The Industrial Revolution, 1750–1914 — the study guide

CHAPTER 1 · c. 1750 · 1750

Why Britain?

Any explanation of the Industrial Revolution, the shift from hand production to machines driven first by water and then by coal, has to start from how ordinary the world of 1750 still looked. The richest manufacturing regions lay in Asia. Around Suzhou in the Yangzi delta millions of rural households spun and wove cotton and silk for markets across China, and Bengal supplied about two-thirds of the textiles bought in Asia around 1750 by the English East India Company, a private firm holding a royal monopoly of Britain’s trade with Asia, much like a corporation with its own army. All of these economies, Britain’s included, were what the historian E. A. Wrigley calls organic economies, in which nearly all heat, light and motion came from the land, as wood for fuel, food for workers and fodder for horses. Such an economy can grow only until it runs short of land, much as a town heated by local firewood can grow only until its woods are gone. What made the Industrial Revolution new was the escape from that ceiling.

Britain escaped first because it offered inventors an unusual pair of prices: dear labour and cheap energy. Its trading economy had grown so fast in the century before 1750 that London’s labourers earned real wages, meaning what a day’s pay could actually buy, roughly twice those of workers in Vienna, while labourers in Delhi or Beijing earned barely enough to survive. At the same time Britain sat on thick coal seams close to its rivers and coast. Colliers, the ships of the coal trade, carried coal from Tyneside, the coalfield around Newcastle, down the coast to London, which already received over 460,000 tons a year by 1700. The economic historian Robert Allen’s insight is that inventors respond to prices, because a machine that saves labour and burns coal is worth building only where labour is expensive and coal is cheap. Britain offered the biggest reward for such machines, while the Dutch Republic, today’s Netherlands, matched British wages around Amsterdam but had only peat, a slow-burning fuel cut from bogs, so labour-saving machines paid far less there.

Prices alone cannot explain the outcome, and the map shows two further forces. The first is the Atlantic economy. British ships carried enslaved Africans from West African forts such as Cape Coast Castle to plantations like those of Jamaica, and the sugar and tobacco they were forced to grow sent profits, raw materials and customers back to Britain; the black arrows trace that triangle. The Trinidadian historian Eric Williams argued in 1944 that slavery financed British industry, a claim later historians have narrowed without dismissing. The second force is knowledge, and especially the British habit of sharing it between scientists and craftsmen. The historian Joel Mokyr describes an Industrial Enlightenment, a culture in which scientists, engineers and skilled craftsmen swapped ideas through societies, journals and workshops, so one practical invention could build on the last. The strongest answer is therefore cumulative, since prices made machines profitable, the Atlantic supplied raw materials and markets, and a culture of tinkering turned possibilities into working engines.

WHY IT HAPPENED

Dear labour and cheap coal. British wages were high by world standards because a century of trading growth had raised the price of labour, while coal from Tyneside and the Midlands was the cheapest energy anywhere. That pair of prices meant that a machine replacing workers with fuel repaid its cost in Britain far sooner than in France, India or China. Inventors and investors follow such returns, so Britain attracted the experiments, and the experiments were then improved until they paid elsewhere too.

An Atlantic economy built on enslaved labour. Britain’s Atlantic empire rested on enslaved labour: by 1750 it ruled colonies in North America and the Caribbean whose plantations were worked by enslaved Africans. About 12.5 million people were embarked on slave ships across the Atlantic between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, and in the late 1700s British ships carried more of them than any other nation’s. Slavery thus enriched Britain twice, through the sugar and cotton the plantations sold and the cloth and iron they bought, and through the ports, merchants and banks their trade built, whose capital and skills later served industry.

A culture of useful knowledge. Britain was unusually good at moving knowledge from the study to the workshop, and that habit mattered as much as discovery itself. The Royal Society, London’s leading scientific academy, and provincial philosophical societies, as science clubs were then called, joined with cheap print and travelling lecturers to connect gentlemen scientists with instrument makers, millwrights, who built mill machinery, and clockmakers. A patent system, slow and expensive as it was, let inventors sell their ideas. The historian Joel Mokyr argues that this culture, which he calls the Industrial Enlightenment, turned one-off ingenuity into a steady flow of improvements, which is the condition for growth that lasts.

