Chapter 37 Part II Results Chapter 9 Towards the Industrial World 1

Truly, this is the age of the engineer. —James Nasmyth, inventor of the steam hammer Oh progressive people, With so many testimonies, boasting to us of the power of the locomotive, Boast to us of steam and railroads. ——A. Pommier 1 Before 1848, only the British economy had actually industrialized and thus dominated the world.By about the 1840s, the United States and much of Western and Central Europe had begun or were in the process of the Industrial Revolution.There is good reason to believe that the United States will eventually become a competitor that Britain must take seriously. (Richard Cobden noted in the mid-1830s that this could be seen within 20 years.) Moreover, by the 1840s the Germanic peoples were already committed to the rapid development of their own industry .Prospects, however, do not equal achievements.By the 1840s, actual industrial change in the non-English-speaking world was still limited.For example, in 1850, the total length of railway lines in the whole of Spain, Portugal, Scandinavia, Switzerland and the Balkan Peninsula did not exceed 100 miles, while the total length of railway lines in all continents outside Europe (except the United States) Not enough.If we leave out Great Britain and a few other places, it is easy to see that the world economy and society in the 1840s was much the same as it was in 1788.The vast majority of the world's population, then as ever, are farmers.In 1830, after all, there was still only one Western city (London) with more than a million inhabitants, and one city (Paris) with more than half a million inhabitants.And, excluding the UK, only 19 European cities have more than 100,000 inhabitants.

In the world outside the UK, the slowness of this change meant that economic activity continued to be governed by the old cycle of good and bad harvests that had existed for thousands of years, rather than the new cycle of alternating industrial booms and busts, which has continued to the end of the period we are dealing with. The crisis of 1857 was probably the first crisis that was both world wide and caused by events other than agricultural disasters.Incidentally, this fact had profound political consequences: the tempo of change in industrial and non-industrial areas diverged between 1780 and 1848. (The worldwide victory of the industrial sector resynchronized the rhythm of change, but in a different way.)

The economic crisis that rattled much of Europe in 1846-1848 was an old-fashioned depression dominated by agriculture.In a sense, it was the last, and perhaps the worst, collapse of the old economic system.Not so in the UK.The worst recession in England's early industrial society, 1839-42, was purely "modern" in its timing and coincided with a period of fairly low corn prices.Spontaneous social unrest in England took the form of an unplanned Chartist general strike in the summer of 1842 (the so-called "plug riots").When the same upheavals befell the Continent in 1848, Britain was suffering only the first cyclical depression of the long century of Victorian expansion, and Belgium, another more or less industrially developed European country, was in the same economic situation. in this way.A Continental revolution without a corresponding movement in England, as Marx had foreseen, was doomed to fail.What Marx did not foresee was that the uneven development of Britain and the Continent would force the Continent to rise up alone.

What is noteworthy in the period 1789-1848, however, is not the small economic changes by later standards, but the fundamental changes that were clearly taking place at the time.Foremost among these is demographic change.The world's population—particularly in those regions on the track of a dual revolution—has embarked on an unprecedented "explosion," doubling in numbers over a period of about 150 years.Since few countries kept anything equivalent to a census before the 19th century, most of them were unreliable (the first census in Great Britain was in 1801; the first adequate census was 1831), so we don't know exactly how fast the population grew during this period.Its growth rate is unprecedented and extremely astonishing in the most economically developed regions. (Perhaps countries like Russia, whose population is not large enough to fill its no-man's-land and hitherto undeveloped areas, should be excluded.) The population of the United States (encouraged by massive immigration and a territory without space and During 1850 the number increased more than sixfold, from 4 million to as many as 23 million. Between 1800 and 1850 the population of Great Britain almost doubled, and from 1750 it nearly tripled. The population of Prussia (on the 1846 borders) also nearly doubled between 1800 and 1846, as did parts of European Russia (except Finland).The populations of Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Holland, and most of Italy also nearly doubled in the century between 1750 and 1850, but at a less dramatic rate during the period in question; Spain and Portugal The population also increased by a third during the same period.

Outside of Europe, we know less.However, China's population appears to have increased rapidly in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, until European intervention and the traditional cyclical movements in Chinese political history led to the collapse of the prosperous Manchu dynasty. (During this period, the dynasty was at the height of its administrative efficiency. The typical dynastic cycle in China lasts about 300 years; the Qing Dynasty came to power in the mid-17th century.) In Latin America, population growth rates were roughly comparable to those in Spain.In the rest of Asia, there is no sign of any population boom.Africa's population is likely to remain stable.Only in some open areas inhabited by white colonists did the population grow at a really high rate, such as Australia, where there were practically no whites inhabited in 1790, but by 1851 the white population had reached 500,000.

