History of the World/History of the World (Bureau Development, Inc.)(1992).BIN/dp/0493/04933.txt

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$Unique_ID{how04933}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{World Civilizations: Industrialization And Western Global Hegemony
The Consolidation Of The Industrial Order, 1850-1914}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Stearns, Peter N.; Adas, Michael;Schwartz, Stuart B.}
$Affiliation{}
$Subject{new
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western
began
social
industrial
states
workers
socialism
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see
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see
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}
$Date{1992}
$Log{See Louis Pasteur*0493301.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 Consolidation Of The Industrial Order, 1850-1914

     In most respects, the 65 years after 1850 seemed calmer than the frenzied
period of political upheaval and initial industrialization. Many people became
accustomed to change. City growth continued in the West, and indeed several
countries, starting with Britain, neared the 50 percent mark in urbanization,
the first time in human history that more than a minority of a population had
lived in cities. But the rate of city growth slowed. Furthermore, city
government began to gain ground on the pressing problems growth had created.
Sanitation improved, and death rates fell below birthrates for the first time
in urban history. Parks, museums, effective regulation of food and housing
facilities, more efficient police forces - all added to the safety and the
physical and cultural amenities of urban life. Hosts of problems remained, but
the horror stories of early industrialization did begin to abate. Revealingly,
crime rates began to stabilize or even drop in several industrial areas, a
sign of more effective social control but also a more disciplined population.

Adjustments To Industrial Life

     The theme of adjustment and stabilization applied to family life.
Illegitimacy rates stopped rising - until 1960 - which suggested that some
earlier disruption in personal habits was easing. Within families, birthrates
began to drop as Western society initiated a substantial demographic
transition to a new system that promoted fairly stable population levels
through a new combination of relatively low birthrates as well as low death
rates. Led initially by the middle classes, the low birthrate involved a
reassessment of the purposes of children. Children were now seen as a source
of emotional satisfaction and considerable parental responsibility, not as
contributors to a family economy. This meant that individual children would be
highly valued, but the total number would be reduced. Other social groups soon
bought into this reassessment, which reflected the progressive disappearance
of child labor and promoted the economic well-being of all family members.
Family life might still prove difficult, as expectations for improvements in
standards of living or for emotional rewards might outpace reality. Merely
effecting lower birthrates could be challenging, for while artificial birth
control devices began to spread after 1850, they were still unfamiliar and not
fully reliable, which meant that many families had to practice new levels of
sexual restraint. Nevertheless, some of the starkest pressures did begin to
yield in family life, as a result of significant adjustments to new realities.

     Material conditions generally improved after 1850. There were important
fluctuations; the industrial economy was unstable, and frequent depressions
caused falling wages and unemployment. Huge income gaps also continued to
divide various social groups. Nevertheless, the general trend was upward. By
1900 probably two-thirds of the Western population enjoyed conditions above
the subsistence level; people could afford a few amenities such as newspapers
or family outings, and their diet and housing improved. Health got better. The
decades from 1880 to 1920 saw a real revolution in children's health, thanks
in part to better hygiene during childbirth and better parental care. Infancy
and death separated for the first time in human history: Instead of one-third
or more of all children dying by age 10, rates fell to under 10 percent and
continued to plummet. Adult health also benefited from better nutrition and
improved work safety. Discovery of germs by Louis Pasteur led by the 1880s to
more conscientious sanitary regulations and procedures by doctors and other
health care specialists; this reduced the deaths of women in childbirth. Women
now began to outlive men by a noticeable margin, but men's health also
improved.

[See Louis Pasteur: Louis Pasteur - Painted by Leon Bonnat.]

     While material life gained in several measurable respects, the workplace
recurrently challenged established habits. Industrial jobs continued to
involve a fast pace and severe limitations on worker autonomy. These
characteristics worsened after 1850. New machines in textiles and metallurgy
sped up work while reducing skill levels. The typical industrial worker was
now semiskilled, trained in very limited areas that involved little sense of
pride or creativity. New methods of supervision, often pioneered in the United
States, involved detailed calculations by efficiency engineers designed to
spur output and limit wasted motion. From this base, managers in industries
such as automobile production introduced assembly-line procedures early in the
20th century, with workers deliberately reduced to machinelike repetitions.

     Yet, as workers suffered under these new conditions - some to the point
of severe depression - there were new ways to compensate. Important labor
movements took shape among industrial workers by the 1890s, with massive
strike movements by miners, metalworkers, and others from the United States to
Germany. The new trade-union movement stressed the massed power of workers,
and while often defeated by management-government coalitions, it did win some
important gains and gave workers some sense of voice and dignity. Furthermore,
both within the labor movement and as individuals, many workers learned to
react to the new systems of work instrumentally. The instrumentalist reaction
urged workers to regard their jobs not as ends in themselves, but as vehicles
for other goals. Many workers, as instrumentalists, learned to bargain for
better pay and shorter hours, so that less of their lives would be invested in
the work process.

