The Industrial Revolution, 1750–1914 — the study guide

CHAPTER 1 · c. 1750 · 1750

Why Britain?

To see what changed, begin in the manufacturing districts of Asia. Around Suzhou in the Yangzi delta, millions of rural households spun and wove cotton and silk for Chinese markets. Bengal supplied about two-thirds of the textiles the English East India Company bought in Asia around 1750. This private company held a royal monopoly of Britain's Asian trade and had an army of its own.

Britain and its Asian competitors nevertheless depended on a similar source of energy. E. A. Wrigley calls theirs organic economies: land supplied wood for heat, food for workers and fodder for horses. As production grew, so did the demand for land. A town heated with local firewood faces a limit when its woods run short; an economy relying on land for nearly all its heat, light and motion faced a comparable constraint. The Industrial Revolution opened a way past it, first using water power and then coal.

Why did British inventors find it worthwhile to develop machines? Robert Allen asks us to look at the prices they faced. A century of trading growth had helped lift London laborers' real wages—what their pay would buy—to roughly twice those in Vienna; workers in Delhi and Beijing earned barely enough to survive. Coal, meanwhile, was abundant near British rivers and coasts. Colliers carried it from Tyneside, the Newcastle coalfield, to London, which received over 460,000 tons a year by 1700. A machine that used cheap coal to save expensive work could repay its cost there. The Dutch Republic, today's Netherlands, had similarly high wages around Amsterdam, but relied on peat, a slow-burning fuel cut from bogs. The same calculation was less attractive there.

The price of a machine's inputs is only part of the story. The black arrows trace an Atlantic economy in which British ships carried enslaved Africans from forts such as Cape Coast Castle to plantations such as Jamaica. Forced labor produced sugar and tobacco, and the trade brought Britain profits, materials and customers. Eric Williams argued in 1944 that slavery financed British industry; later historians have narrowed his claim without dismissing it. Joel Mokyr identifies another connection: an Industrial Enlightenment in which scientists, engineers and skilled craftsmen exchanged knowledge through societies, journals and workshops. Profitable opportunities had to be turned into working machines, and inventions could then be improved. Prices, Atlantic trade and shared knowledge each helped that process along.

WHY IT HAPPENED

Dear labour and cheap coal. British trading growth had raised wages, while Tyneside and Midlands coal offered exceptionally cheap energy. Investors could recover the cost of a machine that replaced expensive work with fuel more quickly in Britain than in France, India or China. That prospect encouraged experiments; improvements later made the machines attractive elsewhere.

An Atlantic economy built on enslaved labour. Britain's North American and Caribbean plantations depended on enslaved Africans. Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries about 12.5 million people were embarked on Atlantic slave ships, and British ships carried more than any other nation's in the late 1700s. The plantations sold sugar and cotton and bought British cloth and iron. Their trade also built ports, merchants and banks, whose capital and skills later served industry.

A culture of useful knowledge. An idea had to reach the people who could build with it. London's Royal Society and provincial philosophical societies, or science clubs, brought gentlemen scientists into contact with instrument makers, clockmakers and millwrights, who built mill machinery. Cheap print and traveling lecturers carried knowledge further; an expensive, slow patent system allowed inventors to sell ideas. Joel Mokyr calls this network the Industrial Enlightenment and argues that it sustained improvements beyond individual discoveries.

Farms, markets and a strong state. English farms fed a large population with a declining share of workers, leaving people for crafts and trade. By 1700 more than 40 percent of men worked in manufacturing, mining or building. Coastal shipping, rivers and turnpike roads, maintained with private tolls, connected a national market without internal customs barriers. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 made Parliament supreme over the monarch. Its property owners taxed heavily but predictably, borrowed cheaply and funded a navy to protect trade. Douglass North associated these conditions with secure investment.

WHAT IT CHANGED

Indian cloth becomes the target. Indian calicoes established the standard: cheap, washable printed cotton. Britain's Parliament banned them in 1700 and 1721, protecting a home market in which British producers could imitate them. Chapter 2 follows machines developed to spin cotton as fine as Bengal's; eventually they allowed Europe to out-produce Asia in its own specialty.

Coal meets the steam engine. Early mine-pumping engines used so much fuel that a pithead, the top of a mine shaft, was a sensible place to run them: coal there was almost free. James Watt worked to make engines efficient enough for use farther away. Chapter 3 follows his engine, the canals carrying coal and iron made with coke, a fuel baked from coal. Cheap fuel supported the first engines, whose improvement extended their uses.

Slavery expands with the machines. British mills' growing appetite for cotton helped expand plantation slavery across the American South. Its enslaved population rose from about 700,000 in 1790 to almost four million in 1860. More cotton meant more land under cultivation and more forced labor. Chapter 2 follows the cotton to Lancashire; chapter 11 takes the story to the American Civil War.

A divergence begins. Industrial Europe and North America came to make most of the world's manufactured goods within a century and a half, while Bengal and the Yangzi delta lost textile export markets. The gap between rich and poor regions widened into what historians call the Great Divergence. Chapter 11 examines it and the epilogue asks who paid. The rich world's lead and the poor world's grievances date from these decades and continue to shape judgments between nations.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

Did Britain industrialise first because of what it had, such as coal and colonies, or because of what its people did with them?

Britain's resources made a strong difference. Robert Allen's prices suggest that its early machines could pay where they could not elsewhere; Kenneth Pomeranz argues that the comparably advanced Yangzi delta lacked nearby coal and overseas land. But resources had to be put to use. China had coal, and Britain had mined it for centuries before the steam engine. Inventors, mechanics, investors and institutions turned opportunities into machinery, assisted by the culture Joel Mokyr calls the Industrial Enlightenment. Britain's colonial advantage also involved choices: its navy, merchants and planters seized Caribbean territory and exploited enslaved people. Most historians combine the explanations. Endowments, or starting advantages, shape incentives; people and institutions decide how to respond. Geography and prices make possibilities available, while choices affect when and where they are realized.

AN INTERESTING FACT

The Birmingham Lunar Society timed its monthly dinners to help members get home. From the mid-1760s to about 1813, it met on a Sunday or Monday near the full moon, whose light helped riders on unlit roads. The circle included manufacturer Matthew Boulton, engineer James Watt, potter Josiah Wedgwood, chemist Joseph Priestley and physician Erasmus Darwin, Charles's grandfather. Calling themselves the Lunarticks, they discussed chemical experiments and business plans at the same table—a meeting of science and industry in practice.

CHAPTER 2 · 1760–1830 · 1800

Cotton and the Factory

Indian calicoes gave British manufacturers a model and a problem. These light printed cloths filled English shops in the late seventeenth century, and customers wanted more. Parliament banned imports of printed calicoes in 1700 and their wearing in 1721. The Calico Acts sheltered British producers, but protection could not itself supply the cheap, strong thread they needed: hand spinning was too slow, and its thread too weak.

The inventions that followed attacked different parts of that difficulty. Around 1764 the weaver James Hargreaves devised a jenny on which one person could spin many threads at once. Richard Arkwright, a former wigmaker, patented a water frame in 1769 that made thread strong enough for the lengthwise warp. Samuel Crompton, a spinner, produced fine yarn with his mule in 1779. Robert Allen's figures show how much work machinery could save. To spin 100 pounds of cotton an Indian hand spinner took about 50,000 hours; Crompton's mule took about 2,000, and the automatic self-acting mule of the 1820s just 135. The reduction exceeded 99 percent. Hand spinners could not compete on those terms.

The machinery also changed where and how people worked. Arkwright put his frames beside the River Derwent at Cromford, ran them day and night and built cottages to keep workers near his remote mill. They tended powered machinery under a manager's rules. At Styal, Samuel Greg's mill, founded in 1784, relied heavily on pauper children bound as apprentices. Robert Owen later used New Lanark on the Clyde to argue that a mill could profit without overworking children.

Water tied the first mills to valleys. Steam made another location possible: towns with workers and coal. Manchester's great Ancoats mills were built beside the Rochdale Canal between 1798 and 1806. Manchester grew from about 70,000 people in 1801 to over 300,000 in 1851; the factory was becoming a force shaping the city itself.

The cotton arrived from much farther away. British imports rose from about 2.5 million pounds in 1760 to 264 million in 1830, and by the late 1820s over 70 percent came from the United States. Eli Whitney's cotton gin of 1793 removed seeds many times faster than hand-picking, making southern upland cotton profitable. Cultivation and slavery spread west; the US enslaved population rose from about 700,000 in 1790 to two million in 1830. Cotton entered through Liverpool, whose ships had transported 1.3 to 1.5 million enslaved Africans before Britain abolished the trade in 1807. The connection was also one of ownership: the Gregs of Styal were among mill owners who held Caribbean plantations. Lancashire's factories formed one end of an Atlantic system of coerced labor.

WHY IT HAPPENED

Indian cloth set the standard. Indian calicoes showed buyers a light, washable and inexpensive cotton printed in colors that did not run. To protect English wool, Parliament banned printed imports in 1700 and their wearing in 1721. British producers had an opening if they could match Indian quality and prices. Making at home what had previously been bought abroad is called import substitution; protection gave inventors room to attempt it.

Machines that suited the fibre. Drawing and twisting cotton fibers requires repeated movements. Rollers, gears and spindles, the rods that spin thread, could perform them. The jenny multiplied spindles; the water frame made thread stronger; the mule made it finer; and carding engines prepared the fiber. Imported cotton did not compete for English farmland, so its supply could grow with the machines' output.

Water power and modest capital. A stream, a building and a few thousand pounds could establish an early mill. A successful wigmaker, merchant or hosier, a stockings dealer, could seek that money from partners and local banks. Former wigmaker Richard Arkwright joined the Derby hosier Jedediah Strutt; Samuel Greg drew on his family's merchant and plantation wealth for Styal. Fast streams in the Pennine valleys of Derbyshire and Lancashire lay within reach of ports and markets. Those conditions drew the first factories to remote, steep valleys.

Slave-grown cotton without limit. Eli Whitney's 1793 gin separated seeds from short-fibered cotton grown inland. Planters could expand cultivation in Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi, carrying slavery onto new land. The American South became the main source of cotton after 1793, and supply grew with Lancashire's demand. Unpaid enslaved labor kept it cheap; the enslaved population in the United States nearly tripled between 1790 and 1830.

