One owner named the little firm the Phoenix Works, and the town that grew around it took the name of Phoenixville. The phoenix is a mythic bird of Arabia, which lives for half a thousand years, roasts itself to death, rises from the ashes, and begins another cycle. It nicely symbolizes the making of iron by roasting ore.
After several decades, bigger manufacturers bought the site and dropped the nails in favor of rails. By this time, railroads were a universal project. For making rails Phoenix needed much more coal and ore so they hauled them in from far away. They also bought surrounding farms, and soon their furnaces, mills, and workshops sprawled for several acres. They renamed the firm the Phoenix Iron Company.
Starting in the middle 1800s Phoenix had another owner, and this one switched from rails to more sophisticated products. These included heavy, quarter-circle iron planks which, when four were bolted to each other, made columns to support a factory’s girders. The company also manufactured cannons, using a new method of squeezing crisscrossed white-hot rods together so they wouldn’t blow apart. (Both sides used these cannons in the Civil War.)
But the major product of the firm was lofty railroad bridges. When a railroad builder placed an order for a bridge, a Phoenix engineer would travel to the site (a gorge or river anywhere) and plan the bridge. Then the many heavy iron parts — all standardized — were shipped from Phoenixville by train and “pinned” together on the site. Heavy though they were, from afar these bridges looked like strips of lace.
The company grew in part by gathering “fixed capital.” By the 1870s it owned, along with many other things, a canal and railroad spur to haul in coal and ore, three blast furnaces, “puddling mills,” a rolling mill, a foundry, a machine shop, and several rows of workmen’s houses.
However, growth meant people too. Many men — but not a single woman — worked for Phoenix Iron. These included the owner (who lived in a hilltop mansion from which he could survey his mills), engineers, foremen, “puddlers” (who tended furnaces so hot their clothes could burst in flames), mold makers, machine tenders (who worked unprotected with white hot iron), shovelers, “lifters,” sweepers, water carriers, clerks, and mule drivers. Most of them worked in constant danger fifty-five hours a week.
Many workmen had been born on nearby farms, but beginning in the 1850s a goodly number came from Ireland. These young men had always lived in huts, dressed in rags, and eaten little but potatoes. When blight had rotted the potatoes in the 1840s, they had left their homes and journeyed to America. Later, many equally impoverished workers came to Phoenixville from central Europe; and, later still, liberated slaves came up from the southern United States.
Clearly the Phoenix raised its workers’ living standard as the company prospered. The clearest proof of this is the changes in their dwellings. Early in the century workmen and their families rented cabins that the company had built for seventy-five dollars apiece. Later on they lived in rows of little houses that the company had built on streets above the mills. Later still, they lived in houses of their own.
The workforce had been roughly twenty in the nail-making years; in the 1870s it rose to two thousand. For about a decade, Phoenix was perhaps the biggest iron producer in the world. But this was not to last, because iron makers were expanding everywhere, and other iron firms combined, forming giant corporations. During the 1800s, iron making all around the globe increased by fifty times.
But Phoenix Iron remained a midsized firm. It hung on for a hundred years, and then it shut its doors. The buildings are still there, so big it wouldn’t pay to tear them down.
DESPITE THE DECLARATION of the bomber whom we quoted at the start — that the Industrial Revolution brought “disaster for the human race” — the fact is this: Where the Revolution has occurred, and where it still is taking place, it has been a blessing for many, many people. We live longer and are healthier and probably happier than those who went before us.
Chapter 15
The richer countries grab the poorer.
AT THE RISK of being teacherly let’s be clear. Here we won’t discuss how Europeans seized the two Americas and bits of Africa and Asia. We talked of that in earlier chapters. When revolutions ended European rule in much of the Americas, that age was past.
What is called the “New Imperialism” occurred mostly in the 1800s. Here’s an overview. Once again, most of the empire builders were European nations, only they were richer now. For purposes of conquest they had all the things they needed: money, steamships, guns, and greed. In a patriotic frenzy, European empire builders gobbled poor and “backward” countries, those that couldn’t save themselves. The richer countries wanted, yes, such useful things as cotton, rubber, jute, and rice, and markets for their products. But they also craved the thrill of ruling others and, perhaps, of teaching them to love the Lord and cover up their breasts.
Other nations joined these European empire builders. America was one of them. As the 1800s ended, the United States seized some islands in the tropics and the land on which to build a link between two oceans. (We’ll say more on that in the next chapter.) The other novice empire-building nation was astonishing Japan.
INDIA, UNDER BRITAIN, was the classic case, the prime example of the way the wealthy northern countries seized and bossed the southern ones. Besides India, Britain owned a lot: Canada, Australia (recently acquired), bits of China, chunks of Africa, and more. These colonies lay all around the globe. But if it was often said that the sun never set on the British Empire, it was also said that if its empire was a crown, India was the crown jewel.
The high value of India was surprising. When English businessmen first entered it, long before, India was their second choice, not their first. On the last day of the year 1600 English merchants organized a firm they called the English East India Company. But the name is misleading. These merchants really wanted to trade in the East Indies islands, which today are Indonesia. One could make a fortune out there trading spices. But the Dutch already traded in those islands, and they kept their rivals out. So the English settled for India, as second best.
