History of the World/History of the World (Bureau Development, Inc.)(1992).BIN/dp/0493/04932.txt

Text File | 1992-10-12 | 25KB | 401 lines

$Unique_ID{how04932}
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$Title{World Civilizations: Industrialization And Western Global Hegemony
The Industrial Revolution}
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$Author{Stearns, Peter N.; Adas, Michael;Schwartz, Stuart B.}
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$Subject{new
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$Date{1992}
$Log{See Surrender At Sedan*0493201.scf
}
Title:       World Civilizations: Industrialization And Western Global Hegemony
Book:        Chapter 29: Industrialization of the West, 1760-1914
Author:      Stearns, Peter N.; Adas, Michael;Schwartz, Stuart B.
Date:        1992

The Industrial Revolution

     The essence of the Industrial Revolution was technological change,
particularly the application of coal-powered engines (or, later, engines
powered by other fossil fuels) to the production process. The new engines
replaced people and animals as the key sources of energy in many branches of
production. They were joined by new production equipment that could apply
power to manufacturing through more automatic processes. Thus spindles were
invented that wrapped fiber automatically into thread, and looms mixed thread
automatically without direct human intervention. Hammering and rolling devices
allowed application of power machinery to metals. And while in early
industrialization textile and metallurgical production received primary
attention, engines were also used in sugar refining, printing, and other
processes.

     The British Industrial Revolution resulted from a host of factors,
including favorable natural resources and strong capital reserves won from
previous trade. Industrialization was fed, also, by the late 18th-century
crisis. Population pressure forced innovations at all social levels.
Enlightenment beliefs encouraged faith in progress and in human ability to
dominate nature. They also sanctioned a devotion to improving material life.
Here were motivations for inventing new processes and applying them widely.

     At the same time, the Industrial Revolution built on previous trends in
Western society, including the large manufacturing sector and the huge
advantages in world trade. Earlier commercialization played a role; British
aristocrats were unusually tolerant of commerce, which helped center initial
changes in the British Isles. Prior development of science set a basis for
artisans to widen their efforts at technical innovation. Governments, already
committed to policies of economic growth, also supported industrialization by
instituting laws encouraging new inventions and new trading and banking
systems.

Origins Of Industrialization, 1770-1840

     The key inventions of early industrialization developed in Britain during
the 18th century. Automatic machinery in textiles was initially intended for
manual use in the domestic system. Then in the 1770s the Scottish artisan
James Watt devised a steam engine that could be used for production, and the
Industrial Revolution was off and running. Within a decade in Britain, the
domestic production of key materials, such as cotton thread, was converted to
factory-housed machines, at the expense of thousands of home workers, mostly
women. Changes of this sort spurred the creation of new industries, to build
machines, and also the rapid expansion of coal mining to fuel the new
productive fires.

     Additional inventions followed on the heels of the original set, for a
key feature of the Industrial Revolution was recurrent technological change.
Early machine spindles were expanded, so that a given worker could supervise
even vaster output. American inventors devised a production system of
interchangeable parts, initially for rifles, that helped standardize and so
mechanize the production of machinery itself. Metallurgy advanced by use of
coal and coke, instead of charcoal, for smelting and refining, allowing the
creation of larger furnaces and greater output.

     Technological change was quickly applied to transportation and
communication, essential areas now that there were more goods to be moved and
more distant markets to contact. The development of the telegraph, steam
shipping, and the railway, all early in the 19th century, provided new speed
in the movement of information and goods. These inventions were vital in
facilitating a new stage in Western penetration of world affairs; they also
kept the Industrial Revolution going in the West, by promoting mass-marketing
techniques and providing direct orders for rails and other industrial goods.

     While technological change lay at the heart of industrialization, several
basic economic changes were inherent in the process as well. The Industrial
Revolution depended on improvements in agriculture. Industrialization
concentrated increasing amounts of manufacturing in cities, where power
sources could be brought together with labor. City growth was dizzying during
the first decades of industrialization, with sleepy villages - such as
Manchester, England - growing to cities of several hundred thousand people.
This kind of growth depended on better agricultural production, accomplished
through improved equipment and seeds, plus growing use of fertilizers. Better
agriculture freed up a growing percentage of the labor force for
nonagricultural pursuits, and fairly soon in vigorous industrializers, such as
Britain, manufacturing output surpassed that of farming in importance.

     Industrialization also meant a factory system. Steam engines had to be
concentrated, for their power could not be widely diffused until the later
application of electricity. Factory labor separated work from the home - one
of the basic human changes inherent in the Industrial Revolution. It also
allowed manufacturers to introduce greater specialization of labor and more
explicit rules and discipline, which along with the noisy machines permanently
changed the nature of human labor.

