On drug foods, see Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants, and Intoxication (New York: Vintage, 1993) and William G. Clarence-Smith and Steven Topik, eds., The Global Coffee Economy in Africa, Asia, and Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: the Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Penguin Books, 1986) is a classic study.
A good brief survey of the slave trade is Herbert S. Klein, The Atlantic Slave Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), while Jennifer Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004) examines gender issues. For a study of Africans more broadly, see John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
For the development of ideas about race, Ivan Hannaford, Race: The History of an Idea in the West (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996) is a good place to start. On families and race, see Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002) and Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton, eds., Bodies in Contact: Rethinking Colonial Encounters in World History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).
5
Industrialization, imperialism, and inequality, 1800 CE–2015 CE
Writing from prisons in British India where he was imprisoned for political activity in the early 1930s, the Indian independence leader Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964) sent a series of nearly two hundred long letters to his teenage daughter Indira, in which he provided her with a sweeping view of world history. Gathered together in 1934 with the title Glimpses of World History, the letters range from the rise of the first cities to Nehru's own day. About a third of the way through the book is a letter titled “The Coming of the Big Machine,” in which Nehru comments that, more than anything else he has written about, industrialization “changed the face of life … It was a revolution affecting all the various classes, and indeed everybody. It has made the difference between the luxury of the very rich and the poverty of the poor even greater than it was in the past.” These effects were felt around the world, Nehru comments, for “capitalist industry led inevitably to a new imperialism, for everywhere there was a demand for raw materials for manufacture and markets for new manufactured goods … So there was a wild scramble among the more powerful countries for new territories … [and then] a new kind of empire, invisible and economic, that exploits and dominates without any obvious outward signs.”
Nearly a century later, world historians generally agree with Nehru that industrialization created the modern world, not only that of his day, but our own as well. The use of fossil fuels—first coal and then also oil and gas—allowed a dramatic increase in productivity, as the energy stored over hundreds of millions of years was taken out of the ground and put to human use. Industry transformed the world politically, economically, socially, and physically, and allowed the nations that industrialized to dominate those that did not in a new wave of imperialism through military conquest that began in the nineteenth century. The invisible, economic empire that Nehru alluded to, often called neocolonialism or soft imperialism, also expanded throughout the world. In this new form of empire, multinational corporations and international agencies were often more important than states, shaping society and culture as well as the economy. Together industry and imperialism (both hard and soft) facilitated greater inequality, both within one nation or region and among them.
From the huge amount of information available about the world since 1800, this chapter focuses on these three themes: industrialization, imperialism, and inequality. It begins with the earliest industrialization, which took place in England, and examines the uneven spread of industry around the world. Growing inequality within and among societies was accompanied by the growth of movements calling for social change, some with egalitarian goals, including the end of slavery and rights for women, but others that advocated segregation, racial exclusion, and even selective breeding. Industry facilitated long-distance migration on a massive scale as well as imperial conquests, which simultaneously challenged and reinforced existing social hierarchies and cultural patterns. Moving into the twentieth century, the chapter examines the impact of total war on modern culture and society, and traces processes of decolonization along with struggles for social and political liberation that marked the postwar decades. Developments that lessened some forms of inequality were countered by economic measures that increased disparities of wealth as industrial and postindustrial jobs followed low wages around the world in the ever more connected network of global capitalism. People continued to move as well, transforming cities into megacities and increasing religious, linguistic, social, and ethnic diversity and blending, despite efforts by religious fundamentalists, cultural conservatives, and some political leaders to combat this. The chapter ends with a brief discussion of the still-short third millennium, with the world's population passing the 7 billion mark and both poverty and prosperity on the rise.
Cotton, slaves, and coal
Because industrialization underlay both British economic and political power and growing Western dominance over much of the world in the nineteenth century, why England industrialized first is a key question in world history. Industrialization began with cotton production, so some of the answer is specific to cotton. Technology is part of this story, but so are the social organization of cloth production and the new patterns of consumption that resulted from global trade outlined in Chapter 4.
By the seventeenth century, cloth production in some parts of the world was increasingly commercialized, but organized in slightly different ways. In China and Japan, peasant households raised silk and cotton, which the women spun and family members wove into cloth, to be worn by the household, used to pay taxes, or sold through networks of merchants. More than half the rural households in China had a loom. In India, cotton and cotton-silk blends were produced in specialized weaving villages by specific castes; generally women spun, men wove, and both sexes finished the cloth, selling cloth not needed by the household to a merchant. In the western European countryside, merchants arranged for wool and flax, and in some places cotton and silk, to be distributed to households and spun into thread by the women of those households, then taken to other households to be woven and finished, and then returned to the merchants for transport and sale. Economic historians have given this system several different names, including “cottage industry,” the “putting out system,” “domestic industry,” and “proto-industry.” In all these areas—China, Japan, India, and western Europe—and perhaps in other places that have been less well studied, rural households intensified their labor to produce more cloth in the seventeenth century, what the economic historian Jan de Vries has called the “industrious revolution.”
