by Ian Mortimer
So who was the principal agent of change? As this was the century that saw the first new form of motive power since windmills were invented, we ought to consider one of the engineers who made the Industrial Revolution possible. By this line of argument, it has to be the first great steam engineer, Thomas Newcomen. Although James Watt’s steam engines were much more efficient, Watt only adapted about 500 machines that had been built to Newcomen’s designs. Newcomen’s impact was far greater, constructing 1,200 steam engines in Britain and Europe. Moreover, it was Newcomen who showed that steam power was commercially advantageous, and that was a huge achievement in itself. However, as noted above, most mills and factories in 1800 were still powered by waterwheels. So did steam engines really make that much difference to life in the eighteenth century? It seems to me that 1,200 steam engines replacing waterwheels is a change comparable to cannon replacing siege engines in the fourteenth century. The real impact of this technology lay in the future.
I would suggest that the man who most changed the lives of eighteenth-century people was Jean-Jacques Rousseau. His writings might be full of flaws but his ideas inspired the calls for tolerance, liberty and equality that collectively turned the events of 1789 from a financial crisis into a revolution. And there can be no denying that that revolution shocked everyone in the West – its kings and lords as well as its paupers.
1801–1900
The Nineteenth Century
Wherever you are reading this book, you are within touching distance of a nineteenth-century invention. If you are on a train or the Underground, your mode of transport dates from the nineteenth century. The same goes for buses: Paris, Berlin, New York, London and Manchester all had their first bus routes by 1830. If you are in a car, listening to an audio version of this book, bear in mind that both the internal combustion engine and the process of recording sound date from the late nineteenth century. If you are in bed or on a plane, you will be reading this with the help of electric light, which was pioneered in the 1870s. If you are relaxing with the book in a bath, note that the bath plug also has its origins in the nineteenth century. So does the loo, by the way: the first flushing water closets that could be mass-produced were exhibited in 1851 at the Great Exhibition. In fact, the very concept of a ‘bathroom’ is a nineteenth-century development: the earliest reference to one in an English house appears to be J. M. Barrie’s line from 1888: ‘What are politics when the pipes in the bathroom burst?’ But I’m digressing. If you’re reading a physical book, note that the paper is made of wood pulp, which was invented as a cheaper alternative to linen-based rag paper in the 1870s. If you’re using a computer in the English-speaking world, you will see that the letters on the uppermost row of the keyboard are arranged QWERTYUIOP: that layout dates from a typewriter that went on the market in 1871. And if you’re wearing a wristwatch, a pair of jeans or a bra – you’re in direct contact with a nineteenth-century invention. You’d probably have to be naked in the middle of a jungle in order to escape the nineteenth century. But if you are, I’d be very surprised if you’re reading this book.
The nineteenth century was the age of invention, even more so than the twentieth. As we saw near the end of the last chapter, applications for UK patents averaged 23,826 per year in the 1890s; by the 1990s, this had dropped by more than half, to an average of just 10,602 applications per year. Among the former were many innovations that we associate with the modern world – not least because we are constantly buying the latest versions of them. Electric toasters, fans, sewing machines and kettles were all invented in the nineteenth century. The first gas cookers went on sale in 1834, thanks to James Sharp of the Northampton Gas Company. Outside the home, gas street lighting was pioneered in London in 1807; by 1823, there were 40,000 gas lamps lighting the capital’s streets, and most European cities were busy installing similar systems. Indoor electric and gas lighting was common by 1900: when the house in Moretonhampstead in which I began writing this book was rebuilt in about 1890 following a fire, it had gas lamps fitted to the walls of the entrance hallway and all the main rooms. It is very easy to forget the enormous difference that artificial lighting made to people’s lives – not only in terms of safety when they went out of doors after dark, but also in the degree to which they could see colour and appreciate the things in their rooms, which had previously hardly been visible in the candlelight. And there were other crucial nineteenth-century inventions. Canned food was invented by a Frenchman in 1806 in order to supply Napoleon’s army. The machine gun was developed at the start of the American Civil War (1861–5). Karl Benz patented his three-wheeled Motorwagen, the first commercially available car, in 1886. The Lumière brothers started making their remarkable short films on the streets of Lyons in 1895, and the following year, the world’s first public cinemas opened in New York and New Orleans. Whereas Admiral Nelson died in 1805 on the deck of a leaky wooden ship that fired hot solid metal cannonballs at the enemy, by 1890 he could have travelled in an electric-powered submarine that fired explosive torpedoes.
As we have seen repeatedly in the earlier chapters, however, invention is not synonymous with change. Despite James Sharp’s best efforts, most people did not cook with gas in the nineteenth century but continued to use solid fuel. It took time for cars and movies to become a part of our everyday lives. Even bras took a while to catch on, if you will pardon the pun. It is necessary to look beyond the mere novelty of something to assess the greater changes taking place in society, and to distinguish those inventions that made a profound difference to life in the West from those that just allowed us to do more easily what we had always done.
