by Andrew Marr
Watt’s engines were first employed in mines, but soon also in mills grinding flour, in breweries and then in other factories. Altogether, between 1775 and the end of the century the firm produced about 450 steam engines. Boulton was now expanding into coin production. At this time Britain was experiencing a plague of fake coinage, so crippling that the Royal Mint had stopped minting. Boulton at his ‘Soho Mint’ had already produced free-market coins as well as coins for foreign governments, for the British in India, and then for the British at home. Coins depended for their high quality on fixed amounts of metal, accurate shaping and industrial-scale manufacture: accuracy and reliability Boulton’s new system, with its Watt engines, could deliver.
Looking back at their story, it becomes easier to see why industrialization took off first in Britain. The state was still old-fashioned. What we today call ‘infrastructure’ was primitive. There were some good roads and some new, useful canals, but muddy and dangerous travel was the norm. The banks were shaky, commercial law was full of holes, Parliament was a cockpit where vested interests fought the newcomers, and the country as a whole was obsessed with its overseas wars. But in both Scotland and England a vigorous, free exchange of new ideas was taking place. Far from London, and outside the ancient guild restrictions, men were able to build, trade and experiment freely, lobby the politicians and take pride in the new philosophy of capitalism explained by Watt’s friend Adam Smith in his Wealth of Nations, published in 1776. They could also get rich. Watt and Boulton represent pioneers of railways and iron bridges, of new types of ship, gas lighting, electricity; initiators of revolutions in pottery, glass, fabrics and machine-tools, men of genius as varied as Humphry Davy, Michael Faraday and Abraham Darby. They were all remarkable. They were also all lucky: that time, that place.
Dark, Satanic and Infectious
But the industrialization of parts of Britain came at a terrible price. Wrenched from the old seasonal rhythms and religious holidays, people were being forced to work differently. During the 1700s, it has been calculated, the average number of work days in a year in Britain rose from 250 to 300. Those were lost days for living and loving, for storytelling and teaching. People who had risen with the sun found themselves stumbling to work in the dark, to artificially lit factories and workshops where they would spend twelve hours on their feet, their time regulated by large mechanical clocks. The famous coal-black factories with their huge chimneys were rare enough at first, mainly in the Lancashire cotton towns, but the packed, cheap housing and the ubiquitous coal smoke soon presented a convincing image of hell to writers as various as Charles Dickens, Friedrich Engels and Queen Victoria.
Although children had always worked in the fields, doing the lighter jobs, they were now pressed into an industrial labour force where they would be so ill-treated that even in these tough times a movement to limit their hours arose. Driven by the same Christian outrage as fuelled the anti-slavery movement, it resulted in a series of Factory Acts limiting hours and setting out health and safety requirements. But the lives of early-nineteenth-century child workers are grimly apparent from the clauses of the first of these Acts, in 1802, which specified that children could work up to eight hours a day from the age of nine, and twelve hours from the age of fourteen; that they should not begin work until after six in the morning; and that they should sleep no more than two to a bed and get an hour’s instruction in Christianity on Sundays. Even with light fines, these laws were much ignored. Further reports, scandals and laws followed; Dickens and his novelist friend Elizabeth Gaskell highlighted factory conditions in their books, and pioneering journalists explored the northern cities as if they were alien jungles – which, for middle-class southerners, they were.
Industrialization also changed the politics of the British, in many unexpected ways. During 1811–16 in Nottinghamshire, Yorkshire and Lancashire, the old artisan, cottage-based handloom weavers revolted violently against the new mechanized factory looms that were destroying their livelihoods. Taking their battle name from a fictitious woodland freedom fighter called King Lud, these ‘Luddites’ smashed machines, attacked employers and magistrates and, having practised night manoeuvres outside industrial cities, ended up clashing with the army. Many were hanged or sent to Australia. In 1830, agricultural workers in Kent began the ‘Swing Riots’ – another attack on the new job-destroying technology, in this case mechanized threshing machines.