     The theme of adjustment extended also to the countryside. Many European
peasants gained new ability to use market conditions to their own benefit.
Some, as in Holland and Denmark, developed cooperatives to market goods and
purchase supplies efficiently; here was a sign of new rural organizing
ability. Many peasants specialized in new cash crops such as dairy products.
Still more widely, peasants began to send their children to school to pick up
new knowledge that would facilitate farming operations. The traditional
isolation of rural areas began to decline.

     Rural conditions lagged behind those in the cities in many ways. European
peasants also faced massive competition from the agricultural exports of the
United States, Canada, Australia, and Argentina, which began to flood Western
markets as ocean shipping improved and refrigeration was introduced in the
1870s. Here, as with urban labor, the theme of successful adjustment should
not be exaggerated. Nevertheless, the raw confrontation with new pressures
that had characterized important aspects of the transition decades before 1850
did yield to an extent. And in the countryside, as opposed to the cities, the
amount of social protest declined as well, once manorialism was fully removed.
Some important strikes by rural laborers occurred after 1890, and in the
United States an important populist movement pitted many kinds of farmers
against railroads and other manifestations of big business, but for the most
part the rural world seemed fairly peaceful - and certainly more peaceful than
rural populations in many other parts of the globe in the same decades.

     The theme of consolidation is an obvious one, after the turmoil of the
revolutionary decades. Vital changes continued - new technologies, the new
work systems, new agricultural competition - but they were no longer startling
to a population accustomed to the basic framework of industrial society.
Adjustments by ordinary people, such as the radically new levels of birth
control or the idea of instrumentalism, fed into consolidation as well: People
were not being totally manipulated by forces beyond their control. Did
adjustment mean that people were more contented than they had been when
industrialization was new? Measuring contentment is always difficult, and
certainly important expressions of grievance continued in Western society. The
development of new expressions of social stress was a final feature of the
decades after 1850 in the West.

Political Trends

     The consolidation theme clearly applies to Western politics after the
failures of the revolutions of 1848. Quite simply, issues that had dominated
the Western political agenda for many decades were largely resolved within a
generation. The great debates about fundamental constitutions and government
structure, which had emerged first in the 17th century with the rise of
absolutism and new political theory and then raged during the decades of
revolution, at last grew quiet.

     Many Western leaders worked to reduce the need for political revolution
after 1850. Liberals decided that revolution was too risky and became more
willing to compromise. Key conservatives strove to develop a new political
consensus that would save elements of the old regime, including power for the
landed aristocracy and the monarchy, but, through reform, would not engender
resistance down the line. Conservatives realized that they could allow
parliaments with limited powers, appeal to workers through limited social
reforms, and even extend the vote without necessarily losing power. A British
conservative leader, Benjamin Disraeli, thus in 1867 took the initiative of
granting the vote to working-class males. Count Camillo di Cavour, in the
Italian state of Piedmont, began even earlier to support industrial
development and extend the powers of Parliament in order to please liberal
forces. In Prussia a new prime minister, Otto von Bismarck, similarly began to
work with a parliament and extend the vote to all adult males (though grouping
them in wealth categories that protected the country from full democracy).
These developments fell short of full liberal demands, in that parliaments did
not have basic control over the appointment of ministries, but many groups
gained some effective political voice. Other Prussian reforms granted freedom
to Jews, extended (without guaranteeing) rights to the press, and promoted
mass education. The gap between liberal and conservative regimes narrowed in
the West, though it re- mained significant.

     The new conservatives also began to use the force of nationalism to win
support for the existing social order. Previously, nationalism had been a
radical force, challenging established arrangements in the name of new
loyalties. Many liberals continued to defend nationalist causes. Now, however,
conservative politicians learned how to wrap themselves in the flag, often
promoting an active foreign policy in the interests of promoting domestic
calm. Thus British conservatives became champions of expanding the empire,
while in the United States by the 1890s the Republican party became
increasingly identified with imperialist causes.

     The most important new uses of nationalism within the West occurred in
Italy and Germany. Cavour, after wooing liberal support, formed an alliance
with France that enabled him to attack Austrian control of northern Italian
provinces in 1858. The war set in motion a nationalist rebellion in other
parts of the peninsula that allowed Cavour to unite most of Italy under the
Piedmontese king. This led to a reduction of the political power of the
Catholic pope, already an opponent of liberal and nationalist ideas - an
important part of the general reduction of Church power in Western politics.

     Following Cavour's example, Bismarck in Prussia staged a series of wars
in the 1860s that expanded Prussian power in Germany. A final war, against
France, led to outright German unity in 1871. The new German Empire boasted a
national parliament with a lower house based on universal male suffrage and an
upper house that favored conservative state governments. This kind of
compromise, plus the dizzying joy of nationalist success, won support for the
new regime from most liberals and many conservatives.

