumulation of material goods, and an acute awareness of clock time—became ever more prominent. Almost all agricultural societies had elements of the market, but Europe’s industrial revolution gave rise to the world’s most thoroughly commercialized societies, in which virtually everything was for sale—raw materials, finished products, land, money, and human labor. And increasingly, those who dominated the market were not individuals pursuing their own interests but large and wealthy corporations. The shorthand term for this kind of society has become “capitalism.”
Death Rates and Birthrates . The revolutionary impact of industrialization also contributed much to that distinctive process of modern world history—the enormous and unprecedented growth of world population. That growth had begun well before the industrial revolution, fueled by global climate changes and the improved diet resulting from the proliferation of New World food crops. But industrial and scientific techniques applied to agriculture, accompanied by improvements in public health and sanitation, sustained and enhanced that population explosion by sharply lowering death rates. That potent combination pushed Europe’s population from about 150 million in 1750 to almost 400 million by 1900, while Europe’s colonies or former colonies provided opportunities for another 50 million Europeans to emigrate to the Americas, Australia, South Africa, and elsewhere. In that century and a half, people of European origin increased from about 20 percent of the world’s total population to almost 30 percent.12 But industrialization also acted, a bit later, to help stabilize the population of the more economically advanced countries, though at substantially higher levels, by encouraging lower birthrates. In
urban industrial settings, children represented prolonged burdens on the family economy rather than productive members of it as they had been in more rural agricultural societies. As this logic took hold, parents acted to limit family size, making use of more readily available means of contraception.
Humanity and Nature . Growing populations in conjunction with industrial technology placed new pressures on the natural environment far beyond those associated with hunting-gathering or agricultural/pastoral societies. Those pressures became global in their implications and widely recognized by the general public only in the second half of the twentieth century, but they were apparent in more localized forms in the nineteenth. The massive extraction of nonrenewable raw materials to feed and to fuel industrial machinery—coal, iron ore, petroleum, and much more—altered the landscape in many places. Sewers and industrial waste emptied into rivers, turning them into poisonous cesspools. In 1858, the Thames River running through London smelled so bad that the British House of Commons had to suspend its session.13 And smoke from coal-fired industries and domestic use polluted the air in urban areas and sharply increased the incidence of respiratory illness.
Against these conditions, a number of individuals and small groups raised their voices. Romantic poets such as William Blake and William Wordsworth inveighed against the “dark satanic mills” of industrial England and nostalgically urged a return to the “green and pleasant land” of an earlier time. A few scientists promoted the scientific management of natural resources (forests in particular), while others, such as the American John Muir, pushed for the preservation of wilderness areas in national parks.14 Although governments tried sporadically to address the problems, no widespread environmental movement surfaced until later in the twentieth century. Well into that century, many people in a heavily polluted Pittsburgh regarded industrial smoke as useful in fighting germs and a sign of progress.
Thus, the industrial revolution began to alter the relationship of humankind to the earth itself. Since the beginning of time, people had been vulnerable to the vagaries of nature—floods, drought, and storms—even as they transformed nature through farming, hunting, fires, and more. Now the balance started to change, and the earth and its many living inhabitants seemed increasingly at risk from the works of industrial humanity. It was a startling reversal of an ancient pattern.
Class and Industrial Society
Aristocrats and Peasants . Within western Europe’s industrializing societies, old social groups declined and new ones arose, creating a wholly novel and distinctively modern class structure. Landowning nobles, proud bearers of Europe’s ancient aristocratic traditions, lost many of their legal privileges, much of their economic power, and some of their social prestige. As the economic basis of society shifted to urban industrial property, the landed wealth of the nobility counted for less, and their disdain for commerce inhibited their adjustment to a capitalist society, increasingly dominated by the “new money” of commercial and industrial elites. Likewise, the peasantry, long representing the vast majority in all agricultural societies, now shrank as a proportion of the population as millions were pulled into industrial cities or pushed into emigration abroad. Those who remained on the land were increasingly oriented to producing for the market rather than for their own subsistence.
“Only a Weaver.” Furthermore, many of Europe’s artisans, who had for centuries produced their societies’ manufactured goods by handicraft methods, found themselves displaced by industrial machinery. In 1820, Britain still had some 240,000 hand-loom weavers; by 1856, more than 90 percent of them were gone.15 A nineteenth-century song lamented the fate of unemployed English weavers:16
Who is that man coming up the street,
With a weary manner and shuffling feet;
With a face that tells of care and grief
And in hope that seems to have lost
belief?