Farms, markets and a strong state. English farming fed a large population with a shrinking share of the workforce, so many people already worked in crafts and trade: by 1700 over 40 per cent of men worked in manufacturing, mining or building. Coastal shipping, rivers and turnpike roads, private toll roads kept in repair by their users’ fees, joined a national market with no customs barriers between its regions. After the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which made Parliament supreme over the monarch, a Parliament of property owners taxed heavily but predictably, borrowed cheaply and paid for the navy that guarded Britain’s trade, conditions that the economist Douglass North linked to secure investment.

WHAT IT CHANGED

Indian cloth becomes the target. The first industry to take the new path was the one in which Britain was most clearly behind. Indian calicoes, light cotton fabrics, set the standard for cheap, washable, printed cloth, and Parliament’s bans of 1700 and 1721 left British producers a protected home market in which to imitate them. The machines invented to spin cotton as fine as Bengal’s, the subject of chapter 2, would let Europe out-produce Asia in Asia’s own speciality for the first time.

Coal meets the steam engine. The engines that pumped water from Britain’s coal mines were so wasteful that they made sense only beside a pithead, the top of a mine shaft, where coal cost almost nothing. Making them efficient enough to work anywhere became the task of the Scottish engineer James Watt, and his engine, together with iron made with coke, a fuel baked from coal, and the canals dug to move coal, is the subject of chapter 3. The fuel came first, and the machines that burned it followed.

Slavery expands with the machines. Industrial demand enlarged the Atlantic slave economy. As British mills consumed ever more cotton, plantation slavery spread across the American South, from about 700,000 enslaved people in 1790 to almost four million in 1860. Chapter 2 traces this chain to Lancashire, and chapter 11 follows it to its breaking point in the American Civil War. Cheap cotton for the mills meant more land and more forced labour on the plantations.

A divergence begins. The industrial age turned a modest gap between the world’s richest and poorest regions into a chasm. Within a century and a half, industrial Europe and North America made most of the world’s manufactured goods, and the textile districts of Bengal and the Yangzi delta had lost their export markets. Chapter 11 examines this Great Divergence, as historians call the widening gap, and the epilogue asks who paid for it. The question still shapes how nations judge one another, because the rich world’s lead and the poor world’s grievances both date from these decades.

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?

The case for what Britain had is strong. The economic historian Robert Allen’s prices show that only British conditions made the first machines profitable, and the historian Kenneth Pomeranz’s comparison suggests that a region as advanced as China’s Yangzi delta lacked chiefly coal near its towns and land overseas. Yet resources do nothing by themselves. China had coal too, and Britain had mined coal for centuries before anyone built a steam engine; turning resources into an industrial economy required inventors, mechanics, investors and institutions that rewarded them, the culture the historian Joel Mokyr calls the Industrial Enlightenment. The colonial advantage cuts both ways, since Britain held the Caribbean only because its navy, merchants and planters seized it and worked it with enslaved labour, which was itself a choice with victims. Most historians now combine the two answers: endowments, the advantages a country starts with, set the incentives, and people and institutions decided whether anyone responded to them. The transferable lesson is that geography and prices make an outcome possible, while human choices decide when and where it actually happens.

AN INTERESTING FACT

Some of the men who did most to join science to industry in eighteenth-century Britain met by moonlight. The Lunar Society of Birmingham, active from the mid-1760s to about 1813, gathered once a month on a Sunday or Monday near the full moon, so that members could ride home safely after dinner along unlit roads. Its circle included the manufacturer Matthew Boulton, the engineer James Watt, the potter Josiah Wedgwood, the chemist Joseph Priestley and the physician Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles. They called themselves the Lunarticks, and their dinners, where chemical experiments shared the table with business plans, show how closely British science and industry already worked together.