The New Poor Law of 1834, which replaced the Elizabethan system of parish relief with a national network of grim workhouses designed to force the poorest out of the countryside and into towns to find work, or to live in deliberately harsh conditions, segregated by sex, in prison-like buildings, provoked violent protests in cities such as Bradford, Oldham and Huddersfield. In 1834, too, the ‘Tolpuddle Martyrs’, six agricultural labourers from Dorset who had formed a union against low wages, were transported to Australia. The popular protest that ensued resulted in a campaign that became seminal in the development of trade unionism. For many visiting continentals, from the German capitalist Engels to the French artist Gustave Doré, Britain was both an amazing example of new ways of making things and a vision of human inequality pressed too far.
Before the advent of industrialization, British politics had been a balance between the influence of the old elites – landowners and gentry – the city merchants and the clergy, plus the new entrepreneurs. Now that balance ended. From 1780 to 1830 the population of England doubled. Industrial output leapt threefold. Much of the increased wealth accrued to the towns, and governments found themselves forced to defend the property rights of mill-owners, to send soldiers to put down workers’ protests, and to tilt both the law and the political system to reflect the new wealth and the new power. The House of Commons had originally been elected from constituencies whose origins were now half lost in time, many of them tiny ‘rotten boroughs’ bearing no relation to the growth of industrial cities. The most important tariff system, the Corn Laws, taxed imported food to protect the income of British farmers and landowners, so keeping the price of bread artificially high. In an orgy of reform, both of these imbalances would be swept aside.
The food issue had been sharpened by Britain’s long war with France and her continental allies. We have seen how huge advances in British farming made the industrial revolution possible; but the further leaps in population then outpaced the farming revolution, so that by the late 1790s Britain had stopped exporting grain. ‘Food security’, which would be such an issue for the British during the two world wars, was a prime national concern during the Napoleonic era too. Tariffs were seen as a way of protecting and promoting home-grown food. Yet industrialization was feeding – literally – on what now had to be imported.
Though clouded by the high-flown rhetoric of free trade and the advance of civilization, this was really a fight between the more southerly Britain of the fields and the northerly Britain of the factories. In 1846 the factories, and the north, emerged as the winners, when a Tory prime minister, Robert Peel, abolished the Corn Laws at the cost of his own position. By then, the political change was under way too. The Great Reform Act of 1832 swept away the most corrupt boroughs and increased the franchise by around 60 per cent, but it failed to extend the vote to enough poorer citizens to satisfy the growing working- and middle-class movement for democracy. Much of the story of later-nineteenth-century politics would be about the constant pressure for reform, and the series of further Acts that would extend voting rights and begin to give cities like Birmingham the political clout they had lacked in the lifetimes of Watt and Boulton.
So the British state shifted from a position of essentially supporting the power of land, of the ancient city guilds and of the chartered merchant companies, to one of essentially supporting capitalism and industry. Religious controversies, always important, were gradually crowded out by class struggles, as trade unions and political reformists such as the Chartists demanded new rights. British industry had emerged victorious in the competitio
n stakes. Having overwhelmed foreign competitors, the British began to adopt free trade as a national religion. This may have been unfair to other countries, struggling to catch up, who would require a period of protection to develop their own industries; it certainly gave the British a reputation for stinking hypocrisy, as well as for skill and hard work.