WHAT IT CHANGED

Steam moves the mills to the towns. The first mills needed streams, so they stood in remote valleys. From the 1790s steam made locations supplied with coal practical. Manchester's mills gathered beside coal-bearing canals, and the district spread across south Lancashire near workers and Liverpool's port. Chapter 3 explains the engine; chapter 5 follows the towns it helped create.

Child labour becomes a public question. The working lives of Styal's pauper apprentices, destitute children sent to work for their keep, and Manchester children on twelve-hour shifts came before parliamentary inquiries from 1816. Robert Owen offered his model mill at New Lanark as evidence of another approach. Michael Sadler's 1832 committee heard workers themselves, and the Factory Act of 1833 used paid inspectors to enforce limits on children's hours. Chapter 5 follows the struggle in mills and Parliament, including the testimony that helped change the law.

The handloom weavers’ boom and ruin. At first machine-spun yarn gave handloom weavers more work and good pay, lasting until about 1805. More people entered the trade and rates fell. Then power looms spread in the 1820s and 1830s, and piece rates—the pay for each length of cloth—collapsed. Many families became poor; their anger fed the protests and machine-breaking of chapter 6. A skilled occupation could be destroyed within a working life, faster than families could retrain or move.

Lancashire depends on the plantation South. Lancashire obtained about three-quarters of its cotton from the American South's slave states by the late 1850s. This tied Britain's largest industry to one region and its system of slavery. When the American Civil War cut supplies in 1861, mills fell silent and the trade turned toward India and Egypt. Chapter 11 follows the resulting crisis.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

Was the factory system more a revolution in machines or a revolution in the control of work?

Machinery changed the amount a worker could produce. The automatic self-acting mule spun in 135 hours what took an Indian hand spinner 50,000 hours; discipline alone could not deliver that gain. Yet owners also sought control over the pace of work. Under the domestic system, spinners and weavers worked at home for merchants. Arkwright's and Samuel Greg's rules and child apprentices, and the bells and fines of Manchester's mills, brought workers under a more regular schedule. Sidney Pollard and E. P. Thompson emphasize control; Stephen Marglin takes that argument furthest, while David Landes and Robert Allen stress technology. The strongest account connects them. Expensive machines paid when they ran without pause, and workers had to tend them steadily. The machinery and the organization of work developed together.

AN INTERESTING FACT

Samuel Crompton's 1779 spinning mule made fine yarn, but he could not afford to patent it. Manufacturers promised a subscription, a fund of voluntary contributions, in return for the design; he received less than £70. To support a claim for public reward, he toured the cotton districts in 1811 and counted an estimated 4.6 million spindles, the rods that twist thread, working on mules. Parliament awarded him £5,000 in 1812, a fraction of Richard Arkwright's fortune from the water-powered frame. Crompton died in modest circumstances in Bolton in 1827. His mule remained the standard spinning machine for a century, making fortunes for others.

CHAPTER 3 · 1769–1830 · 1820

Steam, Coal and Iron

A mine could supply a town with coal, but the deeper its workings went, the more water its owners had to remove. Britain had burned coal for heat since the sixteenth century, and pits on Tyneside shipped it down the coast to London. In 1712 Thomas Newcomen built the first practical steam engine to pump water from mines. Coal was helping solve a problem created by the search for more coal.

Newcomen’s engine consumed a great deal of fuel because each stroke heated and cooled the same cylinder. Waste mattered less at a pit, where coal was almost free. It mattered greatly in Cornwall’s copper and tin mines, where coal had to be brought from elsewhere. In 1765 James Watt, an instrument maker at Glasgow University, saw that a separate chamber could condense the steam while the cylinder stayed hot. He patented the idea in 1769. From 1775 he and Matthew Boulton built engines at Soho near Birmingham; by 1800 they had made between 450 and 500, many for Cornish mines. The saving in fuel made the improved engine especially attractive where coal was dear.

Iron production faced a different limit. Smelting iron from ore with charcoal required wood, and the supply of woodland constrained output. In 1709 Abraham Darby smelted iron using coke at Coalbrookdale in Shropshire. His grandson’s works later cast the Iron Bridge across the Severn in 1779. Coal could now help make the metal used in bridges, engines and machines without requiring a corresponding supply of forest charcoal.

The metal from a blast furnace, called pig iron, was brittle. For tough wrought iron that could be hammered and rolled, it needed further treatment. Henry Cort’s puddling and rolling process of 1783–84 stirred pig iron to burn out carbon and made wrought iron in large batches. Ironworks gathered on coalfields, especially at Merthyr Tydfil in South Wales, where Cyfarthfa and Dowlais became the world’s largest ironworks. British pig iron output rose from about 68,000 tons in 1788 to about 678,000 in 1830. Cheaper iron in turn reduced the cost of engines, rails and machines.

Coal’s bulk made transport essential. In 1761 the Duke of Bridgewater opened a canal from his mines at Worsley to Manchester, and the town’s coal price fell by about half. Investors copied the example. The Trent and Mersey connected Staffordshire’s pottery towns with both coasts; the Grand Junction joined Birmingham to London. The blue lines on the map show a network that by 1830 formed part of roughly 4,000 miles of navigable waterway in England and Wales.

Steam did not immediately displace the older sources of power. In 1800 water wheels still supplied about three times as much power as steam engines. What changed over time was the range of work coal could do: engines made it a source of motion, furnaces used it to make iron, and canals carried it to customers. Railways and steel would build on that combination.

WHY IT HAPPENED

Coal close to towns and the sea. Coal was useful to distant customers only if it could be carried to them. British seams lay near coasts and navigable rivers; Tyneside had shipped coal to London since the Middle Ages, while Midland and Lancashire fields lay beside growing towns. Britain mined about 15 million tons a year by 1800. Accessible, cheap fuel gave both inventors and buyers a reason to develop machines that consumed it.

Flooded mines demanded engines. Deep mines encountered water faster than horses or water wheels could remove it. Thomas Newcomen’s atmospheric engine of 1712 used air pressure on a piston to pump it out. Coal mines could feed its wasteful appetite with free waste coal, and by 1800 hundreds worked in Britain. Cornwall’s copper and tin mines had to pay more for coal, creating a market for James Watt’s more efficient engine.

Skilled hands and patient capital. A separate condenser could save fuel, but Watt needed more than an idea to sell a working engine. John Wilkinson supplied accurately bored cylinders from 1775, using a machine patented in 1774 for cannon. Birmingham metalworkers made parts, and Matthew Boulton brought capital, a factory and salesmanship. Parliament extended the patent in 1775 to 1800, giving the partners twenty-five years to recover their investment. Craftsmen, investors and lawmakers helped turn the invention into a product.

Cotton and war created demand. Buyers gave the new technologies a reason to spread. Cotton mills wanted reliable power, and the wars with France in 1793–1815 required iron for cannon, shot and ships. Contracts and wartime prices encouraged owners such as the Crawshays of Cyfarthfa in South Wales to expand; mill owners who had outgrown their streams turned to steam. Each industry could become a customer for another, making investment in costly equipment worthwhile.

WHAT IT CHANGED

Locomotives grow out of colliery engines. A locomotive grew out of work at collieries, or coal mines, and ironworks, where high-pressure engines could be made light enough to move on rails. Richard Trevithick ran one at Penydarren near Merthyr in 1804. Tyneside colliery engineers, including George Stephenson, built locomotives to haul coal wagons. Chapter 4 follows them to the first public railways: within about forty years an engine for hauling coal had become part of a national system carrying goods and people.

Industry gathers on the coalfields. Moving heavy coal cost money, so industries that burned it had reason to gather near the seams. Lancashire and Yorkshire textile towns, South Wales iron towns and north-east shipbuilding towns stood on or beside coalfields. So did the Black Country, the metalworking district west of Birmingham named for its smoke. Chapter 5 follows the towns that developed there; the location of fuel helped shape where people lived and worked.

The continent copies the model. Britain’s combination of coal, iron and canals appeared in Belgium’s coal belt from Mons to Liège, the Ruhr valley in western Germany and Upper Silesia, now in Poland, often with British machines and engineers. The map shades Belgium and Switzerland as industrializing by 1820. Chapter 7 follows both borrowing and different paths: coal shaped heavy industry’s location, while coal-poor Switzerland used water power and skill.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

Was the steam engine the cause of the Industrial Revolution, or one of its results?

The engine answered needs that already existed. Newcomen built it to drain mines in an established coal industry; Watt found buyers among mines and mills that were already expanding. Water supplied more power until about 1830, and N. F. R. Crafts and other economic historians find steam’s contribution to productivity small before the railway age. In those respects steam was a result of industrialization. Its later effects were considerable. By converting coal’s heat into motion, engines allowed factories and ironworks to work away from particular rivers, encouraged concentration on coalfields and in towns, and eventually powered railways. They made the mineral economy, powered by coal dug from the ground, fully productive. Steam was thus a late but decisive cause of the revolution becoming self-sustaining: its most familiar technology mattered greatly after earlier industries had created a market for it.

AN INTERESTING FACT

Mine and mill owners understood what a horse could do. James Watt used that familiar measure to explain his engines, estimating the work of a horse turning a mill. He defined horsepower as 33,000 foot-pounds per minute, enough to lift 33,000 pounds one foot in a minute. The generous estimate made his engines look modest, and customers bought them rated in horses. Car engines still use the unit. Watt received another connection with the measurement of power after his death. In 1882 the British Association for the Advancement of Science, a national society of scientists, named the scientific unit of power the watt in his honor. He devised one unit to sell engines; the other bears his name.

CHAPTER 4 · 1825–1850 · 1850

The Railway Age

A coal owner could sell fuel cheaply at the pit and still face a large transport bill. Tyneside mines had dealt with the problem since the seventeenth century by sending wagons to the river on wooden rails. Iron rails improved the wagonway; steam offered a way to move the wagons themselves. Richard Trevithick ran a high-pressure locomotive at Penydarren in South Wales in 1804, and in the 1810s colliery engineers including George Stephenson built locomotives at Killingworth near Newcastle.

