Chapter 39 Part II Results Chapter 9 Towards the Industrial World 3

3 However, the economic development of this period has a huge contradiction - France.In theory, no other country can develop faster than it.France, as we know, had a system perfectly suited to the development of capitalism; French entrepreneurial genius and creativity were unrivaled in Europe.The French invented or first developed department stores, advertising, and a technical innovation and technical achievement, photography (associated with Nicephore Niepce and Daguerre), under the guidance of far ahead French science ), Leblanc's soda making, Berthollet's chlorine bleaching, electroplating, galvanizing, etc.French financiers are among the most innovative in the world.France possessed large reserves of capital which, assisted by its expertise, could be exported across the Continent and even to England after 1850, in partnership with institutions such as the London General Omnibus Company.By 1847 some 2.25 billion francs had been exported abroad—an amount second only to Great Britain and, compared with any other country, astronomically high.Paris was an international financial center, only slightly second to London, and indeed, in times of crisis like 1847, it even seemed stronger than London. In the 1840s, French enterprises established a European network of gas companies (such as in Florence, Venice, Padua, Verona) and also achieved establishments throughout Spain, Algeria, Cairo, and Alexandria. Gas Company concession.French companies also intend to finance and build railways in continental Europe (excluding Germany and Scandinavia).

But in fact, the basic level of economic development in France is significantly slower than that of other countries.The country's population has grown steadily, but not dramatically.Cities grew only modestly (with the exception of Paris), and indeed some shrank in the early 1830s.Its industrial power in the late 1840s was undoubtedly greater than that of the other Continental countries, and it possessed as many engine horsepower as the rest of the Continental countries combined; but it was already relatively behind England, and would be relatively behind Germany.In fact, despite its advantages and early start, France never became a major industrial power to rival Britain, Germany, and the United States.

The explanation for this paradox lies, as we know, in the French Revolution itself, which produced much of what it had achieved at the hands of the Constituent Assembly, but at the hands of Robespierre.Capitalism in the French economy was partly a superstructure based on the unshakable peasantry and petty bourgeoisie.Landless free labor only trickled into the cities; the standardized cheap goods that made progressive industrialists rich in other countries had no sufficiently large and expanding market in France.A large amount of capital remains, but why invest in domestic industry?The wise French entrepreneur makes luxuries, not mass consumption; the wise financier uses his funds to promote foreign industry instead of his own.In other countries, the two will go hand in hand only if economic growth provides private enterprise with higher profits than other businesses.Not so in France, although growth in other countries has been driven through France.

At the opposite extreme from France is the United States.The country suffers from a shortage of capital.But it was ready to bring in any amount of capital, and England was happy to export it.The country is also suffering from a labor shortage.But the British Isles and Germany exported millions of surplus populations after the Great Famine of the mid-1840s.The country lacked sufficient artisans, but even the following—cotton weavers in Lancashire, miners and blacksmiths in Welsh—could have been imported from other industrialized parts of the world.Moreover, the peculiar genius of the United States consists in the invention of machinery which saves labour, and especially that which simplifies labour.This talent has been fully developed.All the United States lacked were the tools and transportation needed to develop its vast territory and resources.American colonists, governments, missionaries, and merchants have expanded transcontinentally to the Pacific Ocean, or, with the support of the second most dynamic merchant fleet in the world, have pushed their trade across the oceans, from the Zanzibar to Hawaii.Nevertheless, the internal process of expansion alone was sufficient to keep the US economy growing almost unlimited.The Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea are already the ideal places chosen by the American Empire.

All the institutions of the emerging republic encouraged savings, ingenuity, and private enterprise.The vast numbers of newcomers, settled in the coastal cities and newly occupied interior states, required the same size of personal, household, and farm goods and equipment, and provided an ideally homogeneous market.Inventions and ventures were richly rewarded: steamboat (1807-1813), pin (1807), screw lathe (1809), false teeth (1822), insulated wire (1827-1831), revolver (1835 ), the typewriter and sewing machine (1843-1846), the rotary printing press (1846), and the inventors of a host of agricultural machinery, all in pursuit of these lucrative rewards.Although the U.S. economy really took off after 1860, no other country’s economy grew faster than the U.S. even during this period.

The United States is on the verge of becoming a world economic power.However, there was one major obstacle in this transition: the conflict between the industrial North and the semi-colonial South.For a long time, the North, as an independent economy, has benefited from European capital, labor and technology, especially the United Kingdom; but the South, which rarely imports these resources, presents a typical economy dependent on the United Kingdom.Just as Australia must depend on wool, and Argentina must depend on meat, the success of the South lies in using almost all of its cotton to supply the prosperous cotton mills in Lancashire, England. Its attachment is irreversible.The South favored free trade, which enabled it to sell to England and buy back cheap British goods with the proceeds; while the North, almost from the beginning (1816), protected its own industrial capitalists against all attempts to counteract their own. Competing foreigners, namely the British.The north and the south competed with each other for the territory of the west, one for the development of the manor economy of slavery and backward and self-sufficient settlements, and the other for the development of mechanical harvesters and large-scale slaughterhouses.Until the age of the transcontinental railroads, the South, which controlled the Mississippi Delta (the Midwest's main mouth to the sea), held a stronger economic card. The Civil War between the North and the South from 1861 to 1865 was actually a war of American unification conducted and led by northern capitalism.At this point, the future of the U.S. economy has been determined.