It also became clear that the optimistic theories of Adam Smith and his free-trade followers underplayed the role of war. Many of Britain’s early technical skills related to her mighty fleet (think of Watt’s father, and nautical instruments, and those devastating carronades). Her young consumer economy was fed by the success of British bayonets and cannon in India, America and the Caribbean. Britain would probably have been the first to industrialize anyway, but had France not been preoccupied by the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars during the crucial decades she might have run her old adversary close. (Gas-lighting, so important to making early-industrial city life safer and the days longer, got a major boost in Britain because of the massive accumulation of unwanted musket barrels after Napoleon’s defeat in 1815, which were turned into gas pipes.13)
Both of the major nations that were the next to pick up industrialization protected their own industries and used them to promote nationalism. The United States had great advantages as a rising industrial power. It had a young people, seemingly unlimited land, long rivers for transportation, large natural resources and a new, enlightened political system that positively encouraged people to challenge European orthodoxy. Germany had different advantages. After Napoleon had abolished the Holy Roman Empire, those who spoke German were still divided into around three hundred separate countries, mini-countries, micro-countries, free cities and other political flecks and speckles. But they had huge coal and iron reserves, a long and excellent tradition in metalworking and, in Prussia, a rising national leader. The Prussians drew other smaller German states into their customs union, or Zollverein, which encouraged free trade and began to wear away some of the maze of different measuring systems, currencies and related laws. After defeating first the Austrians and then the French, the united Germany led by Prussia was able to forge ahead at a remarkable pace.
It seemed obvious that industrial growth needed a liberal political order to thrive in. Yet most of Europe had been under the hegemony of the illiberal Habsburgs of Austro-Hungary and other, lesser monarchies, with the Russian Czar still acting as a policeman of last resort. During the nineteenth century the struggle to build liberal political states, in which capitalism and therefore modernization could thrive, was the main internal European cause. By and large liberalism and nationalism marched together. The unification of Italy, a long and complex struggle against Austrian occupiers, local monarchies with medieval origins, such as the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and the Duchy of Modena, and against Papal conservatism, was driven by a sense that Italy needed a modern, united democratic state to pull her into the modern world. (In fact the absolute monarchs had not always done badly; the Naples-based Kingdom of the Two Sicilies had some highly effective shipyards and railway engineering companies.)
Nowhere was the tension between traditionalism and modernization sharper than in France. The post-Napoleonic monarchy curdled into a fully reactionary one under Charles X. Ousted by a revolt in July 1830, he was replaced by the more liberal Louis-Philippe, the ‘bourgeois monarch’; but France lagged far behind Britain in its franchise and a formidable reform movement began to grow. The problem for middle-class liberals was that change was likely to be provoked by the poorer and angrier masses, who they themselves also feared. Poor crops and widespread hunger in turn provoked the ripple of uprisings that made 1848 the year of revolutions in Poland, across the Habsburg empire, and in smaller countries such as Denmark, Belgium and Switzerland. In France, the ancient monarchy was finally overthrown and a Second Republic declared, which would become, within four years under Louis-Bonaparte, the Second Empire. This two steps forward, one back pattern was widespread. Most of the uprisings failed, and few produced clear political advances. Perhaps their most important side-effect was the biggest new political idea of the mid-century: the messianic socialist creed of Marxism.
Karl Marx had come from a wealthy Rhineland family but spent his early adult years as a philosopher-rebel, finally finding safety in liberal Britain. With his co-author and financial supporter Friedrich Engels, he argued for a purely material vision of historical advance, in which the struggle between the rich owners of capital and industry and the workers who produced the real wealth would eventually result in a Communist world, where the working class owned the full value of their work, and the state – monarchical, bourgeois, parliamentary or republican – withered away. In The Communist Manifesto of 1848, addressed to rebelling German workers, he expressed himself in clear, biting and exciting imagery. His huge later work of 1867–94, Capital, attempted to use statistics to demonstrate the scientific truth underlying his vision. It became the secular bible of twentieth-century revolutionaries, even though Marx assumed the revolution must start in advanced Germany or Britain, rather than backward Russia. Marx’s work spread among the extreme socialists of Europe but was at that time a minority taste compared with Christianity-tinged and more moderate, parliamentary visions of socialist politics. His analysis lacked the subtleties of traditional political and moral philosophers, but he had a vivid understanding of the ruthless competition hiding below the dimpled smile of bourgeois capitalism. The future would be nothing like his prediction; but the world around him in the mid-nineteenth century was very much as he described it.