The Stockton & Darlington Railway opened on 27 September 1825 to carry Durham coal to the River Tees. Steam locomotives hauled freight, while horses carried most passengers. It was a public railway: anyone who paid could use it. Its success showed that such a line could earn money. Liverpool and Manchester merchants, meanwhile, wanted an alternative to slow and expensive canal carriage between the port and the manufacturing city.

Their railway needed a decision about power. At the Rainhill trials in October 1829 Rocket, built by George Stephenson and his son Robert, reached about 30 miles an hour. Hot gas from the fire passed through tubes in its boiler, raising steam quickly. The Liverpool & Manchester opened on 15 September 1830 with two tracks, steam traction throughout and a timetable. Passengers arrived in unexpected numbers, showing that a railway built with freight in mind could also be a major passenger business. The opening day brought a tragedy too: Rocket struck and killed the politician William Huskisson, the first famous railway death.

Other lines connected the major cities. These main routes were called trunk lines. The London & Birmingham opened throughout in 1838 from Euston station, and Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s Great Western Railway reached Bristol in 1841. London was connected with Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool; a device developed for carrying coal was becoming a national means of transport.

Investors supplied much of the money, especially during the railway mania, a speculative boom in railway shares. Parliament passed about 270 railway acts in 1846 alone, authorizing some 4,500 miles. George Hudson, the York businessman known as the Railway King, controlled over a thousand miles before his frauds were exposed. Many schemes collapsed. Yet by 1850 Britain had about 6,000 miles of track. At the 1847 peak, some 250,000 navvies dug cuttings and raised embankments by hand.

The map’s white lines now join coalfields and ports. Cheaper carriage brought coal and other goods, fresh food and newspapers to towns across the country. Trains also needed a common timetable: railway time, set by the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, displaced local times. By 1850 railways had connected coal, iron and machinery in a growing system, helping make Britain the world’s first industrial economy.

WHY IT HAPPENED

Coal needed cheaper carriage. Coal’s low price made carriage a large part of its cost; moving it often cost more than mining it. For two centuries collieries, or coal mines, had used horse-drawn wagons on rails. Engines already pumped their pits and offered a way to haul wagons too. Local Quakers, members of a small Christian movement led by Darlington wool merchant Edward Pease, promoted the Stockton & Darlington, opened in 1825 to take Durham coal to the sea.

High-pressure steam made engines mobile. James Watt’s low-pressure engines were too heavy and large to move themselves. Around 1800 Richard Trevithick’s high-pressure engines produced more power from a smaller boiler. Rocket combined later improvements: fire-tubes carried hot gas through the boiler, and a blast pipe used spent steam to fan the fire. Together they raised steam quickly enough to haul trains at speed. Robert Stephenson & Co., founded in Newcastle in 1823, was the first works built to make locomotives, turning improvements into a reliable product.

Merchants frustrated by the canals. Liverpool’s port and Manchester’s mills needed to exchange raw cotton and finished cloth quickly. By the 1820s canals between them were busy and slow, and merchants regarded charges as excessive; carriers had grown complacent without competition. Merchants backed the Liverpool & Manchester Railway as a rival. Across a large cotton trade, even a saving on each load could add up. The first great railway grew from a challenge to a transport monopoly.

Savings looking for a home. Middle-class savings helped pay for the lines. In 1825 Parliament repealed the Bubble Act of 1720, which had restricted share-selling firms, making joint-stock companies that sold shares to the public easier to form. Government bonds, loans to the state, paid modest interest. Railway shares promised higher returns to clergymen, widows, merchants and manufacturers. Cheap credit in the mid-1840s helped turn this interest into a share-buying mania, financing a network faster than any government plan could have done.

WHAT IT CHANGED

A national market and national time. A railway could take coal, cloth, fish, milk and newspapers across the country overnight. Goods could reach more buyers, prices converged and local monopolies collapsed. To coordinate trains, companies adopted Greenwich time, set by the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, from the 1840s; towns followed, decades before the law confirmed one clock in 1880. After 1850 cheap transport also let industrial cities grow by bringing food and fuel from beyond the reach of canals and carts.

The continent builds its own lines. Railway construction created demand for coal, iron and machinery at once, making it a leading industry of continental industrialization. Belgium opened the continent’s first state-built steam railway in 1835; German states and France followed within a few years, often with British locomotives and engineers. Continental governments frequently planned routes themselves, so networks served national strategy as well as private profit.

Railways across the world. British capital and engineers helped build railways from India to Argentina. Transcontinental lines in the United States, Canada and Russia opened vast regions to settlement and trade, connecting distant land to industrial markets. Chapters 9 and 11 follow the grain, cotton and migrants carried into a world economy, and the costs borne by people living in the railways’ path.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

Did railways create Britain’s industrial economy, or did an industrial economy create the railways?

Britain’s industrial economy came first. Cotton, coal, iron and steam were already changing production when railways emerged. Mine owners wanted cheaper carriage, and savings from industry and commerce helped finance the lines. G. R. Hawke’s social-savings measure estimates the extra cost of moving the same traffic without railways. His result suggests a substantial gain of several per cent of national income, although canals and roads could have supplied part of the service. The railway then changed the economy that had paid for it. Its demand created a mass market for coal and iron; engineering became a leading industry, towns grew, time was standardized and ordinary investors entered a national market for shares. The system after 1850 differed in kind from the one before it. An industrial economy created railways, and railways helped create a fully industrial society. The innovation that completes a process need not be the one that began it.

AN INTERESTING FACT

A timetable linking towns had to deal with clocks that disagreed. Before railways, British towns kept local time by the sun; Bristol, about 170 kilometres west of London, ran roughly ten minutes behind the capital. The Great Western Railway began using London time in 1840, leaving Bristol’s citizens with two times to reckon with. The compromise remains visible on the clock of the Corn Exchange, the eighteenth-century trading hall in Corn Street. Its two minute hands, ten minutes apart, show London and Bristol time. Greenwich Mean Time, kept by the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, became Great Britain’s legal time only in 1880, long after railway timetables had made it the time most Britons lived by.

CHAPTER 5 · 1800–1850 · 1851

Industrial Society

A factory needed a workforce within reach, and its jobs drew people from the countryside, Scotland and Ireland. Irish migration became especially pronounced after the Great Famine of 1845–52: the failure of the potato crop killed about a million people and drove many more abroad. On the map, arrows trace routes to Liverpool, Manchester and Glasgow. The same influx that supplied workers created an urgent demand for housing.

Cheap construction answered that demand without providing much space or protection. Back-to-back terraces shared rear walls, so air could not pass through them; narrow passages led to courts crowded around small yards, and cellars flooded. In Little Ireland, beside Manchester's River Medlock, Friedrich Engels, a young German working for his family's cotton firm, found families living in cellars and dozens of people sharing one outdoor toilet. The river was black with dye and sewage. With no town authority responsible for drains, water or rubbish, the conditions of daily life helped disease spread.

Cholera exposed the consequences dramatically. The waterborne intestinal infection arrived at Sunderland in October 1831 and killed about 32,000 people in Britain in 1831–32; another epidemic killed over 53,000 in England and Wales in 1848–49. Typhus, a fever spread by lice, and tuberculosis took lives more steadily. The danger was not shared equally. Edwin Chadwick's Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population (1842) put the average age at death in Manchester at 38 for professional families and 17 for laborers. In rural Rutland the corresponding figures were 52 and 38. Infant deaths pulled these averages down, but the differences showed how sharply class and place shaped survival.

Chadwick believed that foul air caused disease. Even so, he pressed for drains and clean water, arguing that they would save money as well as lives. Parliament's Public Health Act of 1848 created a General Board of Health and allowed towns to establish local boards. It was a cautious beginning: the towns could now organize improvements that their rapid growth had made necessary.

Industrial work presented another problem. Children had worked on farms and in workshops before, but mills and mines imposed long, regimented hours in settings that attracted public scrutiny. In 1832 the reforming MP Michael Sadler's parliamentary committee heard testimony from mill workers. The Factory Act passed at Westminster in 1833 barred children under nine from textile mills and restricted those aged nine to thirteen to nine hours a day. Four inspectors were appointed, giving the restrictions a means of enforcement.

The drowning of 26 children at Huskar Pit in 1838 brought underground work into view. The Mines Act of 1842 barred women, girls and boys under ten from working underground; the Ten Hours Act of 1847 limited the working day of women and young people. Some owners pursued a different answer. Paternalists offered housing, schools and order in return for loyalty, rather like a company town today; the wool manufacturer Titus Salt built a model village at Saltaire. The laws were narrow and often evaded, but they established that the state could limit how industry used people.

WHY IT HAPPENED

Factories pulled workers into towns. The mills offered a reason to move. Steam power allowed works to gather where coal, canals and railways met, while higher town wages attracted people from farming. In the countryside, enclosure—the fencing of common land into private farms—joined falling demand for hand spinning and population growth in leaving many underemployed. England and Wales grew from about 8.9 million people in 1801 to 17.9 million in 1851, and most of that increase went to towns.

No one was in charge of the towns. Building houses did not automatically create a body responsible for serving them. The Municipal Corporations Act of 1835 gave old boroughs elected councils, yet many new industrial towns still lacked councils with power over building, water and drainage. Builders and landlords faced almost no regulation, while private water companies supplied those able to pay. Under those conditions rapid growth could continue for decades without sewers, until disease made inaction impossible to ignore.

Families needed children’s wages. Rent and food had to be paid for even when a father was sick, dead or unemployed, and one adult wage rarely covered them. Families therefore relied on several earners. Jane Humphries found in working-class autobiographies that children from large or fatherless families began earliest, often before ten. Employers had uses for them, including piecing broken threads in mills, and paid them little. Family need and employers' demand brought children into work.

Evidence made the costs visible. Reformers gained ways to bring conditions before Parliament. Censuses began in 1801, civil registration of births and deaths in 1837, and inquiries and inspectors collected testimony as well as numbers. Chadwick's mortality tables and evidence after the flooding at Huskar Pit, where 26 children drowned, made suffering that MPs might never see in a mill or mine into public evidence for action.

WHAT IT CHANGED

Protest grows from hardship. People brought together in industrial towns could organize around shared grievances. Hunger, low wages and the loss of skilled trades fed protest from machine-breaking to Chartism, the mass movement demanding votes for all men. Meetings filled the towns' moors and squares; the concentration of hardship also made collective action possible on a new scale.

