Untitled

Extending the franchise or allowing Dissenting elements to publish their ideas freely would open up a Pandora's box of unending strife.

It would be difficult to argue that Mnichetter's apprehensions were justified. His repressive measures were futile, even though he could be described as prophetic, because the forces for change, especially nationalism and liberalism, had an power that no single individual could hope to reverse.

Europe's industrialization helped to move it to the forefront of the world's powers, just as differing rates of industrialization inside Europe helped to lift countries to the northwest, above all Britain. The reasons for the different rates of growth have caused a lot of controversy because industrialization solved many problems but also created many new ones. Europe's ability to increase the productivity of labor beyond anything previously accomplished in human history is a result of its unique dynamism and creativity.

The last two centuries of European history can be described as years of rapid change. Changes in the world of nature can be compared to rapid change in history. The rocks, soil, and oceans may not have changed much over the centuries. A new environment, a new physical world, can be created by volcanic eruptions and earthquakes.

There have been periods of rapid historical change. The period of the French Revolution might be compared to a volcanic eruption, with violent crowds and millions of armed men streaming out of France and across the Continent, clashing in titanic battles and leaving parts of Europe in smoking ruins and littered with graveyards. 5 million deaths were related to the Revolution and its wars, and of course the numbers of dead tell only a portion of the story of how the lives of millions were suddenly transformed in these years.

It was published by John Wiley & Sons.

The French Revolution spread new ideas, introduced new institutions, and installed new leaders, despite the fact that the brutal mobs and marching soldiers were destructive. After 1815, political change seemed to decelerate; people calmed down, but also with the apprehension that another revolutionary eruption might be near, rumblings of which could be detected in every part of Europe.

Catastrophes in the natural world have consequences for human populations that have only recently begun to be appreciated by scientists and scholars. In 1816, a volcanic eruption in southeast Asia, in present-day Indonesia, changed the climate as far away as western Europe, causing a cold summer, crop failures, and famine, but not a new wave of political revolution. An example of nature's role in modern European history can be seen in the case of the potato plant that was attacked in the 1840s, causing years of starvation in Ireland and the exodus of a large part of the Irish population to the New World. In Europe before the modern period, crop failures resulted in population movements with domino-like implications.

Spurts in population growth put stress on existing institutions with long-range implications beyond the obvious. The number of young people increases in relation to the number of old, energetic and violent pursuit of change if the population grows rapidly. Young people are more willing to move, either internally from villages to cities or to other countries, and are more able to adapt to new ways of doing things.

The implications of population growth are not easy to fit into simple formulas of cause and effect. The population increase in Ireland in the decades before the 1840s did not result in revolution but in mass death and emigration as a result of the potato fungus. The Irish of British authorities were accused of a hardhearted response to the failures of the potato crop due to the tragedies associated with the Potato Famine. The bulge in the population can be an economic burden during the period when the members are infants and young children, but it also contributes to a boom when the children grow into their productive years.

If less flashy forces in the 19th century were to be considered more destructive, it would be because of the changing power of political revolution, warfare, and population spurts. The most important of them was the industrial revolution. The revolution reflected the unique nature of modern European history and contributed to its successes and failures. Free-market industrial growth had in its inner logic a dynamism that pushed recklessly. It was a destructive creativity that had a dark side that lasted into the twenty-first century.

The term "revolution" is misleading because it doesn't take into account the way that an earthquake or a political revolution are. Industrial change was rather a series of intricately related and gradual developments over many years, with roots traced far into the European past. There was no identifiable beginning or end to the revolution. New theories about the nature and origins of industrialization in Europe crop up frequently, despite the fact that economists and other scholars still differ on how to define it.

The industrial revolution can be defined as an unprecedented expansion of human productivity, making human labor more efficient than it had ever been. Before the late 18th century in Europe, the production of commodities was the result of human labor and the labor of domesticated animals. Tools such as the scythe and the plow enhanced the labor of humans and animals. Although the production of commodities was directed by human labor, machines driven by wind or water contributed to the production. One of the reasons that the word "revolution" became attractive is that the output of certain commodities, textiles in particular, increased to an astonishing extent in the late eighteenth century; a range of other advances in productivity paralleled those, and an endless. The most fundamental aspect of this new industrialization had to do with the rapid, seemingly unlimited growth in the productivity of labor, using new technologies and new ways of organizing it, and involving new sources of power beyond wind, water, and the muscles of humans and domesticated animals.

