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Professor Paul Turnbull
"
!
When we situate the course of human history over the 250 years within the time-scale of
our history over the past 250,000 years it becomes strikingly evident how the ways in which
we live have changed since the late eighteenth century CE.
The changes have been connected with and for the most part caused by the emergence of
a modern form of society reflecting the primarily importance of industrial production.
This mode of production has been capitalist – that is to say it has involved the means
of production becoming increasingly concentrated in the hands of private owners, who have
sought to use their ownership to maximize their profit. Private ownership of the means of
production has been accompanied by a the bulk of the state’s population having no means
to obtain the essentials of life but by selling their labour power to those who need it to
exploit their ownership of the means of production.
This transition to reliance on industrial production began in Western Europe during the
latter part of the eighteenth century. We find it first successfully employed on any
significant scale in England, where fossil fuel powered machinery was employed in the
manufacture of textiles and other consumer goods.
We can get a good idea of how this transition occurred by looking at one English
entrepreneur, Matthew Boulton (1728-1809) and his pioneering of the mechanized
production of consumer goods and industrial machinery. 1
Boulton started his working life working in a
small buckle-making business in Birmingham,
in England’s midlands. Birmingham was to
become a major industrial centre from the end
of the eighteenth century; but when Boulton
started learning how to make buckles for shoes
and belts at the age of fourteen (in 1742), it was
a prosperous agricultural market town, but one
in which farming tools and other metal wares
had been important activities since the early
seventeenth century, due to its proximity to
easily minable iron ore and coal deposits.
Figure 1: Matthew Boulton, circa 1790.
Engraving by William Ridley (1764-1834).
Public domain image,
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mat
thew_Boulton02.jpg
1
H. W. Dickinson and James Watt, Matthew Boulton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936). See
also Jennifer Tann, “Boulton, Matthew (1728–1809),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C.
G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: OUP, 2004); online ed., ed. Lawrence Goldman, May 2007,
http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/2983 (accessed May 13, 2010).
!
Figure 2: Matthew Boulton's Soho manufactory,
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sohomanuf.jpg
#
opened
in
1766.
Public
domain
image,
Until the late eighteenth century, however, ironware was produced in small family-owned
workshops, using iron produced in small furnaces that were also family businesses. When
Boulton began making buckles, for example, he did so working in a business run by his father
that mostly employed relatives or men and women from neighbouring families.
The Boulton family were nonconformist Protestants, who saw advances in science and
technology as produced by God’s bestowal of reasoning powers on humanity to benefit
themselves and their fellow beings both socially and morally. The young Boulton was
especially fascinated by new technologies and well before he took over running the family
business in 1760, it had diversified into making range steel, enamel and ceramic employing
new work practices and coal powered machinery.
The new work practices Boulton instituted were those which thereafter typified
industrial production. Rather than having one or two skilled workers making an object, the
creation of the object was broken down into a series of processes, involving a number of
workers. Some processes, such as painting designs on enamel buttons or ceramics, required
considerable expertise, while fashioning the individual components making up a button or
vase combining steel and ceramics required less skill.
Boulton found that by organizing the manufacture of goods in a series of successive
processes undertaken by different people, the rate of producing these goods was faster, and
less costly than having one or two people undertake every step in making them. This meant
he could sell what was produced at a lower price than his competitors while gaining the
same or a greater profit. By investing his profit into hiring more workers and pursuing
further technological innovations he could not only produced a greater volume of goods at
$
!
attractive prices, but also could sell them to merchants, who would than sell them in other
English and continental European centres, while still gaining a good profit.
By the late 1760s Boulton had transformed a manufacturing business that for several
generations had operated in workshops adjacent the family house into an enterprise carried
on in several purpose built “manufactories.”
Boulton had also begun mass-producing luxury furniture, table decorations and clocks for
wealthy English landowners, merchants and a growing number of manufacturers who were
similarly profiting from adopting methods of mass production.
However,
interestingly,
Boulton’s
venturing into the mass production of
luxury items was unsuccessful, because
those who could afford to buy these
goods preferred to spend more money on
commissioning craftsmen to make them
unique items. Owning a unique item that
could be prominently displayed in their
homes or on their person so as to be
admired by visitors was more powerfully
symbolic of their wealth and social
standing than something that many of
their peers might own.