Silk retained its status as the most luxurious fabric, but Indian cotton was the most widely traded, exchanged for slaves on the West African coast, gold and silver in South America, spices in Southeast Asia, and other goods elsewhere. When the Dutch and English East India Companies began to import cotton cloth from India into Europe in the later seventeenth century, consumers there slowly learned its benefits: it was lightweight, felt pleasant against the skin, and could take vivid colors when dyed, printed, or painted. Contemporary commentators noted that the demand for Indian textiles became a “calico craze,” and complained that women of all classes were wearing them or decorating their houses with them, so that differences between social classes were not as evident. Debates raged in coffeehouses and in the new print venues such as newspapers that shaped public opinion over whether Indian cottons encouraged poorer people—especially women—to spend money on imported frivolities. Weavers in London protested, attacking the headquarters of the English East India Company, and tearing the cotton clothes off women in the streets or throwing acid on them. Between the 1680s and the 1720s, th
e English, French, Spanish, and Prussian governments limited or banned the import and wearing of Asian cotton cloth. The enforcement of these laws was feeble, however, and because they did not also ban the re-export of Indian cottons to colonial or African markets, they put no dent at all in the trade.
What changed this global pattern was not better law enforcement, but a process of import (and re-export) substitution through imitation, borrowing, experimentation, and mechanization, first in printing cotton fabric and then in spinning and weaving it. Armenian artisans who had learned cloth-printing in India brought this to Europe, and both they and local artisans opened large-scale “manufactories,” where hundreds of male and female workers used hand tools or hand-powered machines to print cloth. Entrepreneurs and tinkerers seeking to increase cloth production experimented with machines that would allow women to spin more than one thread at a time, sometimes applying mechanical principles they had learned from reading scientific works. By the 1760s several types of these machines could produce thread that was strong and thin enough to make acceptable cotton cloth. Some of these machines could be powered by hand, but others needed an external power source, which was provided by falling water; spinning mills grew up along streams and rivers, first in the British countryside and then in other parts of Europe and North America.
Machines and their inventors generally dominate the story of the Industrial Revolution, but existing marriage patterns and gender norms were also significant factors. Northwestern Europe had a distinctive marriage pattern, with both men and women generally waiting until their mid or late twenties to marry, and then setting up an independent household immediately rather than living in an extended family. The late age of marriage for women was especially unusual, for this was long beyond the age of sexual maturity generally favored as the proper age at which women should marry. Women themselves contributed wages they had saved or goods they had made to establishing the household, often working outside the supervision of their father or another male family member, which was culturally unacceptable in many other parts of the world. Many people never married at all—between 10 and 15 percent of the population, and in some places perhaps as high as 25 percent. In the seventeenth century unmarried women in England acquired a name that also reflected their most common occupation: spinster. Thus, when spinning mills opened, young women were often the first to be hired, because they had been spinning anyway, and also because they were viewed as more compliant, willing to take lower wages, and better able to carry out the repetitive tasks of tending machines.
Mechanized spinning eventually allowed a young woman or girl to spin about a hundred times more than she could by hand, and inventors then turned their attention to mechanical looms, which became practical in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Anti-industrialization activists known as Luddites, mostly male skilled hand-weavers, wrecked machinery in mass protests, but, as with many other social protests, they were suppressed by the army, and destroying machinery was made a capital crime. Cities located in areas with favorable river systems became centers of cloth manufacturing, and output soared; in 1750, Britain produced about 50,000 pieces of printed calico (a piece was about 28 yards long), and in 1830 over 8 million. Urban populations also soared: Manchester in northwestern England, for example, one of the main centers of British cotton production, grew from 17,000 in 1760 to 180,000 in 1830. Conditions in the mills were unpleasant and unhealthy, with cloth fibers filling the air and a work day that stretched thirteen or fourteen hours, six days a week. Workers included migrants from the countryside and immigrants from further away. Many of these came from Ireland, where population growth and worsening economic conditions led many young people to seek jobs elsewhere. When a blight destroyed the potato crop on which people depended in the 1840s and more than a million people died of hunger and disease, even more Irish people moved to English industrial cities, or to those in the northern part of the United States that were also industrializing.
British industrialization thus depended on the labor of migrants, and not simply those in Britain itself. The explosion in production required a vastly increased supply of raw materials, which would not have been possible with linen or wool, because that would have taken far more land devoted to flax or sheep than all of the land in Britain. (The fact that Chinese peasant households raised their own cotton is one reason that large machines did not gain favor there.) But cotton was imported, and in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Britain gained colonies in the Caribbean and North America, places where cotton could be cultivated. The organization for doing so was already in place: the plantations discussed in Chapter 4, worked by African slave labor. New plantations were established across the Caribbean, attracting capital and people, both slave and free. Cotton is extremely hard on the soil, however, and the land was quickly exhausted in the type of boom-and-bust cycle common in the exploitation of commercial crops and natural resources. Cotton production shifted, especially to the southern United States, where the invention of the hand-powered cotton gin (short for “engine”) in 1794 had just substantially lowered the amount of labor needed to clean cotton.