Another future giant of the world economy is Russia.Although far-sighted observers had predicted that sooner or later Russia's vast size, population, and resources would show strength, but at the moment she was of economic insignificance. The mining and manufacturing industries established by successive tsars in the 18th century are gradually declining because landlords or feudal merchants are employed as employers and serfs are used as laborers.It was not until the 1860s that the new industries (household industries and small-scale textile factories) began to develop really significantly.And even exporting grain westward from the fertile Ukrainian black soil regions has made only modest progress.Russian Poland was quite developed, but, like the rest of Eastern Europe (from Scandinavia in the north to the Balkans in the south), the era of major economic change had yet to come.The same is true of southern Italy and Spain, with the exception of small pockets of Catalonia and Basque Country.Even in northern Italy, where the economic changes were much greater, they were more pronounced in agriculture (always a major outlet for capital investment and commercial enterprise in this region), commerce, and shipping than in manufacturing. industry.Throughout Southern Europe, however, industrial economic development was hampered by a shortage of coal.At that time, coal was still the only significant energy source for industrial power.

Thus, one part of the world quickly became an industrial powerhouse, while another part lagged behind.However, the two phenomena are not independent of each other.Economic stagnation, sluggishness, or even recession are all products of economic progress.For how can a country with a relatively backward economy resist the power, or in some cases, the allure, of emerging wealth and business centers?In Britain and some European countries, as long as the low price is sold, it is enough to resist all competitors.The title of the world's factory is very suitable for them.It seemed perfectly "natural" for less developed regions to produce food or minerals and then exchange these non-rivalrous goods for manufactured goods from Britain or other Western European countries."Your coal is the sun," Cobden told the Italians. In areas where local power was held by large landowners, or even enlightened ranchers or ranchers, this exchange was the best of both worlds.The Cuban planters were quite happy to make money from their sugar, and were willing to import foreign goods, because it would make it possible for foreigners to buy their sugar.Things are less rosy where local manufacturers can count on their words, or where local governments appreciate the benefits of a balanced economy or simply realize the downsides of dependency.The German economist Frederick List, usually in the comfortable guise of an abstract philosophy, rejected an international economy that would actually make Britain the first or only industrial power, thus calling for protectionism, and, as we have seen, , Americans also think so, but they do not have this philosophy.

All of the above assume that the economic system was politically independent and powerful enough to accept or reject the roles assigned to them by the small fraction of the world's first industrializing regions.In areas that are not independent, such as colonies, there is no choice.India, as we know it, is in the process of deindustrialization.Egypt is a more vivid example of this deindustrialization process.Because in Egypt, the local ruler, Ali, had actually begun to systematically transform his country into a modern economy, especially an industrial economy.Not only did he encourage the cultivation of cotton for the world market (from 1821), but by 1838 a very considerable sum of £12 million had been invested in an industry which employed some 30,000-40,000 workers.What would happen if Egypt were allowed to go its own way?We have no way of knowing the answer.The history that did happen is that the Anglo-Turkish Convention of 1838 imposed foreign merchants on the country and thus broke the foreign trade monopoly that Ali maintained; Egypt was forced to reduce its army, thereby removing most of the incentives that had led Egypt to industrialize. The nineteenth century was not the first nor the last time that Western gunboats forced a country to "open" to foreign trade, in other words, to the competition for supremacy in the industrialized parts of the world.Looking at Egypt as a British protectorate at the end of the 19th century, who would have thought that as early as 50 years ago, this country was the first non-white country to embark on the road of modernization in order to get rid of its economic backwardness? (Egypt's modernization, once disgusted by Cobden, said: "What they are doing is wasting the best raw cotton that is supposed to be sold to us.... It is not only the raw cotton that is wasted, it is the cotton that is forced to go to the Manufacturing laborers are supposed to work in the cotton fields.” Morley, Life of Cobden, Chapter 30.)

Of all the economic consequences of the era of dual revolutions, this divide between "progressive" and "underdeveloped" countries proved to be the most far-reaching and long-lasting.Roughly speaking, by 1848 it was already clear which countries belonged to the first group, which included Western Europe (except the Iberian Peninsula), Germany, Northern Italy, parts of Central Europe, Scandinavia, the United States , and possibly immigrants from the English-speaking world.But it is also clear that the rest of the world, with the exception of a small area, is degrading, or becoming, Western under informal pressure to import and export goods from the West, or under military pressure from Western gunboats and expeditionary forces economic dependencies.This gulf between "backward" and "progressive" countries remained immovable and insurmountable until the Russians developed the means of crossing it in the 1930s, and increasingly separated the world's few inhabitants from the majority. majority population.No other fact has been more decisive for the development of twentieth-century history than this one.