Both the United States and Germany exploited technologies first developed in Britain. They stole patents, copied machines, debriefed British workers and set up their own technical colleges. This was inevitable. In an interconnected world, good ideas cannot be hidden. Anyway, key breakthroughs exploited in the British industrial revolution had themselves come from overseas – that early steam engine from France, but also the wet-spinning of flax and the Jacquard loom, and four-field crop rotation from Holland. The Japanese did the same after 1945; the Chinese are doing it now to Japan and the US. One day, with any luck, Africans will steal Chinese systems. Copying happens far more quickly than inventing.
For both the US and Germany the most important early technological innovation was the railway (though both also followed the British in digging new canals). In Britain, 1830 is often given as the year when the railway system really came of age; but it was also the year when the first US railway opened. By the 1860s, the Americans had nearly 30,000 miles of track and by 1870, 50,000 miles, compared with the 6,000 miles built in Britain during 1830–50 at the height of the ‘railway mania’. By 1875 Germany too had overtaken Britain in railway miles. A similar overleaping would happen with iron and steel; but both the US and Germany would soon move on to new technologies of their own, from the telegraph to more advanced chemicals and engines. In both cases industrialization drove, and was driven by, nationalism. In the US the railways knitted together a new, huge country. Whereas in Britain they had been built by private money and labour, which often had to fight politicians trying to obstruct new lines, in the US the government loaned army engineers to help. In Germany, though the first railways were designed to link the industrial towns, unification made the railways a key agent in binding the new nation into one.
Capitalist-industrialist theory emphasized openness and free markets, and argued that the more trade, the less national conflict. In practice, nationalism and capitalist industrialization marched in lockstep. The American experience involved cartels, bribery scandals, political corruption and the brutal suppression of workers’ organizations, as well as the racist exclusion of some would-be industrial workers, such as the Chinese, by others, such as the Irish. Industrialization was a far more violent and less pure process than early writers on capitalism had hoped and expected. The theory, nice though it was, had emerged from the unique experience of the British as the first, unchallenged seedbed of this momentous change
in human life. And there were many places where it would completely fail to take root.
From Card-player to Saint: Russia’s Lost Opportunity
The scene was a small but fashionable Russian resort town in the foothills of the Caucasus mountains, Pyatigorsk, in the summer of 1853. An artillery officer, a keen but disorganized soldier who had been fighting Chechen rebels on behalf of the Czar, was in a bad way. He was in many respects a typical young aristocrat of his time. He had gambled away huge sums at gaming tables in St Petersburg, as well as here with army colleagues. His career was in the doldrums. He dreamt of a more modern Russia, less under the thumb of the Czar and his censors, while he wrote war stories. He had chased many women, not least using his position as a landowner to jump on serf girls, and constantly made plans to reform his life, then forgot them again. With his large brow and huge fringe, he was a striking figure – glaring, almost wolf-like.
Now his gambling debts were getting on top of him. A few months before, he had had to get his brother-in-law to sell a second village on his estate, along with its twenty-six serfs and their families – people were disposed of like so many coins. Now he realized he would have to sell the main house itself, the place built by his grandfather, where he had been born. He signed the chit. The grand house was duly bought by a rival landowner, who had it taken apart, loaded it all onto wagons and rebuilt it on his own land. Left behind were two much smaller wings of the house, a gaping hole between them.
Neither the casual selling of serfs to pay card debts nor the exploitation of serf women was unusual behaviour among Russia’s bored, pampered, discontented noble sons. But this man was Leo Tolstoy, in his late twenties. The world’s greatest-ever novelist, he would become a figure of moral authority not only in Russia, where he would be idolized, but around the world. In later life, with his flowing patriarchal beard and dressed in a peasant smock, he would call for Russians to recover their peasant roots, immerse themselves in country life, educate their former serfs and pursue the highest Christian ideals. Returning to live in one of the wings of the formerly grand country house he had sold, Yasnaya Polyana, near Tula, about 120 miles from Moscow, Tolstoy would spend much of the rest of his life trying to atone for his youthful sins. Part of the power of his writing in War and Peace and Anna Karenina derives from his ruthlessly honest exposure of his own addictions and selfishness, and the delight and zest with which he embraced rural Russia.