     Industrialization required new amounts of capital, which meant steady
improvements in banking, and it required new marketing systems to handle
rapidly growing output. Prices of manufactured goods fell because of new
technologies that encouraged mass sales. The bigger industrial concerns began
to set up nationwide, even with international sales organizations. Shops
spread to villages where only occasional peddlers had previously brought in
goods - as peasants began to produce more for urban markets, they tended to
specialize and, thus, to buy clothing and equipment they once had made
themselves. The first department stores opened in Paris in the mid-1830s,
another response to the need for sophisticated marketing.

     Overall, industrialization also promoted the development of increasingly
large firms, though small operations might also benefit for a time from the
Industrial Revolution's energy. Through the 19th century, large firms tended
to promote more efficient use of engines and equipment, while also amassing
needed stores of capital and developing efficient marketing and purchasing
arrangements. Industrialization gradually promoted an economic organization
that featured concentration, bureaucratic management, and a certain
impersonality in directing the labor force.

     Once Britain launched industrialization, other Western nations quickly
saw the need to imitate. Britain's industrial power helped the nation hold out
against Napoleon and led to huge profits for successful businessmen by the
early 19th century. Hence both governments and individual entrepreneurs, in
places such as Belgium, Germany, or New England, soon rushed to copy. Since
most of the general factors that permitted industrialization were present in
these areas as well, including population pressure and an ideology of material
progress, industrialization proceeded relatively swiftly throughout much of
the Western world.

     On the European continent, French revolutionary laws helped unleash
industrialization by destroying local restrictions on trade, protecting
private property, and abolishing artisan guilds that had often tried to defend
older production techniques. With guilds and manors destroyed, propertyless
workers were commodities, to be used and paid as the market required.

     Belgium and France began to industrialize in the 1820s, the United States
and Germany followed soon thereafter. Industrialization did not immediately
sweep all before it, even in Britain; artisan production actually expanded for
a time as cities grew, and rural labor remained vital. But the forms of the
Industrial Revolution gained ground steadily once implanted in the West, and
factory workers and their managers became evermore important minorities in the
general labor force.

The Disruptions Of Industrial Life

     The causes of Western industrialization should not mislead us. Even
though the phenomenon can be explained through earlier shifts in Western
business, outlook, government policy, and labor supply - shifts that also
explain why the Industrial Revolution occurred first in the West and often
proved difficult to reproduce in other civilizations - the changes involved
were massive, and they did not come easily.

     The Industrial Revolution involved huge movements of people from
countryside to city. Families were disrupted in this process, as young adults
proved to be the prime migrants. Cities themselves, poorly equipped to begin
with and now crowded beyond all precedent, became hellholes for many new
residents. Health conditions worsened in poor districts because of packed
housing and inadequate sanitation. Crime increased for a time. New social
divisions opened up, as middle-class families sought to move away from the
center-city poor, beginning a pattern of suburbanization that continued into
the later 20th century.

     Work became more unpleasant for many people. Not only was it largely
separated from family, the new machines and factory rules compelled a rapid
pace and coordination that pulverized traditional values of leisurely, quality
production. First in Britain, then elsewhere, groups of work- ers responded to
the new machines by outright attack; for example, Luddite protests, named
after a mythical British machine-breaker called Ned Ludd, failed to stop
industrialization, but they showed the stress involved. Many busi- ness and
farm families were also appalled by the noise, dirt, and sheer novelty
involved in the Industrial Revolution.

     The early Industrial Revolution also forced new constraints on traditions
of popular leisure. Factory owners, bent on getting as much work as possible
from their labor force to help pay for expensive machines, deliberately
reduced recreational aspects of work: They tried to ban singing, napping,
drinking, and other customary frivolities on the job. Off the job, new
business-led city governments, backed by expanding police forces, attacked
popular festivals, animal contests, and gambling in the name of proper
discipline and good order. Attempts were made to reduce social drinking as
well, but they largely failed in light of workers' insistence on some
recreational outlets. Nevertheless, the Industrial Revolution considerably
reduced key leisure traditions and community ties, which made the early phases
of the experience still more disorienting and grim for many people involved.

     Family life changed, and in changing revealed some of the wider stresses
of the industrialization process. Middle-class people quickly moved to enhance
the redefinition of the family already begun in the early modern centuries:
The family for them served as an image of affection and purity. Children and
women were to be sheltered from the storms of the new work world. Women,
traditionally active partners to merchants, now withdrew from formal jobs.
They gained new roles in caring for children and the home, and their moral
stature in many ways improved, but their sphere was more radically separate
from that of men than had been true before. Children, too, were redefined. The
middle class led in seeing education, not work and apprenticeship, as the
logical role for children to prepare them for a complex future and, it was
hoped, to maintain their innocence until they were prepared to cope with
business or professional life.