Until the 1750s the East India Company was nothing but a thousand British (mostly English) traders and their clerks, sweltering in seaside shops. They did a tidy trade in coffee, pepper, cottons, silks, and (later) opium. The Company was just a mole on India’s vast body. However, then it happened that the shahs, or rulers, of much of India began to lose control. They were feeble leaders, and India was big and hard to rule. Princes and some would-be princes tried to fill the vacuum, fighting with each other and the shahs.
For the British businessmen this civil war brought thrilling prospects. The Company formed an army, disciplined and well equipped with guns. First they fought and beat their French business rivals and shut their company down. Then they faced the hostile Nawab of Bengal, who recently had locked 146 Britons in “the Black Hole of Calcutta” on a summer night, causing all but 23 to suffocate. With the help of regular British troops, the Company defeated him. And so, in 1764 British businessmen found themselves the rulers of Bengal, the richest state in India.
Problems soon arose. Back home in London, it was learned that Company officials in India were plundering and grafting. The British government was also troubled by the way the Company was meddling in wars of other Indian states. Britain therefore named a governor general to “regulate” the Company, that is, to govern British subjects in India. By the beginning of the 1800s, however, a governor general did far more than that. He ruled the British zone in India and everybody in it, British and Indians alike, as if he answered only to his chiefs in London.
By now, in the age of the New Imperialism, the Company wasn’t what it had been, but British rule was doing well. One by one the British won the states around them, then the ones that lay beyond. Sometimes they annexed a state, but often they merely forced its prince to let them run his foreign policy, which amounted nearly to the same thing. In taking over, they were moved no doubt by love of power, but they often claimed
to have no choice but to conquer or be conquered. (The ancient Romans used to say the same.)
By the time it finished, Britain — just a little nation far away — controlled them all, those Indian rulers with their tasty titles: the Nawab of Oudh, the Nabob of Jubbulpore, the Maharaja of Travancore, the Gaikwar of Baroda, the Sultan of Mysore, the Rani of Jhansi, the Begum of Bhopal, the Ahkoond of Swat. (One important conquest was the plains of Sind. After it surrendered, the British general sent his chief a message with a single Latin word, “Peccavi,” which means “I have sinned.”) By the middle 1800s the British ran all India, from the snowy Himalayas to the steaming south.
As they won the land, the British changed their views about themselves and those they ruled. In the early days the Company officials, who were only guests residing in a foreign land, adopted Indian ways. They mixed with Indians and learned their many tongues. They took to Indian food and dress, and some of them to Indian mistresses and wives.
In the 1800s, that all changed. Now the British were the masters, and they learned to scorn the Indians. Now a governor general could write, as one did in 1813, “The Hindoo appears a being nearly limited to mere animal functions and even in them indifferent. Their proficiency and skill in the several lines of occupation to which they are restricted are little more than the dexterity which any animal with similar conformation but with no higher intellect than a dog, an elephant, or a monkey, might be supposed to be capable of attaining.”
With wonderful disdain, another Briton clarified why Indians needed Britain. The role of Britain was “the introduction of the essential parts of European civilization into a country densely peopled, grossly ignorant, steeped in idolatrous superstition, unenergetic, fatalistic, indifferent to most of what we regard as the evils of life and preferring the response of submitting to them to the trouble of encountering and trying to remove them.” The British saw themselves as instruments of God, helping an inferior people. They decided it was best to live apart and treat the natives with a cool correctness. They didn’t hesitate to throw Indians out of their “Europeans Only” railroad cars.
Did the British do more good or harm to Indians? They brought about these gains: they caught and hanged or jailed the Thugs, India’s gangs of ritual murderers, who were worshippers of Kali, goddess of destruction. They constructed bridges, roads, and thousands of miles of the best railroads in Asia. (As a result, food supplies moved faster, and India’s awful famines nearly vanished.) They invested in local industries, especially textiles. (Here British capital helped, but Indians did much themselves.) The British stamped out suttee, the Indian rite of burning widows alive in their deceased husbands’ cremation fires. (When the British outlawed this, Indian religious leaders remonstrated to the governor general, “But, Your Excellency, it is our religious custom.” He answered, “My nation also has a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them.”)
The British also fostered schools, and by 1900 one Indian man in ten could read and write. This was then a lofty rate of literacy in Asia. However, only one Indian woman in 150 could read and write.
In 1857 Indians revolted, terrifyingly. What triggered their “Great Mutiny” were the cartridges that the British army issued to its Indian troops. Hindu soldiers were aghast to find the cartridges were greased with fat from cows, which to them were sacred. Because they had to bite the ends of cartridges before they loaded them in guns, the fat could easily pollute them. Many of them mutinied, and rebellion spread through much of north and central India. Many Indian princes joined the mutiny, hoping to regain the power they’d earlier lost. The program of the mutineers was simply to return to India’s pre-British past.
In putting down the mutiny the British had advantages: tauter discipline and better weapons. In two grim years of fighting Britain quelled the great revolt. Because the mutineers had massacred some British captives, the British struck back hard. At Delhi they drove everybody into open fields and executed thousands after token trials, or none at all.