Population growth and urbanisation
You will be thinking that we are coming to the end of this book: we’ve dealt with eight centuries, so there are only two to go. You may be surprised to learn, therefore, that in historical terms we are not even halfway. The reason for this discrepancy is that history is not time, and time is not history. History is not the study of the past per se; it is about people in the past. Time, separated from humanity, is purely a matter for scientists and star-gazers. If a previously unknown uninhabited island were to be discovered it would have no history as such: its past would be studied by experts in natural history, botany and geology. We cannot write the history of the South Pole before mankind considered its significance and ventured to reach it. History is inextricably linked with what we have done, both as a species and as individuals. Thus a large country like Italy, with a population of 60 million and a huge cultural legacy from its past, has much more history than a small island with a tiny population. This is not being dismissive towards small islands; it simply reflects the fact that a country with 60 million people sees a million times more human experience every day than an island with just 60. There are a million more human exchanges, a million more social attitudes, and a million more diseases, aches and pains. We have to consider not just time passing but human time – that is, the volume of experience that a day or a year represents.
This volumetric approach to human time can be applied to compare centuries as well as different countries. If you add up all the days lived by people in Europe in the thousand years between 1001 and 2000, the relative proportions of the millennial population are shown in the pie chart on the right. If history were the same as time, the chart would show 10 equal divisions of 36 degrees. However, the differences in the chart are significant. We can see that the changes discussed in the first chapter of this book were actually experienced by about 3 per cent of the total European population over the millennium. All those earth-shattering changes of the sixteenth century were dealt with by less than 6 per cent. This is not to say that we should have treated those centuries with greater brevity – they saw profound changes that underpin everything that came later – but it does mean that if we are going to focus on the changes that affected the greatest number of people, then our judgement is going to be heavily skewed towards the last two centuries. In fact, the above chart is a significant under
estimate of the modern bias in the West, for it does not include the populations of the USA, Australia, Canada, South Africa or New Zealand. Nor does it take account of the Westernised people in Latin American, India and the Far East. Worldwide, only about a third of history dates to the first eight centuries of the millennium. If the significance of any given change is weighted according to the number of people who experienced it, then we are now into the heavy division.
Proportions of European millennial population (person-days) per century
Not every country saw population change at the same rate in the nineteenth century. In France, the population increased from 28.7 million to 40.7 million (42 per cent), making this only its fourth largest century of growth since 1001. The rise in Italy was far more dramatic, from 18.09 million in 1800 to 32.97 million in 1900 – an increase of 82 per cent and the most significant rise in its history. Spain and Portugal similarly saw rises of 75 and 86 per cent respectively. Germany’s population rose by 130 per cent, European Russia’s by 181 per cent. The British Isles as a whole saw their total population rise by 153 per cent, but this figure conceals the fact that in England, the cradle of the Industrial Revolution, it increased by a staggering 246 per cent. Such a phenomenon was unthinkable just a century earlier. When the statistician Gregory King made his extensive calculations about Great Britain in 1695, he estimated that the population of London would pass one million in the year 1900 and that in the year 2300 the nation would be home to 10.8 million people. In fact, the population of London and its suburbs had already reached one million in 1800, and that of the United Kingdom as a whole hit 10.8 million the same year – a whole five centuries earlier than predicted by King. But these increases were dwarfed by those of the New World. The non-indigenous population of America (including slaves) increased by 1,335 per cent in the nineteenth century, that of Canada by 1,414 per cent, and newly settled Australia saw a rise of 72,200 per cent, from 5,200 to 3.76 million.
Population growth was driven for the most part by a combination of two factors: a larger supply of food and improvements in transport. The Agricultural Revolution did not stop in 1800: its legacy was continual innovation in farming methods and investment in new machinery. Crop surpluses and meat and milk yields increased. New, efficient means of storing and transporting these surpluses around Europe were developed. By 1860 Britain imported approximately 40 per cent of all its food. Famine still killed people by the thousand – in Madrid in 1811–12, in Ireland in 1845–9 and in Finland in 1866–8 – but after the arrival of long-distance train networks, food shortages in western Europe during peacetime became largely a thing of the past. Whereas before, people could only have as many children as they could feed, now they could have as many as they could breed. And that number was itself increasing with a gradual decline in maternal mortality. In 1700 the proportion of women who died in childbirth in London was 144 per 10,000, in 1800 it was 77 and by 1900 it had been reduced to 42.1
All these extra people had to find some way of making a living. In the past, many of them would have been employed on the land, maintaining the agricultural output on which their lives depended, But the rapid changes in agriculture meant that fewer and fewer people were required for farming. With better rotation systems, better ploughs and steam-powered machinery, farmers who were once barely able to produce enough food for their own household now could produce enough for many. In 1700 roughly 70 per cent of the population worked on the land throughout Europe. In 1801, according to the census of England and Wales, only 18 per cent were employed in agriculture; by 1901 that number had dropped to 3.65 per cent. People could no longer make a living in the countryside. All across Europe they left their villages and their rural roots and made their way towards the cities and towns where factories offered work. The same happened in America and Canada. Immigrants in the second half of the nineteenth century found most of the land already claimed. They too had to settle in towns.
