A Concise History of the World (Cambridge Concise Histories)

by Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks

  Map 5.1 Industrial development in England and Wales

  Thus many factors, some local and some global, led industry to develop first in Britain: the stimulus provided by Indian cotton; a growing and geographically mobile population that provided a broad-based market for consumer goods; marriage patterns and gender norms that provided a cheap workforce already accustomed to cloth production; access to essential raw materials and markets for manufactured products provided by colonial possessions that were growing more extensive through war; a raw material produced elsewhere, so that the environmental and social effects of intense monoculture were not experienced locally; navigable rivers and abundant natural resources such as coal and iron ore located in easy-to-reach places; a culture of innovation in which entrepreneurial artisans could sometimes make a profit from their inventions; a relatively broad-based political system that supported commercial interests and innovation; a lack of warfare in Britain itself, at a time when continental Europe was disrupted by the French Revolution and the conquests of Napoleon. The coincidental interdependence and interaction of these factors set Britain on what the economic historian Joel Mokyr has called the “peculiar path” toward industrialization. Its ultimate implications were only recognized later, of course, not foreseen by a few people with a telescopic vision of the future. No one set out to develop an industrial society, because in 1750 no one knew what that meant.

  The expansion and transformation of industry

  After relative peace returned to Europe with the final defeat of Napoleon in 1815, other countries attempted to follow the English path. Although Britain forbade skilled workers to leave or to export machinery, many slipped out and introduced new methods abroad. Continental and American industrial spies roamed England, and returned home with memorized plans for machines and techniques, receiving awards from their governments. The governments in France and Prussia helped pay for railroads, and established protective tariff barriers against British goods that allowed infant industries to develop. In these measures, they were motivated by nationalism, a new ideology that built on the very old idea (discussed in Chapter 1) that each people has its own culture and identity, expressed through language and reinforced by marriage within the group. European nationalists—and later nationalists around the world—sought to make the territory of each people coincide with the boundaries of an independent nation-state. They developed symbols and ceremonies that expressed this conscious common identity, such as ethnic festivals, flags, foods, costumes, and parades. Many of these claimed to draw on traditional ethnic forms, but were in fact invented in the nineteenth century.

  Nationalist political leaders also began to spread standardized national languages through mass education. Mass schooling developed earliest in Prussia and Sweden, where it was explicitly linked to obedience to political authorities, religious orthodoxy, and the development of a modern army, in which soldiers not only would have the technical expertise to handle modern weapons but also would have learned from an early age to follow instructions and orders without question. Early industrialism did not require formal schooling, and, in fact, often relied on the labor of children, but as industrial processes became more complex, those countries in which a large share of the population could read and write had an advantage. More schools were opened for boys than for girls in the nineteenth century, but educational reformers regarded the schooling of girls as important, for these girls would eventually become mothers, and thus responsible for the early upbringing of future soldiers and workers. Women's education came to be linked with the good of the state, part of creating a strong nation in which people understood their proper roles.

  In the nineteenth century, nationalism sometimes combined with liberalism, an ideology that grew out of the eighteenth-century revolutions and that advocated individual liberty, political equality, representative democracy, and individual rights. Or it combined with socialism, an ideology that advocated greater economic and social equality and the common or public ownership of institutions. Nationalism also became increasingly aggressive, as nationalists emphasized the superiority of their nation over inferior others, and built up armies that could—and did—enforce this superiority through war in Europe and empire-building in Africa and Asia. Nationalists of all types regarded economic growth as essential to a strong nation, so advocated for the development of industry.

  Across the Atlantic, the new United States expanded steadily, through a combination of land purchases from and wars against other countries, along with manipulation, theft, fraud, and violence against Native Americans (and the bison on which some of them depended). The Native American population in the United States declined to slightly over 200,000 by 1900. The same thing happened in Canada, which became a self-governing nation in 1867, bought the vast territory of the Hudson's Bay Company, and annexed other provinces shortly after this to stretch coast to coast. The US version of nationalism became one of “manifest destiny,” a phrase invented by a newspaper editor to convey the idea that God had foreordained the United States to spread across and rule the continent. This territorial expansion and the growth of industry were both backed by government action, including the construction of a heavily subsidized rail system that connected every part of the nation, built largely by immigrants from Europe, Mexico, and China. The expansion westward exacerbated tensions between the North and the South in the United States over whether new territories would allow slavery, which erupted in the Civil War (1861–65) that ended in Northern victory and a prohibition of slavery throughout the United States, although this fell far short of creating equality for people of African descent.