     The working-class family changed as well, though it could not afford all
these indulgences. Young children, increasingly unnecessary on the job, were
often sent to school. Women worked from adolescence until marriage, when they
were often pulled away because of the demands of shopping, home care, and
motherhood. Even when on the job, working-class women were more likely to be
sent into domestic service in middle-class households than to factories,
though there was an important minority of female factory hands. The working
class, in sum, developed its own version of separate spheres, in part simply
to compensate for the new distinction between jobs and home. Family life
became more important than ever before, to provide homemaking services but
also to offer some hope of emotional satisfaction in a confusing world.
Marriages encountered new stresses, but the marriage rate went up fairly
steadily.

     The changes in family roles and values show how deeply the Industrial
Revolution could reach into personal life, particularly for factory workers
but also for other groups. The changes were not all bad, and many people found
ways to use family satisfactions or community institutions such as
neighborhood taverns to help compensate for a loss of power at work. Yet
considerable confusion and anxiety remained; even businessmen, actively
building the new industrial world, might be fearful of the effects of change.
As a leading French industrialist noted, "Progress is not necessarily
progressive. If it were not inevitable, it might be better to stop it."

Industrial Revolution And Political Revolution

     The strands of political and industrial upheaval, initially somewhat
separate, began to intertwine in the West by the 1830s. Both revolutions had
of course responded to some of the same changes and crises in Western society.
But their courses had not at first overlapped: Industry centered in Britain
where politics was relatively stable, while political revolution elsewhere had
actually detracted from economic development.

     Yet there were important links. In the first place, political revolution
helped clear the way for industrialization in places such as France.
Revolutionaries did not deliberately plan industrial development, but many of
them did hope for a more favorable business climate. By attacking the
aristocracy, they increased the prestige of business life. By abolishing
manorialism and guilds they created a labor force more open to market
activities and freer to move to new work locations. Standardized law codes and
more rational systems of measurement also promoted economic change. As in
Russia early in the 20th century, the West's era of revolution resulted from
the slowness of change at the top and created the conditions for more rapid
innovation thereafter.

     The early phases of industrialization, in turn, had strong political
implications. Groups that benefited from industrial change usually sought a
growing voice in government. This was a key pressure behind the British Reform
Bill of 1832 that enfranchised the middle classes and gave them a means of
representing their own interests in Parliament and in city administrations. A
key result was a new tariff system in Britain that reduced protection for
agriculture (and by facilitating food imports helped keep wages low). Other
groups became more politically active as a slightly less obvious adjustment to
industrialization. Lawyers, for example, and in many places also doctors,
sought through political life a prestige and income that would help them
compensate for the growing wealth and prestige of leading businessmen.
Professional groups also pressed governments to provide better training and
licensing facilities, in order to reduce competition from "unauthorized"
practitioners.

     Governments at various levels had to consider the process of
industrialization in other respects. All major Western states shifted their
economic policies to some extent during the first half of the 19th century.
Some were not eager to embrace the Industrial Revolution outright, but all saw
the need to sponsor certain activities that would help keep pace with Britain.
All Western governments, for example, encouraged railway development; Prussia
built many lines directly, while the United States government gave large land
grants to promote a national rail system. All governments began to organize
technical fairs and to promote engineering and science education. Most
governments took an interest in education more generally, on grounds that a
more literate work force would be more productive. Thus France, soon after the
Revolution of 1830, began to encourage (though not yet require) primary
schools throughout the nation, while state governments in the northern United
States moved soon thereafter to make education compulsory. Another area that
cried out for government attention involved urban conditions. Again by the
1830s, governments began to build new sewer systems, to promote some housing
regulation and in general to launch the process of making the new cities
minimally habitable. They also developed formal urban police forces, another
vital extension of government power.

     Important groups in the 19th century argued, in one version of the new
liberal movement, that government activities should on balance decline. Many
revolutionaries urged that governments should pull out of religious affairs,
reduce economic regulation in the interest of promoting free competition, and
even let the poor fend for themselves. In fact, only two Western governments
actually scaled down their activities in the early 19th century: Britain and
Norway. Other governments responded to political and industrial pressures by
rebalancing their functions - with a net increase in the government role.