One needs to appreciate the long and intricate process of historical preparation in order to understand the origins of industrialization. No single invention or set of legislation can be seen as decisive; it was the way in which the factors interacted that made a difference. Industrialization is best thought of as a result of the distinctiveness of European character, as compared to technological innovations such as the internal combustion engine, railroads, cotton gins, and spinning jennies. In northwestern Europe, cultural uniqueness was very prominent.

Britain was the pioneer in the northwestern part of Europe. Its geographical features were among the most important of them. Britain is a relatively flat and fertile country, surrounded by oceans and has many rivers. Inventions had made it possible to extract coal and iron from underground deposits. Britain's commercial character dates back into the Middle Ages, and by the late 18th century it had established worldwide markets for the commodities that its new factories were producing in ever more remarkable quantities.

The Protestant belief that success in the material world was a sign of divine favor and that income was to be saved and invested in productive enterprise has been linked to Britain's commercial past. The belief that Protestantism and capitalism were related is viewed with skepticism by scholars today, partly because Catholic capitalists on the Continent were also successful, if a bit later and less prominently. The success of Jewish capitalists in modern times has led to similar debates about the role of Jewish religion. In the northwestern areas where capitalism was most successful, the Jewish population was very small.

Some members of all three religious groups, Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish, had commercial and urban pasts, and perhaps the safest generalization is that a commercial and urban past played a role.

One of the more frequently mentioned preconditions of industrialization in Britain was an earlier "revolution" in agriculture. The agricultural transformation was more gradual than the industrial one, so the term can be misleading. The legislative aspects involved the passage through Parliament of hundreds of "enclosure acts" that allowed for a more all-embracing claim to private ownership of the land by large landowners.

The spirit behind the enclosure movement was "capitalistic" in the sense that those with that spirit strive to find more efficient uses of the land by closer, more rigorous supervision of it, producing greater profits and thus more ample accumulation of capital for further investment. The large landlords introduced significant innovations in such matters as farm implements, fertilization, and stock breeding. The enclosure of land involved abolishing the traditional claims to partial use of it by the common people was denounced by the many contemporary critics of the movement. The enclosure acts brought an end to the open fields of premodern times, to the former right to gather fallen wood, and to the semicooperative or "feudal" methods of cultivation.

Over the course of the eighteen century, the ownership of land in this more private sense became widespread and resulted in a concentration of large holdings in England that were more extensive and significant than in any other area of northwestern Europe. The former tradition-bound and relatively inefficient villagers were gradually replaced by more substantial, more competent, and more productive farmers who rented plots of land from the squires and then hired agricultural laborers to work the land for wages.

More abundant and cheaper food in Britain can be attributed to the gain in agricultural productivity through this gradual process. It also meant that many rural inhabitants were drawn away from the intricate, often non-monetary economic relationships of the past and integrated into a market system in which they were simply paid wages. Britain's population grew to an unprecedented extent in the same years. By the 1780s, more efficient managers had access to a relatively mobile and more numerous working population, ready to move to where they could find the best wages.

The process occurred in Britain earlier than anywhere else in Europe. Before the industrial revolution, the British had long been known as "money-grubbing" people because of their tendency to calculate profit and loss on the market. By the end of the 19th century, Britain was ahead of other countries in modernizing trends, despite the fact that the transition from the premodern "Jolly Old England" of personalized relationships to a more impersonal and efficient world was not complete.

In considering Spain and Italy in these years, one can see that both agricultural innovation and industrialization came later to them. Large areas of the mountainous interior of both countries were not easily accessible, despite the fact that both countries had long coastlines. The land was arid, the soil was rocky, and the deposits of coal and iron were small. A large portion of the population of Spain and Italy were poor. The upper and middle classes didn't pay much attention to the world of commerce because there were so few urban areas.

Britain was ruled by a single monarch, a single parliament, and a single legal system, and it was more politically and institutionally unified than were Spain and Italy. Its population used a single currency, internal trade did not face significant customs barriers, and banking institutions were being fashioned that allowed for a smooth flow of capital. The growing number of British workers who were not tied to the land or under the control of village authorities moved to new areas of employment, and the burgeoning industrial areas were hiring at salaries that were often attractive to people facing worsening conditions in the villages.