Living standards rise after 1850. The clearer improvements in real wages, life expectancy and height came after about 1850, as food became cheaper, sanitation spread and hours were limited. Most workers thus received gains a generation or two after the costs. Their share depended on power as well as productivity: trade unions and the vote, won by many working men in 1867 and 1884, helped them claim more.

Regulation spreads abroad. Britain's experience gave later industrial countries examples of factory and public health legislation. Prussia, the largest German state, limited child labor in 1839, and France followed in 1841. By the end of the century most industrial countries had factory inspectors and public health boards, as chapters 7 and 8 show. Regulation of industry became a lasting legacy as other countries encountered similar problems.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

Did the first industrial generations gain or lose from industrialisation?

The answer depends on the measure and the period. Charles Feinstein estimated a rise of less than 15 per cent in working-class living standards between the 1780s and the 1850s; Peter Lindert and Jeffrey Williamson found much larger wage gains. Yet men born from the 1820s to 1850 were shorter on average, suggesting poorer childhood nutrition and more disease, while life expectancy in the largest industrial towns fell far below the national average. Jane Humphries found that child labor intensified. Migrants nevertheless had a reason to choose towns: wages were higher than on the land. The wealth created in these years also supported later factory laws, sanitation and cheaper goods. Most historians conclude that the first generations bore heavy costs while their grandchildren enjoyed the gains. An average rise in income cannot by itself tell us who paid those costs or when the benefits arrived.

AN INTERESTING FACT

The young man who wrote one of the best-known accounts of Manchester's slums earned his living in cotton. Friedrich Engels, son of a German textile manufacturer, came to work for his family's firm, Ermen & Engels, in 1842. His observations appeared in The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845). He returned in 1850, remained almost twenty years and eventually became a partner. Income from the business helped support his friend Karl Marx, the revolutionary thinker, as Marx wrote Capital, his critique of capitalism. A Lancashire cotton mill thus helped finance the two founders of modern communism.

CHAPTER 6 · 1811–1848 · 1848

Resistance

A stocking knitter in the Midlands rented the frame on which he worked at home. Pay per stocking was falling, and wide frames produced cheap, poorly finished goods. From Arnold on 11 March 1811, knitters broke the frames of employers who paid low rates while sparing those who paid fairly. Their choice of target carried a demand about the terms of work.

Other textile workers faced different machines. Yorkshire croppers finished woolen cloth by hand with heavy shears; shearing frames could do that work with a fraction of the labor. In April 1812 about 150 attacked William Cartwright's mill at Rawfolds, where defenders shot two of them dead. Lancashire hand weavers attacked mills using steam-powered looms. All this happened during war, dear food and trade depression, when the men had neither votes nor legal unions through which to defend their interests.

The authorities answered with exceptional force. Parliament made frame-breaking punishable by death in 1812, and about 12,000 troops occupied the disturbed districts. After a special court at York, seventeen men were hanged in January 1813. Other workers tried petitioning. In 1817 hundreds of Lancashire weavers set out for London carrying blankets, intending to appeal to the Prince Regent, who ruled for his incapacitated father George III. Troops stopped them around Stockport.

On 16 August 1819 perhaps 60,000 people gathered at St Peter's Field in Manchester to hear the orator Henry Hunt demand reform. The yeomanry, part-time cavalry drawn from local property owners, charged, followed by regular cavalry. About 18 people died. Journalists named the massacre Peterloo, a bitter echo of Waterloo, Britain's 1815 victory over Napoleon. The government's Six Acts then restricted meetings and the press. For many radicals, the attack on a peaceful gathering showed why protection depended on a reformed Parliament.

There was another great wave of machine-breaking before mass political organization came to dominate the story. In August 1830 the Swing Riots began at Lower Hardres in Kent. Farm laborers destroyed threshing machines, which separated grain from straw, and sent letters signed by an imaginary Captain Swing. Nineteen were executed and about 480 transported, or shipped as convicts, to Australia.

The Reform Act of 1832 widened representation but gave the vote only to men of property, about one adult man in five. Industrial workers remained excluded. From 1838 Chartists pursued the People's Charter, a six-point program including votes for all men and a secret ballot. Their movement combined petitions with confrontation: in 1839 troops shot dead about 22 armed Chartists marching on Newport. A petition claimed over three million signatures in 1842, and that summer wage cuts during a deep depression helped a general strike spread from Stalybridge across trades in the industrial north. The final petition, launched at Kennington Common in April 1848, was rejected. Chartism failed at the time, but five of its six demands later became law.

WHY IT HAPPENED

Machines threatened skilled trades. A cropper had served a seven-year apprenticeship to finish woolen cloth by hand; a weaver might have earned a craftsman's wage. Shearing frames threatened the cropper's work, steam-powered looms the weaver's, while wide knitting frames produced sheets cut and sewn into cheap, poorly finished stockings. Employers were cutting rates in a depressed wartime economy. Workers defended training, fair rates and independence as well as their immediate earnings.

War, hunger and depression. The threat of a machine did not by itself determine when protest broke out. War, bad harvests and blocked trade made food expensive and work scarce. During the long war against France, trade with Europe and America was blocked and unemployment rose as Luddites attacked machines in 1811–13. After the war, the Corn Law of 1815 protected landowners' rents by barring foreign wheat until British prices were high, keeping bread dear. Protest peaked in the hard years of 1811–12, 1816–19, 1830 and 1842.

Laws that silenced workers. Working men lacked votes, and the Combination Acts of 1799 and 1800 made unions illegal until 1824. Parliament also repealed laws fixing wages and protecting apprenticeships. Weavers petitioned for a minimum wage in 1808 and 1811 and were refused. With lawful bargaining and political change so difficult, direct action could appear the only means left.

Reformers gave anger a programme. The journalist William Cobbett and the orator Henry Hunt offered a political explanation for hardship: a corrupt Parliament elected by a small minority. They argued for reform of the vote. Cheap newspapers, reading rooms and mass meetings spread that argument through industrial districts. By the 1830s the People's Charter gave local grievances a national six-point program beginning with votes for all men. Political reform promised a remedy beyond what machine-breaking could achieve.

WHAT IT CHANGED

Reform reaches the middle classes first. In 1832 the Reform Act gave Manchester, Birmingham and Leeds their own MPs and enfranchised many middle-class men. Industrial wealth gained representation before industrial labor: almost all workers remained excluded, a betrayal that fed Chartism's demand for votes for all men. Many urban working householders gained the vote in 1867, and many county householders in 1884, after further organized pressure.

Trade unions become lawful. Repeal of the Combination Acts in 1824–25 allowed unions to grow in skilled trades, but legal protection came slowly. In 1834 six Dorset laborers from Tolpuddle were transported, shipped as convicts to Australia, for swearing a union oath. By the 1870s British unions had secure legal standing. Organization once treated as a crime had become part of industrial society's institutions.

Resistance spreads with industry. Industrial resistance appeared elsewhere in different settings. Lyon's silk weavers rose in 1831 and 1834; Silesian linen weavers rose in 1844. Later, textile workers in Japan and India struck against long hours and wage cuts. British protest was the first of many such movements, with states answering through force and reform.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

Were the Luddites enemies of progress, or rational defenders of their livelihoods?

The Luddites had reasons to defend their livelihoods. In 1811–13 knitters broke the frames of low-paying employers while sparing others, and croppers attacked mills installing the shearing frames that threatened their hand-finishing work. Wages were falling, food was dear and unions were illegal. Damage gave workers a way to pressure employers; Eric Hobsbawm called it collective bargaining by riot, while E. P. Thompson defended them against the condescension of later historians. The modern label for someone who fears technology misses that targeted action. They could not stop technical change. Machines eventually made cloth and stockings much cheaper for everyone, including workers. Yet those who lost their trades bore costs while many benefits went to others and later generations. Their struggle raises a question that outlasted the machines they broke: how should a society share the costs of technological change?

AN INTERESTING FACT

On 27 February 1812 Lord Byron made his first speech in the House of Lords against a bill making frame-breaking—the smashing of knitting frames—a capital crime. He had seen the distress of Nottinghamshire knitters near his family's estate at Newstead Abbey. Hunger drove them to break frames, he told the Lords, and the law would not feed them. The bill passed. In 1816 his “Song for the Luddites” imagined weavers exchanging their looms' shuttles for swords. Few parliamentary voices spoke for the frame-breakers; men without votes had little reason to expect a hearing from lawmakers.

CHAPTER 7 · 1815–1870 · 1870

The Continent Follows

The coal belt from Mons through Charleroi to Liège gave Belgium a foundation for industry. Coal had been worked there for centuries, and Liège already possessed a metalworking tradition. When British machinery arrived, it entered a region with fuel and people whose skills could be put to new uses.

Britain tried to keep those techniques at home. It prohibited skilled artisans from emigrating until 1824 and textile machinery exports until 1843. Yet William Cockerill, a Lancashire mechanic, had begun building spinning machines at Verviers in 1799. His son John established a machine works and ironworks at Seraing in 1817. It soon became one of the world’s largest industrial plants: knowledge had crossed the border despite the restrictions.

Belgian independence from the Netherlands in 1830 brought another source of investment. The new state planned and paid for a national railway network, opening its first line from Brussels to Mechelen on 5 May 1835. Relative to its size, Belgium became the continent’s most industrialized country. Its experience showed that Britain’s lead could be copied, with public railway building helping to carry the process forward.

In the German states, internal borders presented a different problem. Tariffs separated potential customers and producers. Prussia, the largest German state, led eighteen states with about 23 million people into the Zollverein in 1834; the customs union removed tariffs between them. Its dashed outline on the map expands until it covers almost all of the future German Empire.

Friedrich List wanted German industry to acquire the strength to compete with Britain. In National System of Political Economy (1841), he argued for tariffs: by making imports dearer, these could give young industries time to develop. List also promoted the railway from Leipzig to Dresden, opened in 1839. His argument for protection would find followers from the United States to Japan.