After the Mutiny, Britain would rule India for another ninety years. But the British rulers trusted Indians less and were even more aloof than they had been before. As one Briton said, “We are not in India to be pleasant.” They were careful always to station British troops with Indian ones, lest Indians dream again of governing themselves.
IN THE EARLY 1800S, most of the continent below them was a mystery to Europeans. They did know North Africa, which was nearest to them. But they knew little of the region south of the Sahara, which is nearly as big as North America. Their ships, it’s true, had anchored on its coasts to pick up palm oil, ivory, and slaves. But Europeans feared the heat, the fevers, and the warriors of the interior, and they rarely tried to penetrate it.
Curiosity and other motives had their way at last. After about 1850, numerous explorers landed on the coasts and wandered inland, using local bearers. One of these was Dr. David Livingstone, a Scot, who wanted to bring medicine and Jesus into Africa and also open it for trade. Honest business, he believed, would undercut the still-surviving Arab trade in slaves. For thirty years he hiked through central Africa, preaching, trading, treating people for disease, and mapping lakes and rivers. Between safaris, he wrote books on Africa that many read, and he urged that other Britons carry on his work.
In 1871 Henry Morton Stanley sailed to Africa to “find” the legendary Livingstone, who was thought to be in trouble. Stanley was an English journalist, reporting for the New York Herald. With his caravan he trudged to Lake Tanganyika, where he found the doctor in a village. Walking up to him he asked the famous question, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” As expected, Livingstone was sick. Stanley gave him medicines and bullets, pots and kettles, and cloth and beads to trade with. Intrepid Livingstone refused to leave his work. When he died the British buried him in London’s Westminster Abbey.
Stanley’s role in the New Imperialism, however, had only started. He wrote a book about his great adventure, called How I Found Livingstone, and Britain’s Queen Victoria received him and gave him a gold snuffbox. He became an explorer, and wrote more books about his doings, with such alluring titles as In Darkest Africa. When they read about his deeds and those of others, Europeans were entranced. Darkest Africa had everything that statemen, missionaries, businessmen, and medal-hungry generals could desire.
A “scramble for Africa” soon got under way. Britain, France, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Germany, and Italy all bit pieces until, after only fifteen years, they had eaten all of Africa but Ethiopia. We can’t tell all this lurid and exciting story, so we’ll focus on the way a Belgian took a giant helping, and let it represent the whole.
In this Belgian venture — caper — Stanley played a major role. Stanley was a harder man than Livingstone; he dreamed of more than saving lives and souls and slaves. He saw that he could make a fortune, so he went to Europe seeking an investor. He found him in a businessman who was also a king.
Leopold II, king of the Belgians, was searching for a place where he and his business friends could make a lot of money. “The Universe lies in front of us,” he wrote, “steam and electricity have made distances disappear, [and] all the unappropriated lands on the surface of the globe may become the field of our operations and of our successes.” When he heard about the ivory, the palm oil, and the rubber trees in the Congo River basin he knew that this was just the fertile field he wanted. And Stanley was the man to plow it. With some backers, Leopold and Stanley formed a company to exploit the Congo. This business would be private, not governmental. The Belgian people were to have no part in it.
Stanley journeyed to the Congo, where he held a meeting with over five hundred tribal chieftains. He persuaded them to sign over to the king’s company the land it needed. Perhaps his words lost a lot in translation. As the chieftains understood it, they were giving up only some distant lands of no importance. They thought they understood that they would keep their villages, the cultivated plots around them, and the nearby forests. It was in these forests that
they gathered modest quantities of rubber, ivory (from tusks of elephants), and gum, which they floated down the Congo and sold to Europeans. But what the chiefs believed they understood was wrong, and in the 1880s they lost everything to the outsiders.
Leopold now was master of a portion of the earth eighty times as big as Belgium. As he would say, “My rights over the Congo are to be shared with none…the King [himself] was the founder of the state; he was its organizer, its owner, its absolute sovereign.” All of it was his to use as he desired, and his timing was exactly right, because just then industrializing countries needed rubber for the tires of bicycles. The Congo was one of the few places in the world with forests of rubber trees. Ivory too was in demand — for billiard balls, piano keys, and knickknacks.
To make a fortune one merely had to get the Congolese to tap the trees and hunt the pachyderms. However, this turned out to be a problem. The Congolese were quite content to live as they had always done: farming, hunting, sometimes selling tusks and rubber. In the steamy heat of the equator, that was all they chose to do. Why sweat for white-skinned men from who knew where?
Leopold’s managers solved this labor problem by forcing the Congolese to pay “taxes” in raw rubber, tusks, and food. (The food — cassava bread, bananas, game — was for the managers and their Congolese enforcers.) If a village failed to pay its “tax” the managers took hostages and jailed the chief. If those measures didn’t work they sent enforcers to arrest the tax delinquents and to flog them, using whips they cut from hippopotamus hide. The goons would shoot to death the worst offenders, chop a hand from each, and turn in basketfuls of severed hands. The hands were proof they hadn’t wasted bullets. (However, some historians believe they also cut the hands from living Congolese.)
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