Chapter 14 Part 1 Development Chapter 2 Industrial Revolution 5

5 Tracing the dynamics that drove industrialization is only part of the historian's task.Another task for the historian is to trace the mobilization and allocation of economic resources, the economic and social adaptations required to sustain this new, revolutionary process. The first and perhaps most critical factor to be mobilized and deployed is the labor force, since an industrial economy implies a markedly lower proportion of the agricultural (i.e. rural) population than the non-agricultural (i.e. growing urban) population A sharp rise in the proportions, and, almost necessarily, (as in our period) a rapid and general increase of population.Therefore, this also means that the food mainly provided by domestic agriculture must first be greatly increased, which is the "agricultural revolution". (Before the age of railroads and steamships—the end of the era we care about—the possibility of importing food in large quantities from abroad was very limited, although Britain eventually became a net importer of food from the 1770s onwards.)

The rapid growth of towns and non-agricultural settlements in England has long been a natural impetus to agriculture.Fortunately, British agriculture was so inefficient in pre-industrial times that a little improvement in it—a little sound management of livestock, crop rotation, fertilization, improved farm design, or the introduction of new crops—could have produce enormous effects.This agricultural change preceded the Industrial Revolution and made possible the first few stages of population growth.The impetus for agricultural development continued naturally despite the economic recession that followed the exceptionally high prices during the Napoleonic Wars, which crippled British agricultural production.Changes during the period covered by this book may have been rather limited in terms of technology and capital investment before the 1840s, but after that the age of agricultural science and engineering arguably came.The sharp increase in British grain production enabled British agricultural production to provide 98% of the grain for the British population, which had doubled to triple in the 18th century, in the 1830s. Farming methods that began to be applied in the early 19th century, obtained through rationalization and expansion of the cultivated area.

All these advances have been made not through technological change but through social change: the abolition of open-field communal farming and communal grazing (the "enclosure movement") left over from the Middle Ages, the elimination of self-sufficient smallholder farming, and the The outdated concept of land non-commercial management.Because the agricultural progress of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries provided for the future, England was able to solve the land problem at its root in a unique way with relative smoothness, although in the process it was often resisted not only by the unfortunate rural poor, but also by the poor. The old-fashioned country gentry resisted.However, the settlement of the land issue made Britain a country composed of a small number of large landowners, a certain number of rented farm owners for profit, and a large number of hired laborers.During the famine year of 1795 and after, the squire judges in many counties voluntarily adopted the "Spinhamland system" for the relief of the poor, which has been regarded as a protection of the old rural society. The last organized attempt to defend against the encroachment of pecuniary ties. (Under this system, the poor could get the necessary subsidies from local taxes to guarantee a living wage. Although this system was well-intentioned, it ended up making the poor poorer than before.) Farmers took the Corn Law " to protect agricultural production against crises after 1815.In spite of all economic orthodoxy, the Corn Laws were, in a sense, a manifesto against such tendencies, by those who judged agriculture like any other business solely by the standard of profit.But these efforts to resist capitalism's eventual entry into the countryside were doomed to failure. After 1830 they retreated steadily against the advancing waves of middle-class radicals. The enactment of the New Pool Law in 1834 and the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 officially announced their final defeat.

This social change was a great success in terms of economic productivity and a catastrophe in terms of human suffering, which was exacerbated by the post-1815 agricultural depression, which left the toiling masses of the countryside in dire straits . After 1800, even such an enthusiastic advocate of enclosure and agricultural progress as Arthur Young was appalled by its social consequences.But these results are also desirable from the standpoint of industrialization, since the industrial economy needs labor, and where else can it be obtained than from the previously non-industrial sector?The domestic rural population, foreign (mainly Irish) immigrants, plus various small producers and working people, these people are the most obvious labor resources. (Another argument is that labor supply did not come from this shift but from an increase in the total population, which, as we know it, was growing at a rapid rate. However, this view is irrelevant. In an industrial economy , not only the quantity of the labor force, but also the proportion of the non-agricultural labor force must increase substantially. This means that men and women who would otherwise remain in the country, as their predecessors did, must emigrate at some stage in their lives , because cities grow faster than their own natural growth rate. In any case, urban populations normally tend to increase slower than rural populations, whether the agricultural population is decreasing, remaining constant, or even increasing.) They must be attracted to new occupations, or, if—and this is most likely—they are not initially attracted to these occupations and unwilling to abandon their traditional ways of life, then they must be compelled to do so. new job.Economic and social misery are the most effective whips, and higher monetary wages and greater freedom of urban life are just added carrots.For various reasons, in the period we are discussing, the forces capable of prying people and loosening them from the harbor formed by history are still quite weak compared with the second half of the nineteenth century.Famines as horrific as the Irish famine led to enormous waves of emigration (1.5 million of a total population of 8.5 million emigrated between 1835 and 1850), which became common after 1850.However, this condition is stronger in England than elsewhere, and if it were not so, the development of industry in England would be hindered, as in France, by the stable and comfortable life of the peasants and petty bourgeoisie, which would make industry Lose the labor it needs to absorb. (If it were not so, Britain would have to rely on a large number of foreign immigrants, like the United States. In fact, Britain only partially relied on Irish immigrants.)