Railways gave the enlarged market a powerful stimulus from the 1840s. Building them required coal, iron and machinery together, creating customers for each. Deep shafts opened the Ruhr coalfield, and the Krupp works at Essen grew from a struggling family steel foundry into one of Europe’s largest firms. Political decisions had joined markets; railway orders helped industrial firms grow to serve them.

France had less coal and a large peasant population that remained on the land. Its industrialization was more gradual, combining high-quality goods such as Lyon silk with major centers including the Schneider brothers’ ironworks at Le Creusot and the cotton mills of Mulhouse in Alsace. Nor did industry elsewhere spread evenly across countries. Textile districts arose in Saxony, Bohemia, Catalonia and the Polish city of Łódź amid largely agricultural surroundings.

The arrival of machinery could also strip existing workers of their earnings. In June 1844, after competition from machine-spun yarn had brought the income of Silesian linen weavers crashing down, weavers at Peterswaldau and Langenbielau wrecked a merchant’s house. Troops fired on the crowd and killed eleven. The continent had borrowed British machines, but its governments and regions shaped their use, and the benefits and losses fell in different places.

WHY IT HAPPENED

Coal and old industrial skills. British techniques could take root quickly where several resources met. The Sambre–Meuse valley had mined coal and worked iron since the Middle Ages; Flanders, Saxony and Alsace already had textile trades. Coal or fast water supplied power, established crafts supplied skills, and water transport connected producers to customers. The map places hatched coalfields close to red districts. Where one of these advantages was absent, industry arrived later.

Borrowed machines and migrant experts. Britain tried to guard its lead by prohibiting artisan emigration until 1824 and textile machinery exports until 1843. Neither rule stopped knowledge from traveling: machines were smuggled, men moved, and continental entrepreneurs visited Lancashire to see what they could copy. British mechanics, engineers and navvies—the laborers who dug canals and railways—built mills and railways from Liège to Rouen. The Cockerills, a Lancashire family of mechanics, made Belgium’s first spinning machines and built the Seraing ironworks. Irish mining engineer William Mulvany worked in the Ruhr; English contractor Thomas Brassey’s railway gangs worked in Normandy. Their experience enabled followers to avoid some of the costly experiments the pioneers had already made.

Governments built markets and railways. Private investors were not always ready to bear the first risks. Governments could create markets and transport before industry had fully developed. Belgium planned its railways; Prussia, the largest German state, led the Zollverein, which removed taxes on goods moving among its German members, much as the European Union does today. Prussia also operated state mines in the Saar and Silesia. France laid out its main railway lines in an 1842 law, then leased them to private companies. Friedrich List gave intervention an economic argument. Infant industries, he held, needed protection while they were too young to compete. State action could give them the conditions and time to grow.

Peace and new borders after 1815. Europe’s great powers made peace at Vienna in 1815, after Napoleon’s defeat, ending a generation of war, blockade and occupation. Capital, goods and people could cross borders again. But the borders themselves had changed, placing industrial resources under different governments. Prussia, the largest German state, gained the Rhineland and Westphalia, including the Ruhr and the Saar. The new Kingdom of the Netherlands gained the coal and iron of Liège and Hainaut; Belgium broke away in 1830. The diplomats at Vienna had, largely without realizing it, helped decide which states would possess coal for the industrial age.

WHAT IT CHANGED

Germany overtakes. By joining markets before political unification, the Zollverein tied smaller German states to Prussia, the largest. Ruhr coal and railway orders supplied the industrial foundations on which a united Germany, created in 1871, overtook Britain in steel and chemicals by the 1890s. Economic unification contributed to political unification; the new empire’s strength would depend on science and big business as well as coal.

The workers’ question crosses borders. The Silesian weavers’ revolt of 1844 gave the suffering of industrial workers a lasting public voice. German writer Heinrich Heine turned it into a poem, and half a century later Gerhart Hauptmann wrote the play The Weavers (1892). Governments faced the workers’ question too. In the 1880s Germany’s chancellor Otto von Bismarck introduced insurance against sickness, accidents and old age, partly to undercut socialists. Protecting workers had become a European political question, shared by workers and feared by governments.

A model for late developers. Later industrializers could draw on List’s argument for sheltering infant industries—those too young to face foreign competition—and on Germany’s partnership of banks and state. The United States raised tariffs to protect its factories. Japan’s Meiji leaders, in power from 1868, studied Germany and used the state to found industries, though Western unequal treaties barred Japan from raising tariffs until 1911. Both pursued active policies rather than relying on the free market recommended by Britain from its secure lead. List compared that advice to kicking away a ladder after climbing it.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

Did continental Europe industrialise by imitating Britain, or by finding its own path?

The first continental steam engines, spinning mills and railways were British in design, often British-built and sometimes British-run. The Cockerills’ Seraing ironworks and English contractor Thomas Brassey’s railways in Normandy show how people carried this knowledge; entrepreneurs looked to Lancashire as a standard. Imitation was central to the beginning. The machines, however, entered societies with different resources and institutions. Belgium and Prussia, the largest German kingdom, used governments to plan railways and run mines. German banks financed heavy industry on a scale British banks never attempted. Friedrich List defended protectionism—sheltering young industries behind tariffs—against Britain’s recommended free trade. France developed more gradually around skilled work, a path economic historians Patrick O’Brien and Caglar Keyder argue suited its resources. Alexander Gerschenkron helps explain why a later start could produce different methods. Followers could borrow established technology while creating institutions suited to their own circumstances. They copied British patents and joint-stock companies, firms owned by many shareholders, selectively as well. Continental Europe combined borrowed technology with institutions of its own, a combination later industrializers from the United States to Japan would repeat.

AN INTERESTING FACT

Germany’s first railway locomotive arrived in pieces from Newcastle. Robert Stephenson & Co. built the Adler, or Eagle, and shipped it to Bavaria for the six-kilometre Nuremberg–Fürth line, which opened on 7 December 1835. The company sent an English driver, William Wilson, because nobody in Bavaria knew how to drive a locomotive. It paid him more than its own director. Wilson trained German drivers and stayed in Nuremberg until his death in 1862. A locomotive did not immediately make every train steam-powered. Coal was expensive, so horses pulled most trains on the line for years. Germany could import a railway before it could fuel one cheaply.

CHAPTER 8 · 1870–1914 · 1913

The Second Industrial Revolution

A deposit of iron ore does not become useful for steel simply because it is large. In Lorraine, phosphorus in the ore made the resulting steel brittle. Two major innovations had made steel cheaper without solving this problem: English inventor Henry Bessemer’s 1856 converter blew air through molten iron, while the Siemens–Martin open-hearth furnace of the 1860s produced larger, more controllable batches.

In 1878 two cousins found a way to remove the phosphorus. Sidney Gilchrist Thomas was a London police-court clerk who studied chemistry in his spare time; Percy Gilchrist was a chemist at the Blaenavon ironworks in Wales. They lined the converter with limestone, which absorbed the impurity. The chemically basic, or alkaline, lining gave the basic process its name.

The consequences reached well beyond the works where the idea was tested. Much of Lorraine had been annexed by Germany in 1871; now its phosphoric ores became Europe’s largest ore field, worked by firms including the de Wendel family’s ironworks at Hayange. Follow the arrow north to the Ruhr: Lorraine ore could meet Ruhr coal. Krupp at Essen employed about 70,000 people by 1912, and German steel output had passed Britain’s by about 1893. A chemical discovery tested in Wales had helped connect two regions into a European steel power.

Chemistry made trained researchers valuable to business in another way. German universities and technical colleges produced chemists by the thousand, and BASF at Ludwigshafen, Bayer and Hoechst organized laboratory teams to make synthetic dyes from coal by-products. In 1897 BASF began selling synthetic indigo, a blue dye; the competition ruined indigo planters in Bengal and Bihar in India. At nearby Oppau in 1913, BASF began using the Haber–Bosch process to fix nitrogen from air and turn it into ammonia, the basis of modern fertilizers and explosives.

Electricity likewise connected scientific knowledge with large-scale enterprise. Werner von Siemens’ dynamo of 1866 converted motion into electric current. Industrialist Emil Rathenau’s firm, renamed AEG in 1887, built power stations, trams and motors; Berlin became Europe’s Elektropolis, or electric city. Such undertakings required enormous capital. Giant firms and banks consequently became powerful, as did cartels, agreements among firms to fix prices or output.

The new technologies could open industry where coal was scarce. Northern Italy drew on hydroelectric power from the Alps; FIAT, founded at Turin in 1899, joined the textile mills of Lombardy. Meanwhile petrol engines built in 1885–86 by Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach at Cannstatt and Carl Benz at Mannheim created a new kind of transport.

Further east, Russian industry grew about 8 per cent a year in the 1890s under finance minister Sergei Witte, largely with French loans. The map marks the empire’s western provinces as industrializing. Britain remained rich and its output grew, but its share of world manufacturing fell from about 23 per cent in 1880 to about 14 per cent in 1913 as the United States and Germany overtook it. Historians still debate how much of that relative decline was British failure and how much was the expected result of larger countries catching up.

WHY IT HAPPENED

Science became a source of invention. By the 1860s, chemistry and physics had produced knowledge that practical tinkering alone could not reach, including the structure of carbon-based molecules and the laws of electromagnetism. Firms could turn that knowledge into goods if they employed people trained to use it. BASF, Bayer and Siemens hired university-trained researchers to develop synthetic dyes, drugs, electric generators called dynamos, and electric light. Invention increasingly entered the laboratory, and Germany, with more universities and technical colleges than any rival, gained most from the shift.

Cheap steel replaced iron. Making steel cheaper gave manufacturers a stronger alternative to iron. Bessemer’s 1856 converter blew air through molten iron, the open-hearth furnace of the 1860s produced larger batches, and the basic process of 1878 made phosphorus-rich ore usable. Steel rails lasted many times longer than iron rails; steel ships could be lighter and larger. Steel spread into rails, ships, bridges and machines. Germany and the United States possessed coal and suitable ores and built the largest steel industries, so geology helped determine the leaders of heavy industry.

Unification, tariffs and banks. German unification in 1871 brought together the market of the Zollverein, the customs union founded in 1834, a single currency and a dense railway network run by individual states. The empire also had access to Ruhr and Lorraine coal and ore. From 1879 Chancellor Otto von Bismarck’s tariffs protected industry and agriculture, while great banks financed mergers and cartels, agreements among firms to fix prices or output. Protected firms with finance and large markets could invest in research and plants bigger than any in Britain. Critics then and since have also argued that their price fixing came at consumers’ expense.