For wickedness past he now atones,
He’s only a weaver that no one owns . . .
Political economy now must sway
And say when a man shall work or play.
If he’s wanted his wages may be high,
If he isn’t, why, then, he may starve
and die.
Other craftsmen less affected by machine competition, such as butchers, masons, and carpenters, flourished in the growing cities of industrial Europe.
“Middling Classes.” The chief beneficiaries of Europe’s industrial revolution were its growing and diverse “middle classes.” Earlier, merchants, lawyers, and doctors, sometimes referred to as the “bourgeoisie,” represented a small urban middle class occupying a social niche between the aristocratic landlords above them and artisans and peasants below them on the social scale. Industrialization greatly enlarged this class. But no single middle class emerged. At the top, wealthy industrialists and bankers might match the affluence of aristocratic magnates. Rather less exalted were small-business owners and professionals such as engineers, architects, pharmacists, and secondary school and university teachers along with older medical and legal professionals. By the end of the nineteenth century, the most advanced industrial societies had generated a whole army of clerks, salespeople, office workers, and small shopkeepers, eager to claim middle-class status and distinguish themselves from the factory workers below them.
Working Classes . These urban factory workers, dubbed the “proletariat” by Karl Marx, represented the other major new social group to emerge from the industrialization process, growing rapidly to about 30 to 40 percent of the population in the most highly industrialized countries. Unlike the artisans, who had their own tools and skilled traditions, the new working class in factories, docks, and mines entered the labor market with few skills and no tools of their own. There, they worked long hours at a pace dictated by the machines they served and subject to the instabilities of an industrial capitalist society.
The factory experience of a 19-year-old woman, recorded by an English reformer in the 1840s, illustrates the conditions in which early industrial workers had to labor:
The clock strikes half past five; the engine starts, and her day’s work commences. At half past seven, and in some factories at eight, the engine slacks its pace (seldom stopping) for a short time, till the hands have cleaned the machinery, and swallowed a little food. It then goes on again, and continues full speed till twelve o’clock, when it stops for dinner. Previously to her leaving the factory, and in her dinner hour, she has her machines to clean. The distance of the factory is about five minutes’ walk from her home. I noticed every day that she came in at half-past twelve or within a minute or two. The first thing she did, was to wash herself, then get her dinner (which she was seldom able to eat), and pack up her drinking for the afternoon. This done it was time to be on her way to work again, where she remains, without one minute’s relaxation, till seven o’clock; she then comes home and throws herself into a chair exhausted. This is repeated six days in the week (save that on Saturdays she may get back a little earlier, say, an hour or two), can there be any wondering at their preferring to lie in bed till dinner-time, instead of going to church on the seventh?17
These conditions generated protests, expressed in strikes, trade unions, and the socialist movement, and gave rise to one of the major new conflicts of industrial societies.
Women, Factories, and the Home
New Views of the “Home.” If industrialization transformed class structures, it also fundamentally altered family life and the roles of men, women, and children within it. In earlier agricultural societies, women combined productive labor on the farm or in the shop with their domestic and child-rearing duties because the family was the primary economic unit, and the home and the workplace were usually the same place. As industrialization moved the work site to factories and offices away from the home, that easy blending of women’s productive and reproductive roles became more difficult. Middle-class women in particular largely withdrew from wage-earning labor. A new “ideology of domesticit
y” defined them as wives and mothers and charged them with making the home a “haven in a heartless world” of competitive industrial capitalism. Keeping women at home became a trademark of middle-class life that distinguished it from that of working-class families, fewer of whom could afford to do so. Thus, many working-class women joined the labor force as textile factory workers, as miners, and most often as domestic servants in middle-class households. But the new notion of women as homemakers and men as breadwinners penetrated the working class as well, and families in which married women worked outside the home were widely seen as failures. This novel division of labor between men and women proved to be a temporary adaptation to industrial life, as widening employment opportunities and the feminist movement brought many women of all classes back into the labor force in the twentieth century.
Children . More enduring perhaps were the changes in the lives of children. Early in the industrial era, many young children worked in the new factories and mines, an extension of long patterns of children contributing to the family economy. But this soon gave way to a concept of childhood defined in terms of school as compulsory education became common throughout nineteenth-century Europe. By the end of the century, a whole new stage of childhood had been invented—adolescence. The teenage years had never before been defined as a unique stage of life, but as growing educational demands, required by an increasingly complex economy, kept young people out of the workforce for many years, that period of life acquired a distinct identity, especially in middle-class families, as a troublesome and traumatic passage from childhood to adulthood.