Where Boulton enjoyed greater
Figure 4: Ormulu tea urn manufactured by Boulton,
success was with cheaper, mass-produced
early 1770s. Creative Commons image ,
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ormolutea items for every day use that ordinary
urn.JPG
people could afford. He also profited
from going into partnership with James Watt
(1736-1819), a Scots engineer and inventor who
radically improved the design of a coal fired
pump engine that had been used in parts of
Britain since the early years of the eighteenth
century to drain water from underground coal
mines. Boulton and Watt went into partnership
building and selling Watt’s improved engine to
the owners of tin mines in Cornwall. Tin had
been mined in this southwest region of England
since at least the third century CE. But by the
early eighteenth century the most lucrative ore
seams lay below the surrounding water table.
Figure 3: Boulton and Watt engine, 1784. Public
domain image,
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SteamEngi
ne_Boulton%26Watt_1784.jpg
!
%
By the 1780s, the Watt engine was also being used to automate cotton spinning – with
the result that cotton cloth could be produced in much greater quantities at cheaper prices
returning higher profits.
Moreover, from the 1760s
Boulton was active in
Birmingham politics and a
firm supporter of structural
reforms that would enable
the industrialization of
industry as he had pioneered
it.
I have briefly sketched
the
achievements
of
Matthew Boulton because
they so typical of the first
generations of European
commercial entrepreneurs
who pioneered industrial
mass production – a form of
production which by its
development from the
second
half
of
the
eighteenth century was to
transform our world, and to
do so in large measure by the
Figure 5: Richard Arkwright's water (spinning) frame, 1768. By the
political
and
1780s larger versions of the frame were powered by steam engines. economic,
GFDL
licensed
image, military strength it gave
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Waterframe.jpg
European states.
In terms of the span of human history, the development of industrial capitalism rapidly
made Europe the centre of gravity within the world system of commercial exchange. How
momentous the scale and speed of this transformation was can be gauged by considering the
work of Daniel Headrick, an American social historian, who has sought to map the
development manufacturing and technological change world since around 1700. Using his
own and estimates by other historians of the scale of both household-based and industrial
manufacturing over the past three hundred years, Headrick has developed an index of total
industrial potential. 2
2
Daniel R. Headrick, The Tentacles of Progress : Technology Transfer in the Age of Imperialism, 1850-1940
(New York ; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). Also Headrick's essay, "technological Change" in B. L.
Turner, The Earth as Transformed by Human Action : Global and Regional Changes in the Biosphere over the
&
!
You will find a
table illustrating the
world’s
total
industrial potential
between 1750-1980
on page 407 of
David Christian’s
Maps of Time. If
you can, consult
table now.
You will see that
taking
Britain’s
industrial potential
Figure 6: "Poverty and Wealth", painted in 1888 by William Powell Frith. Public as a baseline and giving
domain image, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:William_Powell_Frith_- it a value of 100, we
Poverty and Wealth.JPG
can represent the
industrial potential of China and India in 1750 as a value of 93, while that of Europe
excluding Russia, the US and Japan is just 14. The potential of Asia was just over six and a
half time greater than that of Europe. However, by 1900 the potential of Europe was 222,
while of Asia was now 60 - in large part due to effects of European exploitation and control
of Asian production and commercial activity. We will discuss this industrial potential index
further in our classes this week. Suffice it to say here that they vividly illustrate the
transformation affected by Europe’s industrial transformation, and help us understand how
European states came to dictate the course of world history from the early nineteenth
century.
Industrialized mass production first emerged on any significant scale in England, for
reasons we have discussed in this and previous lectures. However, by the 1840s,
industrialized production was occurring on scales that were motivating changes in social and
political structures in western and central Europe.
Many courses on modern European history examine the revolutions that occurred in
numerous European states in 1848. These revolutions came about because of combination
of factors. The years immediately preceding 1848 were years of poor harvest – again
illustrating how significant a factor climate has been in human history. Poor harvests meant
increased food prices. Higher food prices meant less income to purchase manufactured
goods and services that led traditional small-scale and industrial manufacturers scaled back
production. In the case of household based manufacturers, workers generally continued to
Past 300 Years (Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press with Clark University, 1990), pp. 55-67.
!
'
work for less or no more than food and lodging. Those employed by industrial
manufacturers workers were dismissed and left to survive as best they could.
Figure 7: Painting of Battle at Soufflot barricades at Rue Soufflot Street, Paris, on 24 June 1848 by Emile Vernet
(1789-1863). Public domain image, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Horace_VernetBarricade rue Soufflot.jpg
The revolutions of 1848 gained much of their momentum from peasant unrest and
resistance on the part of ruling elites to demands by owners of manufacturing and other
commercial enterprises for greater participation in the governance of the state. But what
was also a significant cause of revolutionary upheaval across continental Europe was that
thousands of industrial workers lost their only source of income.