Followers started with the newest technology. A late starter building a power station or steelworks could install the newest design from the beginning. Britain had older industries still using machinery and methods from the 1850s. American economist Thorstein Veblen called this disadvantage the penalty of taking the lead. The followers also had larger or faster-growing populations; their eventual lead in total output was partly a matter of arithmetic. First place brought costs along with its advantages.

WHAT IT CHANGED

An arms race of steel and chemistry. Factories became part of military competition. Krupp made guns, steel went into battleships, and chemistry supplied explosives. The Haber–Bosch process made ammonia from nitrogen captured from the air, freeing Germany from imported Chilean nitrate, a nitrogen-rich mineral. During the First World War this later allowed Germany to keep producing explosives despite the British blockade. Industrial capacity had become a source of military power.

Commodity frontiers move. A synthetic blue dye could destroy a crop’s market: indigo planting in Bengal and Bihar in India was ruined by factory-made indigo. Nitrogen captured from air would later undermine Chile’s exports of mined nitrate fertilizer. At the same time, electrical and motor industries drew new sources of rubber, copper and oil into the world economy, often by force. Historians call these extraction zones commodity frontiers; they stretched from the Congo to Persia, today Iran. Laboratory discoveries could make or break economies far from Europe.

America takes the lead. The United States had a continental market on which to apply the new technologies. It built the largest steel industry, the first great electric power systems and mass-produced cars; Carnegie Steel and General Electric matched German giants in scale. By 1913 America produced about a third of the world’s manufactured goods, more than Germany and Britain combined. Market size had become as important in the new industries as being first.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

Why did Germany, and not Britain, lead the second industrial revolution?

Germany had institutions and resources suited to the new industries. Universities and technical colleges trained chemists and engineers by the thousand; banks financed huge plants; and after 1871 a protected market grew alongside access to Ruhr and Lorraine coal and ore. In science-based dyes, these institutions gave Germany a real advantage. A second explanation looks at Britain. David Landes and Martin Wiener emphasized family firms content with old methods, education that prized Latin and Greek, and capital sent abroad. Deirdre McCloskey and others questioned whether these choices amounted to failure: an older machine could remain profitable, and a larger country starting later was bound to catch up. The evidence supports elements of all three accounts. German institutions mattered especially in science-based industry; in steel and cotton, differences in resources, markets and timing mainly accounted for the gap. Institutions successful in one technological era were seldom best suited to the next.

AN INTERESTING FACT

In August 1891 visitors to the International Electrotechnical Exhibition in Frankfurt could see a thousand lamps and an artificial waterfall powered from 175 kilometres away. The electricity came from a cement works beside the River Neckar at Lauffen. Sending it that distance was the achievement on display. Engineers from Germany’s AEG and Switzerland’s Oerlikon, including Mikhail Dolivo-Dobrovolsky and Charles Brown, transmitted power over overhead wires at high voltage. They used three-phase alternating current, a new system in which three linked currents rise and fall in turn. The demonstration settled a fierce argument about long-distance transmission. The same system still carries power in almost every grid on earth.

CHAPTER 9 · 1865–1914 · 1890

America Industrialises

Long before the United States led the world in manufacturing, its cotton industry connected British machinery to the labor of enslaved people. Samuel Slater memorized Richard Arkwright's spinning machines in England and began spinning cotton in Rhode Island in 1790. In 1823 Boston merchants opened mills in the planned Massachusetts town of Lowell. They hired young women from New England farms; those women struck against wage cuts in 1834 and again in 1836.

The cotton came from the slave South. Its enslaved population grew from about 700,000 in 1790 to almost four million in 1860. During the Civil War of 1861–65, the North's factories and railways outproduced the South's, confirming the power of the industrial North. The war destroyed slavery and freed four million people. Yet most remained poor farm workers or sharecroppers, paying rent with a share of their crop in a South marked by poverty and segregation.

After the war, a manufacturer could contemplate selling across a much larger territory. Congress gave land grants and loans to the Union Pacific and Central Pacific, whose tracks met at Promontory Summit on 10 May 1869. The Central Pacific had built east from Sacramento, across the Sierra Nevada. It employed 10,000 to 15,000 Chinese workers at a time; in 1867 they formed about 90 percent of its workforce and received less pay than white workers. Deaths were never reliably counted: estimates range from about fifty to over a thousand.

Four more transcontinental lines followed by 1893. Railways could carry goods from a Pittsburgh or Chicago factory to customers far beyond its own city, permitting firms to grow beyond the size a local market could support. Running the railroads also required large businesses with professional managers. Yet the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 barred workers of the nationality that had done so much to build the first line.

Steel gave the expanding railways their rails. At Carnegie's Edgar Thomson works near Pittsburgh, opened in 1875, ore arrived across the Great Lakes and the Bessemer process sent air through molten iron to burn out impurities in minutes. American steel production passed Britain's around 1886. By the 1890s steel, mass production and immigration had made the United States the leading industrial power.

Another way of organizing work appeared in Chicago's meat-packing plants, where overhead lines carried carcasses past workers who each removed a part. Henry Ford said this disassembly line inspired his moving assembly line at Highland Park, where the product passed workers repeating individual tasks. About 22 million immigrants entered between 1880 and 1914, many through Ellis Island, New York's immigration station, after it opened in 1892.

The expansion also provoked struggles over who would share its rewards. At Carnegie's Homestead steelworks in 1892, strikers fought private guards; seven workers and three guards died, and the union was broken. By 1913 American factories made about a third of the world's manufactured goods, more than Britain and Germany together. The country where industrialization began had been surpassed by an economy able to draw on a continent.

WHY IT HAPPENED

A continent of resources. Pennsylvania's coalfields and the Lake Superior iron ranges appear as hatched patches on the map; their resources fed Pittsburgh's industry. Coal, iron ore, copper and oil were present in some of the world's largest deposits. Vast forests and farmland, taken from Native American nations by treaty and war, added to this abundance. Cheap materials encouraged technologies that consumed them freely, making American industry especially hungry for energy and resources.

A huge protected market. A large plant needs many buyers. The American population grew from about 31 million in 1860 to 92 million in 1910, and railways connected those buyers without taxes on trade between states. Manufacturers could spread the costs of enormous plants across millions of customers. They also benefited from protection against British and German competitors. High tariffs, or taxes on imports, rose during the Civil War and remained afterward. This was the kind of shelter for young industries that the German economist Friedrich List had recommended for Germany.

Immigrant and coerced labour. Mines, mills and railways drew workers from Europe, China, Mexico and the American countryside, often at low wages and in dangerous conditions. Immigration kept wages lower than they otherwise would have been, though they remained higher than in Europe and continued to attract migrants. In the South, Black people freed from slavery grew cotton that remained a leading export; debt and segregation constrained their lives and work.

Capital, organisation and the state. Building railroads required money before the lines could earn it. British and European investors supplied capital, while federal loans and land grants reduced companies' risks. Railroads also pioneered firms managed by salaried employees. Alfred Chandler called their coordination the visible hand: managers planned activities previously coordinated by markets. Steel, oil and meat firms copied the organization. Government affected the distribution of gains as well. Courts and officials generally sided with employers, issuing injunctions—court orders banning strikes—and sending troops. Such support helped hold down labor costs and maintain profits, creating conditions in which private enterprise could flourish.

WHAT IT CHANGED

America overtakes Britain. American steel output passed Britain's around 1886; by 1913 the United States made about a third of the world's manufactured goods. Its production methods traveled beyond its borders. In the twentieth century Europe and Japan adopted interchangeable parts—standard components that fit any copy of a product—and the assembly line. Americans, earning the world's highest wages, became the first mass market for cars and electrical goods. The lead in mass production had crossed the Atlantic from Britain's workshop of the world.

Grain and migrants remake Europe. From the 1870s railways and steamships delivered cheap American grain to Europe. Lower bread prices helped workers, but many farmers were ruined and millions of rural Europeans were pushed to emigrate. Germany and France protected farmers with tariffs on imported grain; Britain maintained free trade and allowed its farming to shrink. Ships and railways carried grain east and migrants west, linking the two changes.

The labour question goes national. At Homestead in 1892 strikers fought off guards from the Pinkerton detective agency, but Pennsylvania's state militia broke the strike. Federal troops broke the Pullman railway-car strike in 1894. Such confrontations made corporate power a national political question. Progressive Era reformers in the 1900s and 1910s sought to curb that power. Laws addressed monopolies, firms dominating a whole market, and unsafe food; states restricted child labor, while unions grew slowly. Political action had become part of the response to industrial power.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

Was America’s industrial success built more on its resources or on its people?

The resources set the direction of much American industry. Coal, ore, oil, timber and land, much taken from Native American nations, supplied cheap inputs; Gavin Wright's evidence shows their importance in manufactured exports. Yet deposits and forests could not extract or transport themselves. Inventors and managers organized large corporations, and about 22 million immigrants arrived between 1880 and 1914. Chinese workers built railways and were later barred from the country. Formerly enslaved people and their children grew cotton that remained a leading export. Institutions shaped the rewards of their work: import taxes, federal land grants and employer-friendly courts directed wealth toward industry and held down labor costs, amid fierce conflict. Abundant resources helped determine the direction of technology; access to labor and capital from across the world helped determine the speed of growth. Both mattered, and exclusion and conflict reveal how unevenly the costs and gains were shared.

AN INTERESTING FACT

A traveler consulting American railroad timetables before 1883 encountered dozens of local times. On Sunday 18 November that year, railroads in the United States and Canada switched to standard time zones, four across the United States. Many eastern towns set their clocks back, so noon struck twice: it became known as the day of two noons. Most towns adopted railway time immediately, but Congress made the zones law only in 1918. For thirty-five years a private industry had set the nation's clocks.

CHAPTER 10 · 1868–1914 · 1910

Japan: Industrialisation from Above

In 1839–42 Britain fought China in the Opium War after China tried to stop British merchants selling Indian opium. Britain's steam-powered navy humbled Asia's greatest empire. Japan's rulers had reason to notice: when Commodore Perry arrived in 1853 with American steam warships, Japan had no effective answer.