CHAPTER 2 · 1760–1830 · 1800

Cotton and the Factory

Cotton led the way because British producers had a clear model to copy and a protected market in which to copy it. Indian calicoes, light printed cotton cloths, had flooded English shops in the late seventeenth century, and Parliament banned imports of printed calicoes in 1700 and their wearing in 1721. Those Calico Acts left a home market hungry for cheap cotton cloth that British hand spinners could not supply, since their thread was too weak and too slow to make. Inventors therefore attacked that bottleneck, because whoever could spin cheap, strong thread would own the market. The weaver James Hargreaves’ jenny of about 1764 let one person spin many threads at once, the former wigmaker Richard Arkwright’s water frame, patented in 1769, spun thread strong enough for the lengthwise warp, and the spinner Samuel Crompton’s mule of 1779 spun it fine. The economic historian Robert Allen’s figures show the result: spinning 100 pounds of cotton took an Indian hand spinner about 50,000 hours, Crompton’s mule about 2,000, and the automatic self-acting mule of the 1820s only 135. No hand spinner anywhere could compete with machines that cut the labour by more than ninety-nine per cent.

The factory, where workers tended powered machines under one manager’s rules, turned these machines into a new way of organising work, as revolutionary as the machines themselves. At Cromford Arkwright housed his spinning frames in a mill beside the River Derwent, ran them day and night, and built cottages to keep a steady workforce in a remote valley. The merchant Samuel Greg’s mill at Styal (1784) relied heavily on pauper children bound as apprentices, while at New Lanark on the Clyde the reformer Robert Owen later tried to prove that a mill could make profits without overworking children. Once steam engines could drive spinning machines, mills moved to the towns, where coal and labour were plentiful. The great mills of Ancoats in Manchester, built between 1798 and 1806 beside the Rochdale Canal, and as the town grew from about 70,000 people in 1801 to over 300,000 by 1851, Manchester became the first city whose shape was set by the factory.

Behind every Lancashire mill stood a plantation, and the map draws the two as one chain. Britain’s imports of raw cotton rose from about 2.5 million pounds in 1760 to about 264 million pounds in 1830, and by the late 1820s over 70 per cent of it came from the United States. The inventor Eli Whitney’s cotton gin of 1793, which stripped the seeds from raw cotton many times faster than hand-picking, made the cotton of the southern uplands profitable, and slavery spread west with it, so that the enslaved population of the United States grew from about 700,000 in 1790 to two million in 1830. The cotton landed at Liverpool, whose ships had carried between 1.3 and 1.5 million enslaved Africans across the Atlantic before Britain abolished the trade in 1807. Some mill owners, including the Gregs of Styal, also owned Caribbean plantations. The factory age began, in other words, as the British end of an Atlantic system built on coerced labour.

WHY IT HAPPENED

Indian cloth set the standard. Indian calicoes, printed cotton cloths, showed Europeans what cotton could be: light, washable, cheap and dyed in colours that did not run. When Parliament banned printed calicoes in 1700 and their wearing in 1721 to protect English wool, it left a large home market that British producers could fill only if they matched Indian quality at Indian prices. Import substitution, meaning the effort to make at home what had been bought abroad, gave inventors a clear target and a protected space in which to reach it.

Machines that suited the fibre. Spinning cotton is a repetitive task of drawing out and twisting fibres, the kind of motion that rollers, gears and the spinning rods called spindles could copy. Each machine solved a specific bottleneck: the spinning jenny multiplied spindles, the water frame strengthened the thread, the mule refined it, and carding engines prepared the raw fibre. Because cotton was imported, its supply could grow without competing for English farmland, so output could rise as fast as the machines allowed.

Water power and modest capital. The first mills needed a fast stream, a building and a few thousand pounds, sums that a successful wigmaker, merchant or hosier, a dealer in stockings, could raise through partners and local banks. Richard Arkwright, the former wigmaker who patented the water-powered spinning frame, went into business with the Derby hosier Jedediah Strutt, and Samuel Greg, who founded the mill at Styal, drew on his family’s merchant and plantation wealth. The valleys of the Pennine hills in Derbyshire and Lancashire offered fast water within reach of markets and ports, which is why the first factories stand in steep, remote valleys far from the towns.