The growing populations on both sides of the Atlantic needed to be housed. Long lines of urban terraces sprang up, especially in the cities of the highly industrialised and rapidly urbanising United Kingdom. Only the Netherlands had previously seen such a high proportion of town-dwelling, towards the end of its golden age, in 1700. But the proportion of Dutch town-dwellers was now falling: the country had no coal and so it was slow to industrialise. By 1850 Britain had passed the Netherlands in becoming the most urbanised large nation in the world. Another tipping point was the year 1870 – when more people in the United Kingdom lived in towns than in the countryside. But even that does not reveal the full extent of the change. England went from being 80 per cent rural in 1800 to 70 per cent urban in 1900. Hot on its heels were the rapidly industrialising countries of Belgium and Germany (52.3 per cent and 47.8 per cent urbanised respectively in 1900), and not far behind them was the massively expanding United States of America (35.9 per cent).
Percentage of population living in towns of more than 5,000 inhabitants in UK, Europe and other developed nations (America, Canada and Australia)2
Growing towns did not just consume food and drink but bricks and slates, wooden furniture and iron tools, coal and gas. The infrastructure that supplied them – the railways, pipelines, ships, wagons and horses – also required huge amounts of raw materials that had to be transported and manufactured. Cities and towns made things move, and needed entrepreneurs to borrow money from the banks and spend it in circles of increasing size and rapidity. But in order to be part of this economic cycle, the new arrivals from the countryside had to find work, and that either meant labouring (for which there was an overabundance of supply) or specialising in a trade. With so many people living and working in towns, those devoting their time to a particular trade had to compete, and competition forced them to innovate. They found they had to borrow money and invest in machinery that would give them a commercial edge over their rivals. Those who opted not to set up their own businesses but to join the ranks of factory workers were forced to exchange the general skills that their fathers had learnt for the ability to operate a particular, repetitive task on a machine, effectively de-skilling them and making them a cog in the great engine of industry. Whereas in 1800 most working people who required a new piece of furniture might well have bought some timber and carefully crafted it themselves, by 1900 they went to a department store to buy one made in a factory. This all created an inflationary cycle: population growth drove urbanisation, which drove industrial and transport growth, which in turn supported further population growth and further urbanisation, further specialisation, and so on. Population growth and urbanisation exponentially added to the changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution, ending the direct relationship between people and their land, which had existed since the beginning of farming in the Stone Age. To paraphrase the economist John Maynard Keynes, life in Europe for the vast majority of its burgeoning population was no longer a matter of how to survive; it was a question of deciding how to live.
Transport
Cities and towns could not have grown without a commensurate growth of the transport infrastructure that supplied them. Thus the nineteenth century built on the previous advances in road and canal transport that we discussed in the last chapter. It saw the construction of new canals, the extension of the turnpike trust network and, above all else, the advent of the railways.
Rails had been used to transport heavy goods for centuries – horse-drawn wagons on rails in particular had been employed for coal conveyance long before 1800. But in 1804 Richard Trevithick pioneered the combination of the power of a steam engine with railway transport in the mines of South Wales and the north-east of England. In 1812 the engine Salamanca was constructed for a colliery near Leeds, and in 1813 Puffing Billy was built by William Hedley and Thomas Hackworth for Wylam Colliery near Newcastle. Over the next decade George Stephenson, whose father worked at Wylam, produced a number of industrial steam engines for pulling coal. At the famous opening of the Stockton and Darlington Railway in 1825 Ste
phenson drove one of his engines, Locomotion, at 24 m.p.h., tugging a carriage full of passengers. His even more famous engine, Rocket, won the competition to power the 35-mile Liverpool to Manchester Railway in 1829. That line opened on 15 September 1830 with some drama, as the MP for Liverpool and lately resigned war minister William Huskisson inadvertently fell in front of Rocket and was run over, with the loss of a leg and much blood. Stephenson drove furiously – reaching speeds of 36 m.p.h. – trying to get the dying MP to Eccles to receive medical care but, alas! Mr Huskisson became a martyr to industry. His death ensured that every newspaper at home and many abroad carried the story in detail. This was another ‘Columbus moment’, when everyone could see the door to the future swing wide open.