The commercial treaties of 1858 were imposed under threat. They opened ports including Yokohama, gave foreigners their own courts, and kept import tariffs low—about five percent from 1866. Japan recovered full control over those taxes only in 1911. For the leaders who seized power in the Meiji Restoration of 1868, the problem was how to acquire the strength to resist such pressure. Their slogan, fukoku kyōhei, “rich country, strong army”, joined industrial development to national survival.

The new government was led by former samurai of the warrior class. It abolished the domains of some 270 feudal lords: these were semi-independent territories, rather like provinces with their own princes. A cash land tax helped pay for modernization, and compulsory service supplied a national army.

The government also tried to show private producers how modern industry could work. It opened the Tomioka silk mill in 1872 with French machines and the French engineer Paul Brunat. Young women learned to reel thread from cocoons and were recruited to teach the technique elsewhere. That year a railway connected Tokyo and Yokohama; a line reached Kobe in 1889.

State ownership had its limits. In the 1880s, facing deep government debt, finance minister Matsukata Masayoshi cut spending and sold most state factories to private firms, among them Mitsui and Mitsubishi. These grew into zaibatsu, family-controlled groups spanning banking, mining, shipping and trade, comparable to South Korea's Samsung today. Banker Shibusawa Eiichi's steam-powered Osaka Spinning Company, opened in 1883, became a model for private mills. Red patches around Osaka, Nagano and Gunma show the textile industry spreading. The government had accepted early risks; investors could now follow an example that promised profit.

The workers who made textiles paid a price for that expansion. Women accounted for about 80 percent of textile workers, many recruited on contracts from poor farm families. They lived in dormitories and worked twelve hours or more a day. Government doctor Ishihara Osamu reported in 1913 that many went home with tuberculosis.

Heavy industry drew on different resources and on imperial victories. The state opened the Yawata steelworks beside the Chikuhō coalfield in 1901, using part of the indemnity, or compensation forced on a defeated country, paid by China after the war of 1894–95. That war also gave Japan Taiwan. Victory over Russia in 1905 brought a lease in southern Manchuria and control of Korea, which Japan annexed in 1910. Railways from Seoul and a colonial land survey tied Korean farms to Japan's economy. At home, waste from the Ashio copper mine poisoned farms along the Watarase river, and politician Tanaka Shōzō led protests. Industrial success had costs borne by workers, colonial subjects and farming communities.

WHY IT HAPPENED

The shock of Western power. China tried to stop British opium sales, but Britain's steam-powered navy defeated it in the Opium War of 1839–42. Commodore Perry's American steam warships arrived off Japan in 1853 and showed that Japan, too, could not keep foreigners out. Treaties signed under threat limited its import tariffs and its courts' reach. Many samurai, members of the hereditary warrior class, concluded that Japan needed industry to finance an army and navy capable of avoiding China's fate. Fear of Western power gave modernization urgency.

A state that chose industry. The Meiji government that took power in 1868 dismantled the domains of the daimyo, the feudal lords who had ruled Japan's regions. It raised a national army by conscription, or compulsory service, and collected a cash land tax. The revenue supported railways, telegraphs, shipyards and model factories that private firms could copy. Officials also looked abroad for knowledge. The Iwakura Mission of 1871–73 sent senior ministers to study the United States and Europe, and the government hired about three thousand foreign experts. Where private capital was missing, the state accepted the early risks, as economic historian Alexander Gerschenkron's theory of late development predicts.

An educated, commercial society. Modern industry could draw on institutions and skills developed during the preceding 265 years of Tokugawa military rule. Edo, today's Tokyo, and Osaka were large cities; rice, silk and cotton circulated in national markets; merchant houses such as Mitsui dated from the seventeenth century. Perhaps 40 percent of boys had received some schooling. Rural households already spun, wove and reeled silk from cocoons for sale. These activities supplied workers, managers, capital and customers for new enterprises.

Silk paid for machines. Imported machinery, ships and Indian raw cotton had to be paid for in foreign currency. Japan's great export, raw silk, earned it. Disease devastated European silkworms in the 1860s and helped Japanese trade. Young women in Nagano and Gunma reeled thread from cocoons, and the silk traveled through Yokohama to France and the United States. Their textile labor helped finance further light industry and heavy industries making steel and ships.

WHAT IT CHANGED

Japan competes in Asian markets. By the 1900s Japanese cotton yarn and cloth were competing against British and Indian goods in China and Korea. Japanese shipping lines carried Indian cotton to Osaka, and reformers from China to India studied Japan's example. It was the first Asian country to beat the industrial West at its own trade in Asian markets. In a world economy that assigned much of Asia the role of raw-material supplier, Japan alone had escaped that role, showing that the industrial gap could be closed.

Empire becomes part of the economy. The empire supplied Japan on terms set for Japanese benefit. Taiwan provided sugar and rice, Korea rice and land, and the Japanese-run South Manchuria Railway coal and soya beans. Colonial authorities built railways and factories for Japanese purposes and treated resistance harshly. Many Korean farmers lost land through the colonial survey of 1910–18 and later emigrated to Japan and Manchuria as cheap labor. Japan had used industrial strength to escape colonial rule; it then imposed rule on its neighbors to feed that industry.

Regulation arrives a generation late. Industrial growth exposed people with little power to serious costs. Communities protested pollution from the Ashio copper mine, mill girls struck, and the government's 1903 survey documented factory conditions. Japan passed its first Factory Act in 1911, limiting the hours of women and children, though enforcement began only in 1916. As in Britain, regulation followed industrial growth by a generation.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

How far was Japan’s industrialisation the achievement of the Meiji state?

The Meiji state made decisive early choices. Within a generation it abolished the domains of the feudal lords, raised taxes for modernization, built railways and telegraphs, founded factories including Tomioka and Yawata, and hired foreign experts. Alexander Gerschenkron's model of late development anticipates this kind of intervention. But government factories were not the whole industrial economy. Many lost money and were sold cheaply to private firms in the 1880s. Cotton spinning and silk reeling, the unwinding of thread from cocoons, earned foreign currency and grew mainly through private investment, from Shibusawa's Osaka Spinning Company to thousands of rural silk workshops. Thomas Smith emphasized state enterprise; Penelope Francks and others have drawn attention to markets, merchants and literacy inherited from the Tokugawa shoguns, military rulers until 1868, and to young women's labor. The state set direction and removed obstacles; private enterprise and women's work did much of the rest. State action can accelerate late industrialization, but it needs a society able to respond.

AN INTERESTING FACT

In 1872 Tomioka's recruiters faced a rumor that French staff drank young women's blood. They had been seen drinking red wine. To reassure families, the mill's first director, Odaka Atsutada, enrolled his own daughter Yū, then about fourteen, among the first trainees; other officials followed. Japanese carpenters and tilers built the brick mill to a French design. The buildings still stand, and in 2014 UNESCO, the United Nations' cultural agency, listed the mill as a World Heritage Site. A factory needed workers and their families' trust as well as machines.

CHAPTER 11 · 1850–1914 · 1913

A Global Transformation

A voyage between London and Bombay once required a long passage around Africa. The opening of the Suez Canal on 17 November 1869 reduced the route from about 10,700 to 6,300 nautical miles. Steam made the shorter route practical: from the 1860s iron steamships with compound engines used steam twice to save coal, and coaling stations such as Singapore supplied them along the way. Ships could make long journeys more cheaply and reliably.

Information moved faster than ships. A working Atlantic cable followed in 1866, and in 1870 a line from Porthcurno in Cornwall to Bombay brought messages that had taken weeks by mail in minutes. London investors could manage mines and railways on other continents. As the prices of grain, cotton and cloth converged across oceans, a producer’s competitors could be on the far side of the world.

What kind of economy did these routes connect? Industrial countries exported manufactured goods and capital, while other regions supplied food and raw materials. The terms were often imposed. John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson called Britain’s approach the imperialism of free trade: it opened markets with treaties and gunboats where possible, resorting to conquest where necessary. Powerful states today also use sanctions and loans to influence weaker ones.

China tried to stop British merchants selling Indian opium. Britain fought the Opium War and forced Chinese ports open in 1842. At the treaty port of Shanghai, foreigners lived and traded under their own laws; it became China’s first industrial city. Treaties in 1838–41 also forced the Ottoman Empire and Egypt to lower tariffs, or import taxes. That ended the effort of Muhammad Ali, Egypt’s ruler from 1805 to 1848, to build state cotton mills.

The cotton famine of 1861–65 exposed the reach of these connections. The American Civil War cut off Southern cotton, leaving Lancashire mills idle. Growers in India and Egypt prospered as cotton left through Bombay and Alexandria, but their boom collapsed when the war ended. A conflict in America could ruin spinners in Lancashire while enriching farmers in Gujarat and the Nile delta.

Competition had lasting effects in Bengal. Lancashire’s machine-made cloth destroyed the export trade of its handloom weavers, and Dhaka, which may have had 150,000 or more inhabitants around 1800, had fallen to about 50,000 by 1840. Yet India’s industrial story did not end with the weavers’ losses. Entrepreneurs, many of them Parsis descended from religious refugees from Persia, began building cotton mills at Bombay in 1854. By 1914 India had about 260 to 270 mills.

In central Africa, the spread of the air-filled tyre increased demand for rubber. King Leopold II of Belgium personally owned the Congo Free State, whose agents forced villagers to gather wild rubber through hostage-taking, mutilation and killing. Estimates of the population loss remain disputed, from about one million to perhaps ten million people.

The scale of the change in manufacturing is striking. Europe and the United States made about 23 per cent of the world’s manufactured goods in 1750 and about 85 per cent by 1900. Historians call this widening gap the Great Divergence. The connections that brought distant producers into one economy also left industrial production distributed very unevenly.

WHY IT HAPPENED

Steam and cable shrank distance. Distance had once shielded local producers from some competition because moving goods and news was expensive. Steam and cable reduced that protection. Compound engines used steam twice and saved coal; iron and later steel hulls made ships larger, while stations from Gibraltar to Singapore supplied fuel. Undersea telegraph cables were insulated with gutta-percha, latex from Malayan trees. Grain and cotton could now be traded profitably across oceans, extending worldwide a change railways had brought to Britain.