Slave-grown cotton without limit. Cotton had to come from somewhere, and after 1793 it came above all from the American South. The inventor Eli Whitney’s cotton gin separated the seed from the short-fibred cotton that grew inland, so planters pushed slavery onto new land in Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi. The supply of raw cotton thus expanded as fast as Lancashire’s demand, kept cheap by the unpaid labour of enslaved people, whose numbers in the United States nearly tripled between 1790 and 1830.

WHAT IT CHANGED

Steam moves the mills to the towns. Water power tied mills to remote valleys, and from the 1790s steam engines freed them. Manchester’s mills clustered beside canals that brought coal, and the cotton district spread across south Lancashire, where coal, labour and the port of Liverpool lay close together. Chapter 3 explains the engine that made this possible, and chapter 5 the towns it created. Steam let the industry grow wherever coal could be delivered.

Child labour becomes a public question. The pauper apprentices of Styal, destitute children sent to work for their keep, and the children who worked twelve-hour shifts in Manchester’s mills became the subject of parliamentary inquiries from 1816 onwards. The mill owner Robert Owen argued from the example of his own model mill at New Lanark, the politician Michael Sadler’s committee of 1832 gathered testimony from the workers themselves, and the Factory Act of 1833 finally enforced limits on children’s hours with paid inspectors. Chapter 5 follows that struggle in Parliament and the mills. The children’s own testimony became the evidence that changed the law.

The handloom weavers’ boom and ruin. Machine-spun yarn first multiplied the work of handloom weavers, who were well paid until about 1805, and then drew so many recruits into the trade that rates fell. When power looms, mechanised weaving machines, spread in the 1820s and 1830s, weavers’ piece rates, the pay for each length of cloth, collapsed and many families fell into poverty. Their anger fed the machine-breaking and protest of chapter 6. Their fate showed that a machine could destroy a skilled trade within one working life, faster than any family could retrain or move.

Lancashire depends on the plantation South. By the late 1850s about three-quarters of Lancashire’s cotton came from the slave states of the American South, a dependence that tied Britain’s largest industry to the fate of slavery. When the American Civil War cut the supply in 1861, Lancashire’s mills fell silent and the trade turned to India and Egypt, the story that chapter 11 tells. The crisis showed how dangerous it was for Britain’s largest industry to depend on a single slave-worked region.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

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

The machines were real and their gains enormous. A self-acting mule, an automatic spinning machine, spun in 135 hours what an Indian hand spinner needed 50,000 hours to spin, and no amount of discipline could have produced that difference by itself. Yet the first factories brought machines and workers together under one roof partly for reasons of control. The rules and child apprentices of the mill owners Richard Arkwright and Samuel Greg, together with the fines and bells of Manchester’s mills, show employers solving the problem of making people work steadily, a problem the domestic system, in which spinners and weavers worked at home for merchants, could not solve. The historians Sidney Pollard and E. P. Thompson emphasise this side, the economist Stephen Marglin pushed it furthest, and the economic historians David Landes and Robert Allen stress the technology. The most persuasive answer treats the two as inseparable, because expensive machines paid only if they ran without pause, and they ran without pause only if workers were disciplined to tend them. The wider lesson is that a new technology usually arrives together with a new way of organising people, and both have to be explained.

AN INTERESTING FACT

Samuel Crompton, who in 1779 invented the spinning mule, a machine that spun fine yarn, could not afford to patent it. He released the design to manufacturers who promised him a subscription, a fund raised from their voluntary contributions, and received less than £70. In 1811 he toured the cotton districts counting spindles, the thread-twisting rods, to support a claim for a public reward, and he estimated that some 4.6 million of them were now spinning on mules. In 1812 Parliament granted him £5,000, a fraction of the fortune the mill pioneer Richard Arkwright made from his water-powered spinning frame, and Crompton died in Bolton in 1827 in modest circumstances. His mule became the standard spinning machine of the industry for a century, while the fortunes it made went to others.