It is one thing to obtain a labor force in sufficient quantities, but quite another to obtain enough qualified laborers with the appropriate skills. The experience of the 20th century has shown that this problem is a crucial one, and it is also more difficult to solve.First of all, all laborers must learn how to work in a manner suitable to industry, that is to say, in a manner quite different from the seasonal fluctuations in agricultural production, or from the independent handicraftsman for him. The small piece of land managed can work in a self-regulating way, and the way to adapt to the industry is to work continuously and regularly every day.Workers also had to learn to respond sharply to monetary stimuli.Employers in England then complained as often as South African employers now about the "laziness" of their labourers, or about the tendency of their employees to stop working when they had earned a customary week's living wage.These problems were solved in strict labor discipline (fines and the Master and Servant Law which biased the law in favor of the employer, etc.), but above all by keeping the wages of the labor as low as possible so that he had to work continuously for a full week work in order to earn a minimum income.The problem of labor discipline was even more pressing in factories, where it was often found that employers were more accustomed to employing obedient (and cheaper) women and children: of all workers in English cotton mills, 1834-1837, adult Men make up a quarter, women and girls more than half, and the rest are male child laborers under the age of 18.Another common method of ensuring labor discipline is subcontracting, or making skilled workers the actual employers of unskilled labor. These methods reflect the small-scale, sporadic process.In the cotton industry, for example, about two-thirds of the boys and one-third of the girls were thus "under the direct employment of skilled labourers," and from then on they were more closely guarded.This unique practice is even more prevalent outside of factories.The foreman, of course, was directly motivated by the money and never let up his watch over the helpers he hired.

It is even more difficult to recruit or train enough skilled workers, technically trained workers.Because there are few pre-industrial technologies that can be used in modern industry, although there are still many jobs, such as construction technology, which are actually still the same and have not changed.Fortunately, in the century before 1789, Britain's slow and incomplete industrialization had created a group of quite suitable technical teams, both in textile technology and metal processing.Therefore, on the European continent, locksmiths are one of the only craftsmen who can handle delicate metal work, and they have become the ancestors of machine builders, and are sometimes called "engineers" or "mechanics". " (already common in mining and mining-related trades), as were English waterwheelers.It is no accident that the word "engineer" in English refers to both skilled metalworkers and designers and planners, because most of the higher skilled craftsmen come from these Skilled, independent people.In fact, the industrialization of Britain depended on this group of unplanned and highly skilled workers, while the industrialists of the European continent were not so lucky.This explains the extreme neglect of general and technical education in the UK, a neglect that will pay for itself later.

In addition to the problem of labor supply, the problem of capital supply is not big. Unlike most other European countries, the UK does not lack capital that can be used for investment immediately.The main difficulty was that the wealthy men of the eighteenth century who controlled most of the capital available for investment—landlords, merchants, ship merchants, financiers, and so on—were unwilling to invest their money in new industries, which, therefore, often had to fail. Do not start with small-scale savings or loans, but develop through the reinvestment of profits earned.Local capital shortages made early industrialists—especially self-made industrialists—more thrifty and greedy, so their workers were relatively more exploited.However, this reflects imperfections in the flow of surplus investment across the country rather than a shortage of capital.On the other hand, the rich in the 18th century were ready to invest their money in certain causes conducive to industrialization, especially transportation (canals, dock facilities, roads, and later railroads) and mining .Even if landowners cannot operate these businesses themselves, they can extract mining royalties from them.

As for technology in trade and finance, there are no difficulties, whether private or public.Banks, banknotes, money orders, bonds, stocks, the technical details of overseas and wholesale trade, marketing, are all well understood.There are many people who can operate these businesses, or can easily learn to operate them.Furthermore, by the end of the 18th century, the government was determined to pursue a policy of commercial supremacy, and old laws that ran counter to this (for example, the "Society Law" of the Tudor period) had long been obsolete.Between 1813 and 1835 it was completely abolished, except as regards agriculture.In theory, Britain's legal, financial, and commercial institutions are rather crude, hindering rather than helping the economy.For example, if people wanted to form joint-stock companies, they almost always had to get Parliament to pass costly "private laws"; effective institutions in order to serve this purpose.The UK does its best, and in fact, it does better than its competitors.

Through this rather arbitrary, unplanned, empirical approach, the first significant industrial economies were established.Small and old by modern standards, the economy still marks Britain today.And by the standards of 1848 it achieved greatness, though it is astonishing that the boomtowns were uglier and the proletariat worse off than elsewhere.A modern historian concluded: "On the whole, the conditions of the British working class from 1830 to 1848 were obviously worse than those in France." Even foreign tourists are worried about this.However, it controls a steam engine with 1 million horsepower, relies on more than 17 million mechanized spindles, produces 2 million yards of cotton cloth every year, excavates almost 50 million tons of raw coal, and imports and exports goods worth 170 million yuan a year. GBP.Its trade was twice that of France, its closest rival, yet in 1780 Britain had only barely surpassed France.England consumes twice as much cotton as America and four times as much as France.Its pig iron production accounts for more than half of the total pig iron output in the world's economically developed regions. The average amount of pig iron used by British residents is twice that of the country (Belgium) whose industrialization level is second only to the UK, three times that of the United States, and more than four times that of France. .British capital investment—a quarter of America's and almost a fifth of Latin America's—brought home 200-300 million in dividends and bills of exchange from around the world.The UK has effectively become the "world's factory".

The only law of the merchant and entrepreneur is to buy cheap and sell dear without limit.At that time, both Britain and the whole world knew that the industrial revolution launched in the British Isles was changing the world. The industrial revolution would be invincible, and the immortal emperors of the past would appear powerless in front of today's businessmen and steam engines.