Industry demanded raw materials. Factories needed supplies beyond those available locally. Cotton, jute, wool, rubber, copper, tin, palm oil and grain came from distant regions. West African palm oil supplied lubricants and soap for industrial Europe, Bengal jute made sacks for the world’s grain, and Congo and Amazon rubber went into tyres. Demand drew these regions into the industrial economy as suppliers, often with little power over the terms.

Free trade backed by force. Free trade meant commerce with few barriers, but markets could be opened by force. Britain fought the Opium War after China tried to stop British opium sales, opening China in 1842. Treaties imposed low import taxes on the Ottoman Empire, Egypt, Persia, Siam (now Thailand) and Japan; India’s colonial government kept taxes on British imports low. Gallagher and Robinson called the combination of trade and treaties, backed where necessary by conquest, the imperialism of free trade.

Capital from London. British investors held about £4 billion in overseas assets by 1914. Much went into railways, ports, mines and government bonds, or loans to governments. In India the colonial government guaranteed railway companies a return of about five per cent, paid from Indian taxes, so British investors bore little risk. Capital followed profit and political security into routes for exporting raw materials; relatively few factories were built that might compete with Britain’s.

WHAT IT CHANGED

Nationalism grows from economic grievance. The loss of Indian wealth became an argument for political change. Dadabhai Naoroji charged that British rule drained the country, and the Indian National Congress, founded in 1885 as a party of educated Indians and later a leader of the independence movement, took up the claim. In 1905 Bengal’s swadeshi movement—“of one’s own country”—urged Indians to buy Indian goods and boycott British cloth. A product associated with economic loss became a means of resistance.

A world of migrants. Steam shortened a voyage that had taken six weeks under sail to about ten days, making passage cheaper. Tens of millions of Europeans crossed the Atlantic; Indian and Chinese workers traveled to plantations and mines across the tropics, many under indenture, contracts binding them to employers for years. The epilogue’s arrows trace these journeys and ask who gained and who left home under pressure from debt and coercion. Labor moved where capital sought it, changing the populations of whole continents.

The Great Divergence hardens. By 1900 Europe and the United States made about 85 per cent of manufactured goods, and the income gap between the industrial core and much of Asia and Africa had grown enormously. This Great Divergence became embedded in the world economy. Historians dispute how much industrial competition and empire each contributed. A difference that had been modest in 1750 now separated manufacturing countries from many suppliers; it would take a century to begin closing.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

Was the impoverishment of regions such as India the result of industrial competition or of imperial rule?

Lancashire’s machines made cloth cheaply enough to take Bengal weavers’ export markets. Clingingsmith and Williamson argue that India’s share of world manufacturing would have fallen steeply even under Indian rule: droughts and the fragmentation of the Mughal empire, which had ruled most of India, had already raised food prices and wages. Competition presented a serious challenge. Imperial rule affected the choices available in response. The colonial government kept taxes on British imports low, taxed Indian mill cloth from 1896 and paid guaranteed returns to British railway investors from Indian taxes. It also funded an army and administration that nationalists such as Naoroji called a drain. Tirthankar Roy warns against treating the result as total ruin: hand weaving adapted and Indian-owned mills grew. Industrial technology made a decline in Indian hand industry likely, while empire removed tools such as import taxes and an investing state that Germany, the United States and Japan used to industrialize. Competition posed the problem; political power shaped who could answer it.

AN INTERESTING FACT

Nellie Bly’s journey around the world in 1889–90 took 72 days. The American journalist beat Phileas Fogg’s fictional record in Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days (1872), following routes visible on this map: steamers through the Suez Canal to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Singapore and Hong Kong, a Pacific crossing to San Francisco, and a train across the United States. Verne’s imagined circuit depended on new infrastructure too: the canal opened in 1869, and a railway first crossed India from Bombay to Calcutta in 1870.

EPILOGUE · 1750–1914 · 1914

Who Won and Who Lost

In 1750 Europe and the United States made less than a quarter of the world’s manufactured goods, according to Paul Bairoch’s estimates; China and India together made about 57 per cent. By 1900 the position had been transformed. Europe and the United States made about 85 per cent, while China’s share had fallen to about six per cent and India’s to under two. Industrial production had concentrated in a small group of countries.

Britain’s lead also gave it power as a lender. By 1914 the City of London, its financial district, had invested about £4 billion abroad in railways, mines and loans to foreign governments. Industrial profits helped finance loans, railways and fleets that extended the country’s reach. Within industrial countries the benefits spread slowly but widely after 1850: real wages, measured by what pay could buy, rose as working hours fell. The Panama Canal, opened in August 1914, was the last great work of this confident world.

Workers had organized to obtain a share of those gains. British unions grew from the skilled trades of the 1850s; the dock strike of 1889 organized unskilled workers, and by 1914 unions had about four million members. In Germany Chancellor Otto von Bismarck banned the Marxist Social Democratic Party from 1878 to 1890. By 1912 it had become the largest party in the Reichstag, the elected national parliament.

The movement crossed borders. In 1889 socialist parties from about twenty countries founded the Second International in Paris. It called for an eight-hour day and made 1 May an international workers’ day. Governments used repression, but they also adopted reforms. Bismarck’s Germany introduced state insurance against sickness, accidents and old age in the 1880s. Britain introduced old-age pensions in 1908 and national insurance in 1911, paying sick and unemployed workers from contributions by workers, employers and the state. Industrial capitalism survived its critics partly by accepting some of their demands.

The account looks harsher outside the industrial core. Colonies and economies opened by force or treaty supplied cotton, jute for sacks, rubber, tin and grain on terms set by others. A functioning market did not ensure that everyone could afford food. During the 1876–78 famine in southern and western India, centered on Madras, about 5.5 to 10 million people died while grain continued to move to market and abroad.

Poverty and cheaper steamship passages helped drive migration. Some 50 million Europeans left for the Americas and Australia, while over a million Indians left under indenture, bound to plantation work for years. Another consequence crossed borders without a ship. Coal freed industry from the limits of the land; in Stockholm in 1896 the Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius calculated that doubling atmospheric carbon dioxide would warm the earth by several degrees. The fuel that enriched industrial countries was also beginning to change the planet.

WHY IT HAPPENED

Coal-powered productivity. Coal-powered machinery multiplied what each worker could produce. Britain mined about 287 million tons in 1913, its all-time peak, exporting about a third to fuel other countries’ ships and factories. Coal, capital and skills gave countries the means to build industrial wealth; countries without them, or prevented from using them, fell behind. Access to energy helped establish the divergence.

Diffusion through states and markets. Countries that followed Britain did more than import its machines. Germany, the United States and Japan protected young industries, built railways and educated engineers. German investment banks supplied long-term industrial loans, while Japan’s Meiji government, the modernizing regime that took power in 1868, built model factories. By 1914 several industrial countries competed for markets, resources and colonies. Their success depended on adapting borrowed methods to local conditions.

Empire and unequal exchange. Colonial rule and unequal treaties placed much of Asia and Africa in the position of supplying raw materials and buying manufactures. The treaties forced weaker states to accept low tariffs, or import taxes. Guaranteed returns for foreign investors and forced labor, including in the Congo Free State, King Leopold II of Belgium’s private colony, also directed gains toward industrial powers. Tan and blue on the 1914 map show the system’s reach. Political power helped determine who benefited from the technology.

Workers and voters organised. Early industrial Britain’s losers organized to change their circumstances. Luddites smashed machines; Chartists demanded votes for working men; trade unionists and socialists built movements that helped win the vote, legal unions and early welfare laws. Similar movements spread across Europe, the United States and Japan. Their pressure helps explain why incomes became more equal after mid-century, although wealth did not. Reform came from below as well as from governments.

WHAT IT CHANGED

An industrial war. The First World War drew on steel, chemicals, railways and factories across whole economies. This was total war, using a nation’s economic resources for fighting; machine guns, heavy artillery and poison gas appeared on a scale the American Civil War had only foreshadowed. Estimates of military deaths range from about 9 to 11 million. The industrial powers had traded more with one another in 1913 than ever before. Interdependence alone had not kept the peace.

Catching up, slowly. Only in the late twentieth century did the Great Divergence between the industrial West and the rest begin to narrow. After 1945 many former colonies sought to industrialize behind tariffs, or import taxes. From the 1950s Japan, followed by South Korea, Taiwan and finally China, combined state guidance, protection and exports, as earlier latecomers such as Germany had done. Their success shows that later policy could alter conditions behind the nineteenth-century gap, including capital, technology and the power to set tariffs.

The carbon century. Coal and later oil powered the twentieth century. Atmospheric carbon dioxide rose from about 280 parts per million before industrialization to about 300 by 1914 and passed 400 in the 2010s. Arvid Högbom and Svante Arrhenius were among the first scientists to connect coal burning with a warmer planet. They worked in the industrial world on this map; the costs they glimpsed are now global.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

Who gained most from the Industrial Revolution by 1914, and was the price worth paying?

Owners of capital and populations of the industrial core gained most clearly by 1914. They were richer, healthier and more numerous than any earlier society, and working classes had begun to share in the gains after 1850. Others paid without benefiting: enslaved people who grew cotton for the first mills, handworkers from Lancashire to Bengal who lost their trades, colonized suppliers, and those who died in famine or forced labor. Was the price worth paying? Evidence alone cannot settle that judgment, especially when those who paid and those who gained were mostly different people, often separated by continents and generations. Two considerations matter. Slavery, empire and minimal famine relief were political choices rather than inevitable features of industrial technology. The gains eventually spread far beyond the first industrial countries. Industrialization was a transformation worth having, achieved at a price far higher than necessary and paid by the wrong people.

AN INTERESTING FACT

Arrhenius was not alarmed by his calculation. At the coal-burning rates of his day, he expected a doubling of carbon dioxide to take something like three thousand years. In Worlds in the Making (1908), he suggested that warming might bring milder, steadier weather and richer harvests to colder parts of the earth, including Sweden. He did not foresee the twentieth century’s growth in coal and oil use. Carbon dioxide has risen by about half in little more than a century and a half. Arrhenius got the direction right, but industry grew much faster than he anticipated, and his timetable was badly wrong.