     Political and industrial revolution intertwined in one final respect in
the first half of the 19th century. Some lower-class groups, already mobilized
through an interest in political rights, began to turn to the government as a
means of compensating for industrial change and to revolt when the government
seemed unresponsive. Artisans and workers in Britain generated a new movement
to gain the vote in the 1830s and 1840s; this Chartist movement hoped that a
democratic government would regulate new technologies and promote popular
education. Artisans in France and Germany increased their revolutionary ardor
because of their growing fears of displacement through industrialization. The
political mood of the West became more fervent by the 1840s under the twin
impact of unfulfilled popular revolutionary demands and the pressures and
anxieties promoted by early industrialization.

The 1848 Revolutions

     The result was a final, extraordinary wave of revolutions in 1848 and
1849. Paris was again the center. In a popular uprising that began in February
1848, the French monarchy was once again expelled, this time for good, and a
democratic republic was briefly established. Urban artisans pressed for
serious social reform - perhaps some version of socialism and certainly
government-supported jobs for the unemployed; groups of women schoolteachers,
though fewer in number, agitated for the vote and other rights for women. This
revolution, then, started on a more radical basis than had the great uprising
of 1789, with a wider array of social demands and a democratic, rather than
simply liberal, political platform.

     Moreover, revolution quickly spread to other centers. Major revolts
occurred in Germany, Austria, and Hungary. Revolutionaries in these areas
sought liberal constitutions to modify conservative monarchies; artisans
pressed for social reforms that would restrain industrialization; peasants
sought a complete end to manorialism. Revolts in central Europe also pressed
for nationalist demands, with German nationalists seeking the unity of their
country, and various nationalities in Austria-Hungary, including Slavic
groups, seeking greater autonomy. A similar liberal-nationalist revolt
occurred in various parts of Italy. Significant agitation developed in other
parts of western Europe.

     The revolutionary fires burned only briefly. Nowhere did revolution win
the kind of success the great French Revolution had achieved, partly because
significant political changes had already been introduced. The social demands
put forth by artisans and some factory workers, either for socialist gains or
for a return to older guild structures, were quickly put down; not only
conservatives but middle-class liberals opposed these efforts. Nationalist
agitation also failed for the moment, as the armies of Austria-Hungary and
Prussia restored the status quo to central Europe and Italy. Democracy
persisted in France, but a nephew of the great Napoleon soon replaced the
liberal republic with an authoritarian empire that lasted until 1870. Peasant
demands were met, and serfdom was now fully abolished throughout western
Europe. Many peasants, uninterested in other gains, now supported conservative
forces.

[See Surrender At Sedan: Louis Napoleon's letter of surrender at Sedan -
Painted by Anton Von Werner.]

     The substantial failure of the revolutions of 1848 drew the revolutionary
era in western Europe to a close. Failure taught many liberals and
working-class leaders that revolution was too risky; more gradual methods
should be used instead. Improved transportation reduced the chance of food
crises, the traditional trigger for revolution in Western history. Bad
harvests in 1846 and 1847 had driven up food prices and helped promote
insurgency in the cities, but famines of this sort did not recur in the West.
Many governments also installed better riot control police.

     The ongoing social changes brought by industrialization also played a
role in ending political revolution in the West. The artisan class, whose
sense of organization and older values had been crucial to revolts, began to
decline as factory industry continued to gain ground. Artisans did not
disappear, but they lost some of their sense of mission. Many began to
concentrate on personal advancement, or a solid but moderate craft trade
unionism that sought improvements within the system rather than a different
system. While many grievances continued on the part of new and old social
groups, the belief that political upheaval could stem the tide of
industrialization began to fade.

     Finally, the experience of decades of recurrent revolution, plus
industrialization itself, created new social divisions that made uprisings
more difficult. The period of revolution had been predicated on old-style
social divisions that pitted commoners against the privileges of the
aristocracy, and on other institutions, such as unreconstructed monarchies or
established churches that did not give ordinary people a voice. Divisions of
interest obviously existed among commoners, depending on wealth or on urban as
opposed to rural residence, but there could also be some shared interest in
attacking the structures of the old regime. By 1850 an industrial class
structure had come to predominate. Earlier revolutionary gains had reduced the
legal privileges of the aristocracy, while the rise of business had eroded
aristocrats' economic dominance. With industrialization social structure came
to rest less on privilege and birth, and more on money. Key divisions by 1850
pitted middle-class property owners against workers of various sorts. The old
alliances that had produced the revolutions were now dissolved. New social
cleavages would produce important unrest, but not in the classic revolutionary
mold. An era of transition had ended. Through intended and unanticipated
results of earlier revolutions and the steady gains of an industrial economy,
a new society had been created in the West - a society that, somewhat
surprisingly, made revolution almost obsolete in the West from 1850 through
the later 20th century.