Chapter 7 Part One Development Chapter One The World of the 1780s 5

5 With the exception, perhaps, of the capitalist mode of production, the development of the agricultural world has been rather slow.The world of commerce and manufacturing, and the technical and intellectual activities that go hand in hand with it, are full of confidence, vitality, rapid progress, and great development.The social class that benefits from it appears energetic, determined and optimistic.Observers of the time were most impressed by the extent of trade, which was closely connected with the exploitation of the colonies.The maritime trade system developed rapidly, and the trade volume and volume increased greatly. Merchant ships sailed around the world, bringing benefits to the European commercial society in the northern Atlantic Ocean.Using their colonial power, they plundered the goods of the inhabitants of the East Indies (and to a certain extent the Far East. They bought tea, silk, porcelain, etc. there, to meet the growing European demand for these items. However, the Chinese and Japanese Political independence made the trade less rapacious at the time.), from there to Europe and Africa, where these commodities, plus European goods, were used to buy slaves to feed the rapidly growing plantations of the Americas. institutional needs.American plantations, in turn, exported a larger quantity and cheaper sugar, cotton, etc. to ports along the Atlantic Ocean and the North Sea.There they would be redistributed east along with the traditional industrial and commercial goods of Europe's East-West trade: textiles, salt, wine, and other items.Then from the "Baltic Sea" in exchange for grain, wood, flax.Eastern Europe brought grain, lumber, flax and linen products (a profitable commodity to export to the tropics), hemp, and ironwork produced in this sub-colonial area.Between the more developed economies of Europe—economically speaking, this included the increasingly active white societies that settled in the North American colonies—the web of trade became denser than ever before.

When the rich Anglo-Indians or plantation owners returned from the colonies, most of them were already rich, and their wealth was so great that the old local rich men never dreamed of it.Merchants and ship merchants seem to have been the real economic powerhouses of the era, and in that century they built or rebuilt the splendid docks of Bordeaux, Bristol, Liverpool, and only dignitaries and banks Only a family can compare with them.Those who plundered their fortunes from their lucrative government positions, the phrase "below the king's fat job" had substance, as the times still do.Besides these, lawyers, land managers, local brewers, merchants, and the like, constituted the middle class.They accumulated limited wealth from the agricultural world and lived a low and quiet life.Even the manufacturer doesn't look much better than his poor relatives.For, despite the rapid development of mining and manufacturing, in all parts of Europe the merchants (and in Eastern Europe, usually feudal lords) were still their masters.

This is because the main form of industrial production at the same time is the so-called home foundry, or decentralized processing system, where merchants buy products produced by handicraftsmen or farmers during part of their slack time, and then sell them on a larger market.The result of this mere development of trade was the creation of the initial conditions for early industrial capitalism.The handicraftsman who sells his product becomes a mere piece-worker (especially if the merchant supplies him with raw materials or rents out his production equipment.), while the peasant who weaves becomes a mere piecework worker. Weavers who owned small plots of land.The specialization of processes and functions fragmented old-style handicrafts, or created a mass of semi-skilled labor among the peasantry.In the past, masters and craftsmen held two jobs, some specialized craftsmen groups, and some local middleman groups gradually transformed into subcontractors or employers. However, the key figures controlling these decentralized production forms, The main figure who connected the laborers of the lost villages and deserted streets to the world market was also a certain type of businessman.The "industrialists" who are or are about to emerge from the ranks of producers are small supporting roles beside this type of businessman, even if they are not directly dependent.There are exceptions, especially in highly industrialized England, where ironmakers, or such illustrious persons as the great pottery merchant Josiah Wedgwood, are something to be proud and admirable, and cherished by people all over Europe. Visit the enterprises they established with curiosity.However, the typical industrialist (the term had not yet been invented) was still a magistrate, not a commander.