This remarkable increase in population naturally stimulated the economy to a great extent.However, we should regard this population growth as one of the results of the economic revolution and not as its external cause, because otherwise such rapid population growth cannot be sustained after a very limited period of time. (In the case of Ireland, population growth has not been sustained without a sustained economic revolution to complement it.) Population growth brings with it a larger labor force, especially a youthful workforce, and more consumers .The world at this time is a younger world than ever before: full of children, young couples or young adults in the prime of their lives.

The second big change is traffic.The railroad was in its admittedly infancy in 1848 fashion.In England, America, Belgium, France, and Germany, however, the railways were of considerable practical importance, and even before they were built the improvements in traffic were astonishing by former standards.For example, the Austrian Empire (except Hungary) has added more than 30,000 miles of roads between 1830 and 1847, and its road mileage has thus expanded by two and one third times.Belgium nearly doubled its road network between 1830 and 1850; even Spain nearly doubled its otherwise meager road miles—thanks in large part to the French occupation.The United States, as it had always been, was larger in its transportation enterprise than any other country, and its network of mail roads expanded more than eightfold, from 21,000 miles in 1800 to 170,000 miles in 1850.Just as Britain was completing its network of canals, France dug 2,000 miles of canals (1800-1847), and the United States opened the vital Erie Canal, between the Chesapeake and Ohio canals and other waterways.Between 1800 and the early 1840s, the total tonnage of shipping in the Western world more than doubled, and steamers already sailed between England and France (1822) and sailed regularly on the Danube. (In 1840, there were about 370,000 tons of steam ships and 9 million tons of sailing ships, but in fact, steam ships may have carried about one-sixth of the traffic.) In order to have the largest commercial fleet, the United States once again surpassed the The rest of the world is even close to catching up with the UK. (The Americans had nearly achieved their goal by 1860, before ironclads once again gave Britain the upper hand.)

Nor should we underestimate the overall improvements in speed and carrying capacity that were achieved at that time.Undoubtedly, the horse-drawn carriage transport that can transport the tsar of the entire Russian people from St. Petersburg to Berlin in four days (1834) is beyond the reach of ordinary people; but the new express mail train is something they can afford Yes, after 1824 express mail coaches could drive directly from Berlin to Magdeburg in 15 hours instead of two and a half days.Railroads, combined with Rowland Hill's pioneering effort to standardize postal tariffs in 1839 (completed with the invention of the sticky stamp in 1841), multiplied the amount of mail.But even before these two inventions, the growth of the mail in countries less developed than England was very rapid: between 1830 and 1840 the number of letters sent in France increased from 64 million to 94 million a year.Sailing ships were not only faster, but also safer and more reliable, and their average tonnage was larger.

From a technical standpoint, these improvements are certainly not as inspiring as the railroads.However, those majestic bridges across rivers and rivers, huge artificial waterways and docks, especially the fast boats with wings spread like flying swallows, and the elegant and beautiful new mail cars are still among the most outstanding industrial design products.As a means of facilitating travel and transportation, connecting urban and rural areas, rich and poor areas, its efficiency is even more impressive.Population growth was due in large part to improvements in transportation, since in the pre-industrial era the depressant was not so much the often high death rate as periodic catastrophes of famine and food scarcity (often is local).If famines in the Western world became less dire during this period (except in years of almost universal poor harvests like 1816-1817 and 1846-1848), it was mainly because of such improvements in transportation and, of course, Including general improvements in government and administrative efficiency (see Chapter 10).

The third big change, of course, is in the absolute numbers of business and immigration.No doubt this is not the case everywhere.For example, there was no sign that Calabrian or Apulian farmers were preparing to migrate, nor did the annual volume of goods shipped to the great market in Nijniy Novgorod increase to any surprising extent.However, looking at the entire world of the dual revolution, the flow of people and goods has been overwhelming. Between 1816 and 1850, about 5 million Europeans emigrated from their home countries (nearly four-fifths of them went to the Americas), and within countries, the torrent of population migration became even greater. From 1780 to 1840, the total amount of international trade in the Western world tripled, and between 1780 and 1850, it more than quadrupled.By later standards, these figures are undoubtedly quite ordinary (22 million Europeans emigrated from 1850 to 1888; the total international trade in 1889 was close to 3.4 billion pounds, compared with only 1840 £600m), but by early standards - which were, after all, the standards people were comparing against - these performances all exceeded their wildest dreams.