Arguably the most influential political work published in the nineteenth century was
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engel’s pamphlet, entitled, The Communist Manifesto. It was
published in England in February 1848; but addressed workers throughout Europe. It is
worth taking some time to read this pamphlet, because it gives a vivid illustration of the new
kinds of political thought that were emerging in reaction to the miseries that economic
depression and the reduced industrial production were causing in Europe by the midnineteenth century.
(
!
What is more, we can see that many of the
social and political reforms that occurred in
Europe over the following half-century or so
were to reflect the concern of European rulers,
owners of the means of production and those
whose labour they purchased to ensure that
what happened in 1848 would never occur
again.
We can also see that by the 1870s the
emergence of new, large states in Italy and
central Europe owed much to the development
of industrial production and its acceleration of
commercial activity.
From the 1870s, growth in industrial
production, notably in England, Germany and
the US stimulated technological innovations
that boosted productivity and levels of capital
Figure 8: title page of the first edition of the
available for investment in new enterprises.
Communist Manifesto, London, 1848.
GFDL licensed image,
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:C Advances in organic chemistry enhanced not
ommunist-manifesto.png
only the profitability of manufacturing, but also
the productivity of agriculture.
Electricity had been a source a curiosity as early as 1000 BCE, but in the early 1820s it
was realized that electrical energy could be used to power machinery; and by the 1890s,
electric motors were being used to power vehicles and beginning to be used to power
industrial machinery.
By the 1890s, electric
lights
were
also
contributing
to
increased productivity
by providing brighter
and consistent lighting
than gas lamps could
in factories.
Figure 9: electric trams, Vancouver, Canada, 1910. Public domain image,
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:BC_Electric_trolley_buses_1910.jpg
!
)
By the early twentieth century, European states and the United States had government
agencies to facilitate the strategic growth of industrially based manufacturing and
commerce.
The industrial transformation of Europe and the United States were to have detrimental
effects on commercial activity in Asia. Industrially produced goods could be produced at
costs that allowed them to be sold within Asian markets at prices that local manufacturers
could not match. But often the worst effects of Europe and the United States’ economic
power flowed from the political and political industrialism gave them. In India, for example,
growing cotton had sustained peasant families for countless generations. It had been the
basis of household-based manufacturing and generated wealth through its commercial
exchange. However, as British production of cotton goods grew in volume, that state’s
commercial entrepreneurs and, from the early 1860s, its government, aggressively imposed
policies that undermined local cotton production to the point that tens of thousands of
people could no longer live by manufacturing, trading or selling cotton textiles. Equally
being forced to sell the cotton to local elites acting on behalf of British manufacturers at
outrageously low prices impoverished peasant growers – and led to many families suffering
malnutrition and premature death.
The situation by the mid-nineteenth century was well summarized by Mohandas
Karamchand Gandhi, the great Indian anti-colonial politician and spiritual leader:
1. English people buy Indian cotton in the field, picked by Indian labor at
seven cents a day, through an optional monopoly.
2. This cotton is shipped on British ships, a three-week journey across the
Indian Ocean, down the Red Sea, across the Mediterranean, through Gibraltar,
across the Bay of Biscay and the Atlantic Ocean to London. One hundred per
cent profit on this freight is regarded as small.
3. The cotton is turned into cloth in Lancashire. You pay shilling wages
instead of Indian pennies to your workers. The English worker not only has the
advantage of better wages, but the steel companies of England get the profit of
building the factories and machines. Wages; profits; all these are spent in
England.
4. The finished product is sent back to India at European shipping rates,
once again on British ships. The captains, officers, sailors of these ships, whose
wages must be paid, are English. The only Indians who profit are a few lascars
who do the dirty work on the boats for a few cents a day.
5. The cloth is finally sold back to the kings and landlords of India who got
the money to buy this expensive cloth out of the poor peasants of India who
worked at seven cents a day.
*+
!
Similarly, in China, first Britain and then other European powers gained what they
Figure 10: Gandhi during the Salt Protests, 1930. Note the wearing of simple home spun cloth. Public domain
image, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gandhi_during_the_Salt_March.jpg
termed “commercial concessions” from that state’s rulers. By the early twentieth century,
European domination of China’s economy and politics were causing the disintegration of
the state and into areas carved out and controlled by local landowners with the wealth to
raise private armies.