But, whatever their status, commercial and manufacturing activity flourished.Among the European countries in the 18th century, Britain achieved the most brilliant success, and its strength was mainly based on its economic achievements.Thus, by the 1780s, all Continental European governments, which professed to be pursuing rational policies, also began to promote economic and especially industrial development, although the success of each country was different.Before the sciences were divided by the academics of the nineteenth century into the higher "pure" sciences and the lower "applied" sciences, the various disciplines were devoted to solving problems in production: the most astonishing advances of the 1780s were in chemistry On the one hand, chemistry has traditionally been most closely related to plant operations and industrial needs.The Encyclopedia of Diderot and d'Alembert is not only a summary of progressive social and political thought, but also a summary of scientific and technological progress.Because people believed in the progress of human knowledge, believed in reason, wealth, civilization and the control of nature (this has penetrated deeply into the society of the 18th century), believed in "Enlightenment" (Enlightenment), in fact, this belief mainly It draws its strength from the remarkable advances in production and trade, and from economic and scientific rationality (which, it is thought, must be closely related).And its greatest fighters were those classes that achieved the most economically, those progressives who participated most directly in that era: the business groups, the economically enlightened landowners, the financiers, the scientifically minded economic and social management. workers, educated middle class, manufacturers and entrepreneurs.These people hail Benjamin Franklin, a printer, journalist, inventor, entrepreneur, statesman, and shrewd businessman, as a keystone of the active, self-reliant, rational citizen of a future society. symbol.They are the upstarts in society and do not need to experience the baptism of the American Revolution in Britain like the American Revolution on the other side of the Atlantic.They formed the local societies from which advances, whether in science, industry, or politics, sprung.Participating in the Birmingham Lunar Society were Wedgwood, the potter; James Watt, the inventor of the modern steam engine, and his business partner, Matthew Boulton; Priestley, the chemist; ), the aristocratic zoologist and evolutionary pioneer Erasmus Darwin (Darwin's grandfather), and the famous printer Baskerville.Everywhere these people flocked to branches of Freemasonry, where class distinctions did not exist, and where the ideas of the Enlightenment were spread with disinterested zeal.

It is significant that France and England were the two main centers of Enlightenment thought, and of the Dual Revolution, even though the Enlightenment, which is widely popular internationally, was in fact formulated by the French. (Even the formulations made by the English are a reprint of French thought.) Secularized, rationalistic, progressive individualism dominates "enlightened" thought, liberating the individual from the shackles that bound him is its main purpose: to be free from the medieval ignorant traditionalism that still grips the world, from the superstitions of the Church (as distinct from "natural" or "rational" religion), from Liberty, equality, and (with it) fraternity were its watchwords.In due course they became the slogans of the French Revolution.The unification of individual liberty can only produce the most favorable results.The free play of individual intellect in the world of reason is the most astonishing achievement that man can possibly seek, and we have indeed seen the results of it.The quintessential "Enlightenment" thinker, with his passionate belief in progress, reflected the remarkable developments in knowledge, technology, wealth, welfare, and civilization that he was able to see around him, and which he did justice to Attributed to the continuous advancement of thought.At the beginning of the Enlightenment, witches were still being burned everywhere in Europe; by the end of the age, enlightened governments like Austria had abolished not only judicial torture but also serfdom.If vested interest groups such as feudal lords or the church still stand in the way of progress, what else can they expect but to be swept away?

Strictly speaking, it would be ambiguous to call the ideology of the middle class "Enlightenment," although many Enlightenmentists—who were politically committed—taken for granted that a free society would be a capitalist society.In theory, the goal of the Enlightenment was the freedom of all mankind, and all progressive, rationalist, and humanist ideologies were implicit in, and indeed derived from, that.But in fact, the leaders of the liberation movement who call for enlightenment are often the middle class of society. They do not rely on their background, but they are newcomers with both ability and political integrity and rationality.The social order produced by their activities will be a "bourgeois" and capitalist society.

It might be more accurate to call the "Enlightenment" a revolutionary ideology, and while many of the Continental champions were politically cautious and moderate, most of them - until the 1780s - regarded them as faith in an enlightened absolute monarchy.For the meaning of the Enlightenment meant that the existing social and political order in most of Europe should be abolished.It expected too much of the old regime's own demise.Instead, as we have seen, the old regime is in some ways reinforcing itself against the advance of new social and economic forces.And the stronghold of the Ancien Regime (existing outside England, the United Provinces of the Netherlands, and a few other areas where they had been defeated) was precisely the monarchy in which moderate Enlightenment thinkers maintained their convictions.