France has a different kind of contrast to Britain. Spain was known to refer to France as a garden, a place of unusual natural wealth, beauty, and splendor. To live like God in France was a common expression. The stage of industrial productivity reached by Britain by the late eighteenth century was not reached by France for another fifty years or more.

There were several reasons for this slowness. Britain was a victorious country in the 19th century, having suffered no battles on its territory and having retained its mastery of the seas. Part of the explanation for the country's slow development is due to France's revolutionary chaos, its expenditures in warfare, and the massive loss of men in their most productive years. During Napoleon's rule, France pillaged much of Europe, but it was less likely to be put into productive investments than it was in Britain. France had to pay an indemnity of 700 million Francs after Napoleon's hundred days.

The legal and institutional reforms of the Revolution paved the way for the French economy to benefit. The country had established a centralized national government and banking institutions, as well as acquiring a standardized currency and metric system. The reforms were not enough to tip the balance since it took quite some time for them to be up and running.

France's entrenched class structure and national character made it difficult for rapid industrialization. By the first decades of the 19th century, the country's rural lower classes remained larger than in Britain. France's peasantry was less interested in production for the market and more tied to the land. The middle ranks of French society, or bourgeoisie, included industrial and commercial entrepreneurs, some of whom resembled the British capitalists in plowing their profits back into business expansion and innovation, but there was nonetheless a tendency among this element in France to divert its profits to the acquisition of prestigious estates.

It is worth repeating the point made in Chapter 2 that the French bourgeoisie at this time and in centuries past was not a distinct social class with a common identity. The town-dwellers were not a unified entity by the 19th century.

There were many subtle changes within the French bourgeoisie by the late 18th century. The poor elements of the bourgeoisie tended to regard the owners of significant amounts of capital as threats to their wellbeing, because they had little in common with modern capitalists in lifestyle and mentality.

The most influential element of the French bourgeoisie is this segment.

The point of dwelling on this somewhat arbitrary and intricate terminology, aside from the fact that it was much used in the nineteenth century, is that in France such social categories tended to be more prominent and enduring than in Britain. In Britain's ruling elites, class distinctions and snobbery were retained in some cases, but on balance the growing ranks of the upwardly mobile, energetic businessman in Britain in the nineteenth gradually became more of an issue. The differences in the growth of productivity in the two nations are probably explained by the differences in their national identity in the 19th century.

France's rigid class structure in the 19th century had an influence on another trend: France's total population began to level off because its peasants were limiting the size of their households.

By the eve of World War I, the British had almost caught up with the French, whose population had grown only to 39 million. The population of the new German Reich, formed in 1871, reached 65 million by 1914, making it more impressive than the British growth.

In the first half of the 19th century, most of Europe's nations and regions fell below Britain and France in industrial productivity and wealth, but above the southern regions of Spain and Italy. Each country had a different mix of the above mentioned characteristics. Britain was a business-oriented country when it became independent from the Netherlands in the 19th century.

The British would surpass the British in reputation as competitors in the scramble for profits by the end of the century.

All of Europe would feel pressure to follow in Britain's footsteps. Because of industrialization's gradual and many-sided nature, many people who observed it in its initial stages were impressed by its human and environmental costs. Europe as a whole would eventually be transformed by industrialization's enhancement of productivity. The new industrial developments were initially thought to be destructive and only benefit the capitalists. Railroad engines were accused of being noisy, smoke-belching monstrosities, and violating the tranquility of country life. "Satanic mills" was a common epithet for the first factories. The entrepreneurial spirit of the first capitalists was thought to be immoral and driven by a near-criminal lust for individual profit.

Over the course of the century, those who concluded that the application of industrial techniques was mostly positive grew in number and influence. There was a more enduring dissent about how much the state should attempt to interfere with or manage the new industrial economy, and various anti-industrial and anti capitalist movements arose, but for the most part the legislation passed in the course of the century, especially in Britain, had the purpose of encouraging

Although the role of technology has been exaggerated in comparison to the broader historical and cultural setting, technological innovation is one of the most familiar themes in the standard narratives of the industrial revolution.

In other words, people had to be ready to use the new technologies, and at first many were not, especially in rural areas. In the first stages of the second industrial revolution, science in a more rigorous sense began to play a prominent role in such fields as chemicals and electricity, but in the first stages such was not usually the case.