Slavery expanded geographically and numerically with cotton. In the 1790s, there were perhaps 700,000 slaves in the American South, most in Maryland and Virginia, and some commentators predicted slavery might die out because it was not economically viable. By 1850, the number had instead increased to 4 million, the majority in the new states of Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Louisiana, where “King Cotton” ruled. They produced nearly two-thirds of the world's cotton, which accounted for half the worth of all US exports. Enslaved people worked under harsher conditions in cotton plantations than they had earlier, with longer daily working hours in gang labor that moved across vast monocultural cotton fields in lines rather than tending more varied crops. (The work day was slightly shorter than that in textile mills, but longer than the normal workday of peasant farmers.) Like factory workers, slaves had a continually intensive work year, as cotton was picked three times a year and cleaned and processed during the winter, and as slaves also manured fields and cut down forests for new plantations. The USA had outlawed the importation of slaves in the early nineteenth century, so the older slave states supplied them through a network of companies and independent traders. Hundreds of thousands of people were forcibly migrated, usually with no concern about family relationships; the threat of being sold to a cotton state served as a means of controlling slaves’ behavior throughout the American South.
The increasing productivity of slave labor, along with decreasing shipping costs because of steamships and better packing methods, kept the price of raw US cotton low. Other than a brief period during the American Civil War (1861–65), when hundreds of British factories closed because they could not obtain raw cotton, US cotton dominated the market. Cotton picked and cleaned by American slaves (or, after the Civil War, by former slaves who were now sharecroppers and tenant farmers), bought, sold, and financed at commodity exchanges in New York, New Orleans, London, and other cities, and spun, woven, and finished in European (especially British) factories, clothed the world. During the War of 1812 between Britain and the United States, patriotic campaigns in the USA promoted the production and use of homespun, but British manufactured cloth was cheaper as well as better, and it remained a standard item for shopkeepers in towns and peddlers on the frontier, sold to Native Americans as well as immigrants. By 1850 Britain was producing half the world's cotton cloth, and exporting more than half of this, including to India. Millions of people in India lost their livelihoods, and from 1750 to 1850 manufacturing cities such as Calcutta shrank, with people migrating to villages in a process of de-urbanization. Industrialized cotton thus shaped family life for weavers in India just as it did for factory workers in Britain and slaves in the USA.
Industrialization was initially powered by water, but because water-powered machinery could be interrupted by drought or freezing weather and was geographically limited, stron
g impetus emerged to search for other sources of power, which could also address shortages of wood for heating and cooking in large cities such as London. The solution was coal, available in certain parts of Europe, most plentifully in England and Wales. British toolmakers and engineers invented and then improved steam engines to pump water out of ever-deeper coal mines. Carts full of coal were pushed and pulled along rails first by human and animal power, and then by coal-powered steam engines. Steam technology spread out from the coalfields to steamships, steam locomotives that ran on iron tracks, and other uses. Steam-powered transport allowed the faster and cheaper movement of people, goods, and ideas, thus thickening networks of connection.
Coal went hand-in-hand with iron. The spread of gunpowder weapons increased the demand for iron astronomically, and in the early nineteenth century British ironworkers developed coal-powered steam blowers and other equipment that allowed new iron- and steel-making processes. Many machines and machine parts that had earlier been made out of wood were increasingly made of the much more durable iron or steel, and iron began to replace stone as a construction material. In the periodization of human history into eras developed at roughly this time, the Iron Age began in the second millennium BCE, but in terms of iron's impact on everyday life, the Iron Age really began in the nineteenth century.
Early steam engines were so wasteful of energy that they only made economic sense where fuel was cheap and did not need to be transported very far, so the iron industry grew up in coal-mining regions, and cities such as Newcastle and Liverpool expanded at an amazing rate. They were filthy and lacked enough housing, clean water, or sanitation services for their residents; diseases such as typhus and tuberculosis spread easily. Work was structured by the need to use machines efficiently, so tasks became more routinized and the work day even longer and more regimented in coal-fired factories than it had been in water-powered ones, and far more so than in household forms of production. Wages were low, but often higher than those in the countryside, and the opportunities to escape parental and family control were greater, so the new industrial cities sucked in young people, as cities always had. The British state supported industry through tax policies that favored investors, high tariffs or outright bans on manufactured goods from elsewhere, and naval power that could enforce laws requiring colonies to trade only with Britain. In 1750, Britain accounted for less than 2 percent of production around the world, while in 1860 its share was more than 20 percent, including two-thirds of the world's coal and more than half of its iron.
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