However, the detrimental effects of this industrially driven transformation of our history
were not entirely due to human agency. I mentioned earlier in this lecture that climate was
an indirect yet significant factor in revolutions occurring across continental Europe in 1848.
Climate also helped accelerate the degree of control European states gained over the
economies and political structures of Asian states. In the late 1870s, the equatorial and subequatorial regions of the earth were subject to several years of extreme drought caused by
the warming of Pacific and Indian Ocean temperatures.
In India food crops on which nearly 60 million people depended on failed between
1876-8. It has been estimated that somewhere between 6 and 210 million people died of
starvation – with the result that many local economies and larger networks of commercial
exchange collapsed.
In northern China, much the same tragedy occurred. It has been estimated that up to 13
million people died of starvation and disease. What is more, the ability of the Chinese state
to intervene to control food stocks and distribute food was weaker than it was in India. This
!
**
and the effects of famine on manufacturing and commercial exchange all served to weaken
further the already severely declining authority of the Chinese state.
Towards the end of
the chapter in his Maps
of Time entitled, “Birth
of the Modern World”,
David Christian points
out that by the end of
the nineteenth century
the rulers of tributary
states beyond Europe
were confronted with
the reality that the only
path
to
escaping
European domination
and achieving future
economic and social
stability
lay
in
3
industrialization.
Moreover,
the
transition to modernity
by some European
states, notably Germany,
Figure 11: depiction of Indian Famine of 1877 in London Illustrated News.
Public domain image,
gave reason to think that
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Famine_in_India_Natives_Waiti
ng_for_Relief_in_Bangalore.jpg
this might be done
without endangering their
rule. In Germany, industrialism had been achieved while consolidating the power of
Prussia’s feudal aristocracy and ruling dynasty within the new German Reich.
The Meiji period in Japan between 1868-1912 CE saw that the emergence of a state
with the structural framework necessary to support an industrial capitalist economy by the
early 1890s. Modernization was aided by widespread employment of European expertise to
advise on economic development, science and technology.
Japan’s ruling elite during the Meiji period’s financing and support of industrialization
greatly aided the emergence of powerful new industrial monopolies – which were to have
great influence in Japanese domestic politics, foreign policy and the development of
colonial ambitions in eastern and south East Asia.
However, other states were less successful in pursuing modernity until the second half of
the twentieth century. China was to experience further economic decline and political
3
David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (Berkeley: California University Press, 2005),
pp. 436-7.
!
*"
chaos until the end of the Second World War, when the Communist Party emerged the
victor of civil war in the aftermath of Japanese occupation and determinedly embarked on
making China a leading industrial power.
Incidentally, we can understand, even if we disagree, with China’s current leadership in
resolutely challenging the right of western states and media to make critical comments on its
domestic affairs matters, when we take account of how European states came to dominate
and control China’s economic and politics from the 1840s to the establishment of the
Peoples’ Republic in 1949.
Figure 12: Late 19th century French cartoon of European powers and
Japan
"carving
up"
China.
Public
domain
image,
http://www.knowledgerush.com/wiki_image/3/32/China_imperialism_c
artoon.jpg
Before concluding this
lecture, it is necessary to
draw attention to how the
twentieth has not simply
been
an
age
of
industrially-powered
change, but one in which
the speed and scale of
change experienced by
people throughout the
world
has
got
progressively faster.
This has largely been
due to astonishing rates
of technological change,
which
have
greatly
increased
agricultural
productivity, the volume
of industrial production,
and the development new
forms of
electronic
communication giving an
ever increasing proportion
of the world’s population
the ability easily to create,
rapidly disseminate and use information.
Today we often use the terms “first” and “third” world as convenient shorthand when
discussing the wide disparity in living standards and health between those living in Europe
or European settler colonies and people in Africa and many parts of Asia. This disparity had
clearly emerged by the end of the nineteenth century, bequeathing we who live in the early
twenty-first century one of most intractable problems.
!
*#
Figure 13http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a6/Percent_poverty_world_map.png: world populations
showing percentage of per capita income below US poverty line in 2008. Source: CIA World fact Book 2008. Public domain
image,
Bibliography
Christian, David. Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History. Berkeley: California
University Press, 2005.
Dickinson, H. W., and James Watt. Matthew Boulton. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1936.
Headrick, Daniel R. The Tentacles of Progress : Technology Transfer in the Age of Imperialism,
1850-1940. New York ; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Turner, B. L. The Earth as Transformed by Human Action : Global and Regional Changes in the
Biosphere over the Past 300 Years. Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University
Press with Clark University, 1990.