Most of the early inventors and industrialists had some education, but only a few came from the lower ranks of society. Most of the first successful industrialists came from the middle and lower ranks of society, so the phrase "rags to riches" overstated the matter.

James Hargreaves invented the spinning jenny in 1764.

The entrepreneurial individualism of these early industrialists, which came to be so revered and idealized, was somewhat less bold than thought. Compared to the mentality of a traditional peasant, it was real enough, but these individualists depended on a dense network of legal reforms and social institutions that had little to do with their personal efforts. In southern Italy or Spain, men with skills like those of Watt or Arkwright would be hard to find. Even if they had been able to take their inventions with them to such areas, their enterprises would almost certainly have failed, since there were no markets or effective demand for their products.

The cotton textiles were the most important part of this first stage. Between the 1780s and 1820s, production in Britain soared. As their price continued to decline, the demand for them seemed boundless, opening up attractive vistas of profit for those ready and able to seize opportunities. In Britain, there were many people who were inventive, ingenious and willing to take risk in order to make money on the market.

The technical details of the rise of the cotton industry are not easily summarized and often arcane, but in general one invention or innovation tends to stimulate others, with inevitable false starts and recurring periods of adjustment to solve various practical or technical problems. In Britain, the "flying shuttle" nearly doubled textile production by the mid-century. That led to a sharp increase in the demand for yarn, which in turn inspired two other famous inventions, the spinning jenny and the water frame. In the 1780s, Richard Arkwright, the inventor of the water frame, adapted a steam engine to drive the new spinning machinery, which had previously been driven by water power. The need to supervise production more closely was one of the reasons Arkwright moved workers, spinning machinery, and steam engines into large buildings. Small workshops remained the mainstay of Britain's industrial scene for many years, but the appearance of large units of production marked a new stage of history.

Each change had a human cost. Before a power loom was invented to meet the demand, there was a spurt in the productivity of spinning that overwhelmed the hand-loom weavers, who worked mostly from their homes. Cotton textiles were produced in quantities in the early 19th century and with an efficiency that would have been impossible a half century earlier. The production of raw cotton, which came from India, was one of the bottlenecks that was attended to. The invention of the cotton gin, patented in 1793) by the American Eli Whitney, made it easier to remove the seeds from the cotton. Britain's industrial revolution depended on factors outside Britain and Europe in terms of raw materials and markets for finished products, as well as Whitney's role in the production of cotton in the United States.

The first stages of the industrial revolution were associated with textiles, but the application of new technologies, new power sources, and rationalized production had powerful, many-faceted repercussions. The use of steam engines in the mills was an example of how inventions in one area of production often proved useful in completely different areas: Experiments with steam power dated back to the 17th century, and by the early 1800s steam engines were being used to pump water out of coal mines. James Watt made improvements to the engines up to that point. Watt was a technician at the University of Glasgow and qualified more as a scientist than other early inventors, but his business partnership with Matthew Boulton, an already successful manufacturer of toys and articles of clothing, was more important to his success than his technical inventiveness. Watt might have been stymied since the capital outlay needed for his inventions were much more than those of Arkwright or Whitney.

Boulton and Watt's steam engines were popular in Britain and other countries by the end of the 18th century. Their story would be found in many other sectors of the economy.

The use of steam engines for transport had long-range implications, both on water and land. The process began with their use in mines. The construction of a railroad in Britain and the United States began in about a decade and was followed by other Continental nations.

Technical details of the production methods were hard to grasp.

The "genie of revolution" that had been released in France in 1789 had similarities to the demonic process that had been unleashed in the case of the current event.

The changes in methods of production had profound, if not obvious, social and intellectual implications. Slavery in the United States became highly profitable because of the increase in demand for cotton in the British textile industries, which made it difficult to abolish it. The British navy is important to protect British commercial interests. Workers in Britain found new kinds of employment, and many industrializing areas grew with a speed that put tremendous stress on municipal structures as well as political structures of the nation as a whole.

After the Congress of Vienna, cotton textiles made up almost half of British exports, and the country's leaders claimed that it was becoming the workshop of the world. It was a challenge for the rest of the world to comprehend the military power of Britain. Many were not enthusiastic about following Britain's path and many were debating the significance of the revolution in France. Efforts were being made to give a broader meaning to what one historian has termed the "dual revolution," political and economic of France and Britain. We need to turn to those efforts.