CHAPTER 3 · 1769–1830 · 1820

Steam, Coal and Iron

Coal mattered because it removed the limit that land had always placed on energy. Britain had burned coal for heating since the sixteenth century, and the pits of Tyneside shipped much of it down the coast to London. Deeper mines flooded, however, and in 1712 the inventor Thomas Newcomen built the first practical steam engine to pump them dry. It wasted most of its fuel by heating and cooling the same cylinder with every stroke, but at the mine itself coal cost almost nothing. James Watt, an instrument maker at Glasgow University, realised in 1765 that condensing the steam in a separate chamber would keep the cylinder hot and save fuel. He patented the idea in 1769, and from 1775 he and the manufacturer Matthew Boulton built engines at Soho near Birmingham; by 1800 they had built between 450 and 500, many of them pumping the copper and tin mines of Cornwall, where coal was dear. Efficiency mattered most where fuel was expensive, which is why the improved engine found its first customers far from the coalfields.

Coal transformed iron as well, the material from which machines, engines and bridges were made. Iron had been smelted, or melted out of its ore, with charcoal, and charcoal meant forests, so iron output was limited by woodland. At Coalbrookdale in Shropshire the ironmaker Abraham Darby smelted iron with coke, coal baked to drive off its impurities, in 1709, and in 1779 his grandson’s works cast the Iron Bridge across the Severn. The ironmaker Henry Cort’s puddling and rolling process of 1783–84 stirred pig iron, the brittle metal that came out of the blast furnace, to burn out its carbon, turning it in large batches into wrought iron, the tough metal that could be hammered and rolled. The industry moved onto the coalfields, above all to South Wales, where the Cyfarthfa and Dowlais works at Merthyr Tydfil became the largest ironworks in the world. British pig iron output rose from about 68,000 tons in 1788 to about 678,000 tons in 1830, and that cheap iron lowered the cost of every engine, rail and machine, so the growth of one industry now made the next one cheaper.

Coal was heavy and cheap, so whoever could move it cheaply could build industry wherever they liked, and canals were the first answer. In 1761 the Duke of Bridgewater opened a canal from his mines at Worsley to Manchester, and the price of coal in the town fell by about half. Investors rushed to copy him, and the map’s blue lines show the network that followed: the Trent and Mersey linked the pottery towns of Staffordshire to both coasts, the Grand Junction joined Birmingham to London, and by 1830 England and Wales had about 4,000 miles of navigable waterway. The age of steam nevertheless arrived slowly, since in 1800 water wheels still delivered about three times the power of steam engines. The energy revolution was gradual in its pace and total in its consequences, because every later industry, from railways to steel, ran on the coal that these engines, furnaces and canals first put to work.

WHY IT HAPPENED

Coal close to towns and the sea. Britain’s coal seams lay near navigable rivers and the coast, so coal could reach customers by water long before railways existed. Tyneside had shipped coal to London since the Middle Ages, and the Midland and Lancashire fields lay beside growing towns. By 1800 Britain mined about 15 million tons a year. That accessibility made coal cheap where it was needed, and cheap coal made the machines that burned it worth inventing.

Flooded mines demanded engines. As miners dug deeper, water became the limit on the output of coal and metal, and horses or water wheels could not pump it out fast enough. The inventor Thomas Newcomen’s atmospheric engine of 1712, worked by air pressure on a piston, solved the problem for coal mines, where waste coal was free, and by 1800 hundreds worked across Britain. Cornish copper and tin mines, far from any coalfield, needed something more efficient, and that need created the first market for the engineer James Watt’s improved engine.

Skilled hands and patient capital. The engineer James Watt’s separate condenser, a chamber that cooled the steam outside the cylinder, became a working engine only because skill, money and legal protection came together around it, beginning with the accurate cylinders that the ironmaster John Wilkinson bored from 1775 on a machine he had patented in 1774 for cannon. Birmingham’s metalworkers supplied the parts, and the manufacturer Matthew Boulton supplied capital, a factory and a gift for selling. An Act of Parliament in 1775 extended Watt’s patent to 1800, giving the partners twenty-five years to recover their investment. Behind every famous inventor stood the craftsmen, investors and lawmakers who turned an idea into a product.