  Beginning in the 1870s, the newly reunited United States and a newly unified Germany joined Britain in leading what has been termed the “second industrial revolution.” Chemicals, electrical goods, pharmaceuticals, food, military technology, and the automobile joined textiles and iron as key industrial products and factory production was speeded up through the use of the assembly line. Industry became increasingly dominated by giant business enterprises and conglomerates, such as those of the Krupps in Germany or the Rockefellers in the United States, that could afford the huge capital investments needed to open a factory using the latest technology and weather boom and bust business cycles. These included a severe economic depression in the 1890s, in which the politically well-connected factory and mine owners slashed wages, laid off workers, and fought the organization of labor unions, often hiring private military contractors to enforce their aims. In the United States, this was most often the Pinkerton Private Detective Agency, which at the turn of the twentieth century had more employees than there were soldiers in the US army.

  Outside of western Europe and the United States, industrialization proceeded fastest in Japan, where a long political crisis beginning in the 1850s ended with reform-minded local aristocrats (samurai) seizing power in the name of the emperor (the “Meiji Restoration”). They decided to make Japan a “rich nation, strong army,” by following Western models. Various class privileges were abolished, property rights and the tax system were radically altered, and commoners were drafted into a new national army. Thousands of schools were opened where students were expected to learn discipline and patriotism as well as reading and arithmetic; by 1910, 98 percent of school-age boys and girls were enrolled in elementary school. Meiji reformers explicitly rejected China as a political and cultural model, and urged Japanese to become Western, or to combine Western and Japanese values in a new and stronger synthesis. Men, and some women, began wearing Western clothes and eating beef, increasingly available in restaurants and praised as the “prince of foods” responsible for Western success. Using taxes gained from agriculture, the government invested in railroads, mines, and factories, though most of the latter were later privatized.

  Beginning in the 1880s, the Japanese government increasingly modified Western capital-intensive models of industrialization to the Japanese situation, and developed a more labor-intensive type of industrializ
ation that relied less on the replacement of labor by machinery and often combined machine and hand production. Light industry such as textiles and later toys quickly became globally competitive. By 1933, Japan was the world's largest cotton textile exporter, and a new agricultural extension network helped silk—Japan's largest single export until well into the twentieth century—flourish. But heavy industry, such as steel and chemicals, which required more capital and energy and were less able to use cheap rural labor, remained uncompetitive, and depended heavily on close ties to the government, especially the military. At one end of the Japanese economy, large conglomerates (zaibatsu), with strong political ties, predominated, in a pattern that has continued to today. At the other, small, often family-based firms relied on cheap but relatively skilled labor, and developed networks with each other to duplicate some of the economies of scale created by big firms elsewhere, sustaining a much higher level of self-employment than in any Western country with a similar level of income and industrialization. The distinction between management and labor was smaller than it was in larger Western companies, with more (male) members of the firm retaining managerial aspects of their work.

  5.1 Women reel silk using large machines in a Japanese silk mill, 1921. Sorting and unwinding the cocoons was done by hand in the same factory, and sometimes weaving was done by hand as well in the Japanese pattern of labor-intensive industrialization.

  In several other states, including Russia, Egypt, Persia, the Ottoman Empire, and the new countries of Latin America, political leaders and ambitious entrepreneurs also sought to promote industry in the nineteenth century, but with less success. They could not compete with cheaper European or US imports, and the governments were not powerful enough to enforce high tariffs like those that had protected German and US industries as these were getting started. European and US governments acted to keep markets open for their own industrial products, and to ensure the steady flow of raw materials and agricultural commodities from weaker nations.

  In Latin America and the Caribbean, indigenous people were not pushed off their land as they were in the United States and Canada, but instead were kept in place and their land was taken from them through laws that favored the tiny elite of wealthy landowners. Huge estates came to be owned by a few private individuals, who paid those who worked the land not in money, but in vouchers redeemable only at company stores. Those stores used high prices and fraud to keep workers permanently in debt, a system of debt peonage that was also common in cash-crop plantations, mines, and extractive industries such as lumbering in other parts of the world. In the second half of the nineteenth century, businessmen and bankers from Europe and the United States established or expanded plantations in Latin America that grew cash crops for export, including coffee, hemp, sugar, cotton, bananas, beef, and rubber, along with mines for the tin, copper, nitrate (used in fertilizer, explosives, and pharmaceuticals) and other minerals used in industrial processes. European and US governments used investments, loans, technology, and military actions to support this neocolonial system of Western economic domination and maintain friendly governments. Commercial agriculture for export, and mining, employed many more men than women; men migrated to large plantations, cities, or even other countries in search of paid labor, and women remained in villages to care for children and the elderly and to engage in unpaid agricultural work, or traveled to cities and mining areas to work as bar-maids, laundresses, and prostitutes. Rural impoverishment led to social protests and local revolts, such as a revolt in Cuba against Spanish colonial rule in 1895 and the Mexican Revolution in 1911–20. Most people remained poor, however. Latin American economies expanded somewhat in the early twentieth century as a result of industrialization, but social inequalities also expanded, and the region's reliance on extractive industries and monoculture left it economically vulnerable and environmentally degraded as native forests were chopped down for their timber or to make way for plantations and ranches.