     Other key political issues were resolved around the same time. The United
States fought its bloody Civil War - the first war based extensively on
industrial weaponry and transport systems, carefully watched by European
military observers - between 1861 and 1865. The war resolved by force the
simmering dispute over sectional rights between the North and South in the new
nation, and also brought an end to slavery. France, after its defeat by
Germany in 1870, overthrew its short-lived echo of the Napoleonic Empire and
established a conservative republic - with votes for all adult men, a
reduction of Church power, and expansion of education, but no major social
reform or tampering with existing property relationships. Just as a
conservative Bismarck could be selectively radical, so France proved that
liberals could be very cautious.

     With these changes, the war between conservatives and liberals yielded to
petty skirmishes and sniper attacks. The big issues that divided the two
groups were gone. Virtually the entire West now had a parliamentary system,
usually a democracy of some sort, in which religious and other freedoms were
widely protected. In this system, liberal and conservative ministries could
alternate without major changes of internal policy. Indeed, Italy developed a
process called transformismo, or transformism, in which parliamentary
deputies, no matter what platforms they professed, were transformed once in
Rome to a single-minded pursuit of political office and support of the status
quo.

The Social Question And New Government Functions

     The decline of basic constitutional disputes by the 1870s had two further
results: It opened the way for a new set of political issues in the West, and
it promoted the fuller development of an industrial-style state. At the same
time the unifications of Italy and particularly of Germany had major impact on
the diplomacy of western Europe. Germany, once unified, was immediately a
dominant European power, with a rapidly expanding industrial base. Its
ascendancy, plus the sheer addition of major diplomatic actors on the European
stage, inevitably unsettled international relations among the Western states.
Here, too, was an agenda item of growing importance after 1870, following many
decades in which major diplomatic issues had been downplayed in favor of
concentration on internal economic development and political challenge.

     Government functions and personnel expanded rapidly throughout the
Western world after 1870. All Western governments introduced civil service
examinations to test applicants on the basis of talent, rather than on
connections or birth alone - thus unwittingly imitating Chinese innovations
over a thousand years before. With a growing bureaucracy and improved
recruitment, governments began to extend their regulatory apparatus -
inspecting factory safety, the health of prostitutes, hospital conditions, and
even - through the introduction of passports and border controls - personal
travel.

     Schooling expanded, becoming generally compulsory up to age 12. Many
American states by 1900 began also to require high school education, and most
Western nations expanded their public secondary school systems. Here was a
huge addition to the ways governments and individuals interacted. The new
school systems promoted literacy, long gaining ground in the West and now
becoming virtually universal; by 1900, 90 to 95 percent of all adults in
western Europe and the United States could read. They promoted numerical
skills and other job-related aptitudes. They also encouraged certain social
agendas. Girls were carefully taught about the importance of home and women's
moral mission; domestic science programs were designed to promote better
nutrition and hygiene. Boys and girls alike were taught the advantages of
medical science over other health measures, and in general, governments played
a major role in promoting the use of doctors. Schools also carefully
propounded nationalism, teaching the superiority of the nation's language and
history as well as attacking minority or immigrant cultures.

     Governments also began to introduce wider welfare measures, again
replacing or supplementing traditional groups such as churches and families.
Bismarck was a pioneer in this area too in the 1880s, as he sought to wean
German workers from their attraction to socialism. His tactic failed, as
socialism steadily advanced, but his measures had lasting importance. German
social insurance began to provide assistance in cases of accident, illness,
and old age. Soon some measures to aid the unemployed were also added,
initially in Britain. These early welfare programs were small and their
utility limited, but they sketched a major extension of government power.

     The growth of government obviously required new financing. Western
governments benefited from the advancing prosperity brought by
industrialization. They also introduced personal income taxes by 1900, here
too starting small but gradually expanding the take.

     The industrial-style government widely introduced by Western nations at
the end of the 19th century had considerably more contact with ordinary people
than any Western government had ever before maintained. It also sought active
loyalty, not mere calm. It began to take over many functions previously
performed by families and communities, in part because these institutions had
weakened or changed under the impact of industrialization.

     Accompanying the quiet revolution in government functions was a
realignment of the political spectrum in the Western world during the later
19th century that involved the replacement of constitutional issues by social
issues - what people of the time called "the social question" - as the key
criteria for political partisanship. Socialist and feminist movements surged
to the political fore, placing liberals as well as conservatives in a new,
though by no means unsuccessful, defensive posture.