  Industrialization was thus an uneven process. In many parts of the world, subsistence agriculture remained the primary means through which families supported themselves well into the twentieth century, and even in the most industrialized countries non-industrial work remained important throughout the nineteenth century. In the 1880s, only 44 percent of the British, 36 percent of the German, and 20 percent of the US labor force was in industry. But by harnessing power that was not produced by humans, animals, wind, or water, and by using machinery, industrial production allowed workers to produce far more than they would have been able to otherwise, created opportunities for great wealth for those who owned this output, and eventually raised the standard of living for most people in industrialized countries when compared with those who lived in non-industrial ones. From 1820 to 1913, Asia's share of world Gross Domestic Product (GDP) declined from 60 to 25 percent, while that of western Europe rose from 20 to 31 percent, and that of North America from 2 to 20 percent.

  Industrialization also spurred new technologies, such as the steamship and railroad, which allowed products to be shipped long distances fairly cheaply and dominate the global marketplace. New tools included new weapons, including the repeating rifle and the machine gun, through which a few industrial states were able to conquer many others. Just as the increase in productivity that resulted from the domestication of crops in the Neolithic generally allowed agriculturalists to dominate their non-agricultural neighbors—although the Mongols are a significant counter-example—so the explosion in productivity created by the harnessing of fossils fuels allowed industrial states to rule much of the world directly through global empires, and to dominate the rest through their control of the economy.

  In a very influential conceptualization, the sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein termed the hierarchical set of global relationships that developed in the nineteenth century the “modern world system” in which economic growth in western Europe and the USA (the core) was achieved by dominating partially industrialized independent states (the semi-periphery) and especially by using—and exploiting—the raw materials and people of colonial and other non-industrial areas (the periphery). World-systems theory has been criticized as overly monolithic and materialist, and as putting too much emphasis on the West and ignoring the activities of people elsewhere, especially in Asia. Even its critics, however, view industrialization as the foundation of what the historian Kenneth Pomeranz has called the “great divergence” —the gap in income and material well-being between the West and the rest of the world that marked (and continues to mark) the modern world.

  Class, gender, race, and labor in industrial societies

  Industrialization was facilitated by existing social and gender structures, but it then changed these significantly, and also led to new understandings of how society operated. Hereditary aristocracies did not disappear (other than in political revolutions in which they were ousted) but social elites increasingly included families that had made their wealth in production, banking, and commerce, rather than through land ownership. They understood themselves to be “middle class,” set apart from those beneath them by education, culture, and habits. Those beneath them included not only rural villagers—who remained the bulk of the population throughout the nineteenth century, even in industrializing countries—but also a new social group created by industrialization, the “working class” made up of wage-laborers. Thus, along with a sense of group cohesion (and distinction from others) that came from language, ethnicity, nation, race, and religion, industrialization created a new type of group identity and consciousness: class.

  Reflecting on what he saw around him, the German philosopher Karl Marx (1818–83) theorized that all history was class struggle, and that just as the industrial middle class—the bourgeoisie—had triumphed over the aristocracy, in the future the working class—the proletariat—would conquer the bourgeoisie in a violent revolution, after which all would share the wealth and exploitation would end. Marx thought that everything in society arose from material cond
itions, including religion, laws, family relationships, ideas, and culture. He criticized capitalism for the extremes of wealth and poverty it had created and for its separation of workers from ownership of the means of production, and opposed nationalism, asserting that working people everywhere had common interests.

  Marx's ideas shaped socialism (though he called himself a communist rather than a socialist, as he saw socialism as too naïve and utopian) and attracted a wide following. Socialism was instrumental in a series of (ultimately unsuccessful) popular revolutions that swept Europe in 1848. In the later nineteenth century, socialists founded political parties, which grew to millions of members and focused more on improvements in working conditions through labor unions, elections, and laws than on revolution. More radical communist ideas would lead to social revolution not in industrialized countries as Marx had expected, but in the largely agricultural societies of Russia and China.