     The rise of socialism depended above all on the power of grievance of the
working class, with allies from other groups. It also reflected a major
redefinition of political theory accomplished, from 1848 through the 1860s, by
one of the leading intellectuals of the century in the West, Karl Marx. Early
socialist doctrine, from the Enlightenment through 1848, had focused on human
perfectibility: Set up a few exemplary communities, where work and rewards
would be shared, and the evils of capitalism would end as people exercised
their rational judgment to choose the better way. Marx's socialism was
tough-minded, and he blasted earlier theorists as giddy utopians. Marx saw
socialism as the final phase of an inexorable march of history, which could be
studied dispassionately and scientifically. History for Marx was shaped by the
available means of production and who controlled those means - an obvious
reflection of the looming role of technology in the industrial world forming
at that time. Class struggle always pitted a group out of power with the group
controlling the means of production; hence, in the era just passed, the middle
class had battled the feudal aristocracy. Now the middle class had won; it
dominated production and, through this, the state and culture as well. But it
had created a new class enemy, the propertyless worker proletariat, that would
grow until revolution became inevitable. Then, after a transitional period in
which proletarian dictatorship would clean up the remnants of the bourgeois
social order, full freedom would be achieved. People would benefit justly from
their work, as essential equality would prevail, and the state would wither
away; the historic class struggle would at last end because classes would be
eliminated.

     Marx's vision was a powerful one. It clearly identified capitalist evil.
It told workers that their low wages were exploitative and unjust. It urged
the need for violent action but also assured that revolution was part of the
inexorable tides of history. Victory was assured, and the result would be
heaven on earth - ultimately, an Enlightenment-like vision of progress.

     Marx's message also came at a good time. Earlier socialist movements had
withered in the collapse of the revolutions of 1848, partly because they
seemed so impractical and partly because of government crackdowns on radical
leaders. By the 1860s, when working-class activity began to revive, Marxist
doctrine provided encouragement and structure. Marx himself continued to
concentrate on ideological development and purity, but leaders in many
countries translated his doctrine into practical political parties.

     Germany led the way. As Bismarck extended the vote, socialist leaders in
the 1860s and 1870s were the first to understand the implications of mass
electioneering. Socialist movements were always strong in the provision of
grass-roots organization, available to constituents not only in election
periods; they provided fiery speakers who courted popular support instead of
appealing, as many liberals and conservatives did, on the basis of their
elevated social station and the respect it deserved. By the 1880s socialists
in Germany were cutting into liberal support, and by 1900 the party was the
largest single political force in the nation. Socialist parties in Austria,
France, and elsewhere followed a roughly similar course, everywhere emerging
as a strong minority force. Only in Britain and particularly the United States
did socialism lag somewhat, in part because workers already had the habit of
looking to liberal movements as their political expression. In Britain, too,
socialism became a significant third force by 1914.

     The rise of socialism terrified many people in Western society, who took
the revolutionary message literally. In combination with major industrial
strikes and unionization, it was possible to see social issues portending
outright social war. But socialism itself was not unchanging. As socialist
parties gained strength, they often allied with other groups to achieve more
moderate reforms, and in the main they became firm supporters of parliamentary
democracy. A movement called revisionism arose, which argued that Marx's
revolutionary vision was wrong - it needed revising - because industrial
workers were not becoming a full majority and because success could be
achieved by peaceful, gradual means. Revisionism was denounced by many
socialist leaders, but in fact most behaved in revisionist fashion, putting
their energies into building electoral victories rather than plotting violent
revolution. Western socialism, in other words, while it reflected bitter
grievances and class divisions as against a mood of consolidation and
adjustment, worked to a great extent within the democratic political system.

     Socialism was not the only challenge to the existing order. By 1900
powerful feminist movements arose, which sought various legal and economic
gains for women, such as equal access to professions and higher education as
well as the right to vote. Feminism won support particularly from middle-class
women, who argued that the very moral superiority granted to women in the home
should be translated into political voice. Many middle-class women also chafed
against the confines of their domestic roles, particularly as family size
declined. A small but important group of women entered the professions
directly, challenging ideas of inherent male superiority; a still-larger
number became teachers and nurses, increasingly dominating semiprofessions
that gave women both a new work role, at least before marriage, and a new
sense that their opportunities were unjustly limited. In several countries
feminism combined with socialism, but in Britain, the United States,
Australia, and Scandinavia a separate feminist current arose that petitioned
widely and even conducted acts of violence in order to win the vote. Here,
too, was a major threat to political adjustment, but here too was a threat
that might be managed. Several American states and Scandinavian countries
extended the vote to women by 1914, in a pattern that would spread to Britain,
Germany, and the whole United States after 1918.

     The politics of Western society remained lively, with new forces jostling
older interests and assumptions. Outside of formal policy - for example, in
some new cultural currents - tensions were even more pronounced, as against
the mood of complacency - of confidence in industrial and political progress -
that remained widespread around 1900.