Cotton and war created demand. The new cotton mills wanted reliable power, and the wars with France between 1793 and 1815 wanted iron for cannon, shot and ships. Government contracts and wartime prices pushed ironworks owners such as the Crawshays of Cyfarthfa, in South Wales, to expand, while mill owners who had outgrown their streams turned to steam. Each new industry became a customer for the next, which made the expensive new technologies worth adopting. Demand set the timing of change, because an invention spread only once enough buyers needed what it could do.

WHAT IT CHANGED

Locomotives grow out of colliery engines. High-pressure steam engines, light enough to move themselves, were first put on rails at collieries, or coal mines, and ironworks. The Cornish engineer Richard Trevithick ran a locomotive at Penydarren near Merthyr in 1804, and colliery engineers on Tyneside, among them George Stephenson, built locomotives to haul coal wagons. Chapter 4 follows their engines from the coalfields to the first public railways. Within about forty years the colliery locomotive had grown into a national transport system, because an engine built to haul coal could carry goods and people just as well.

Industry gathers on the coalfields. Because coal was heavy, the industries that burned it moved to it. The textile towns of Lancashire and Yorkshire, the iron towns of South Wales and the shipbuilding towns of the north-east all stood on or beside coalfields, and so did the Black Country, a metalworking district west of Birmingham named for its smoke. Chapter 5 follows the towns they became. The map of coal had turned into the map of where Britons lived and worked.

The continent copies the model. Belgium’s coal belt from Mons to Liège, the Ruhr valley in western Germany and Upper Silesia, now in Poland, repeated Britain’s pattern of coal, iron and canals, often with British machines and engineers. On the map Belgium and Switzerland are already shaded as industrialising by 1820, and chapter 7 follows how the continent learned from Britain and where it chose a different path. Coal decided where heavy industry could grow, on the continent as in Britain, while coal-poor Switzerland industrialised on water power and skill.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

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

The steam engine is the most famous symbol of the Industrial Revolution, yet the evidence suggests it was as much a result as a cause. The inventor Thomas Newcomen’s engine was designed to solve a problem created by an existing coal industry, the engineer James Watt’s improvement found its market in mines and mills that were already expanding, and steam supplied less power than water until about 1830. Economic historians who measure growth, such as N. F. R. Crafts, find steam’s contribution to productivity small before the railway age. On the other side, steam freed industry from rivers and let factories, ironworks and later railways cluster on the coalfields and in towns, which made concentration and scale possible. It also turned coal’s heat into motion, the step that made the mineral economy, one powered by coal dug from the ground, fully productive. A balanced judgement treats steam as a late but decisive cause: it arrived after the revolution had begun, and it was steam that made the revolution self-sustaining. Technologies that become the symbols of an age often matter most in its second phase, after the pioneers have proved the market.

AN INTERESTING FACT

The unit still used to rate car engines began as a sales tool. The engineer James Watt needed to tell mine and mill owners how many horses one of his engines could replace, so he estimated the work of a horse turning a mill and defined one horsepower as 33,000 foot-pounds of work per minute, enough to lift 33,000 pounds by one foot, a generous figure that made his engines look modest. Customers bought engines rated in horses, and the habit stuck. In 1882, long after his death, the British Association for the Advancement of Science, a national society of scientists, named the scientific unit of power the watt in his honour. Watt is thus remembered by two units, one named after him and one he devised to sell engines.

CHAPTER 4 · 1825–1850 · 1850

The Railway Age

Railways began as an answer to the oldest problem of the coal industry, which was the cost of moving a heavy, cheap fuel. Wagonways with wooden rails had carried coal from Tyneside pits to the river since the seventeenth century, so iron rails and steam locomotives improved a familiar system. The Cornish engineer Richard Trevithick ran a high-pressure locomotive at Penydarren in South Wales in 1804, and coal-mine engineers such as George Stephenson built locomotives at Killingworth near Newcastle in the 1810s. The Stockton & Darlington Railway opened on 27 September 1825 to carry coal from the Durham pits to the River Tees, using steam locomotives for freight and horses for most passengers. Its success showed that a public railway, open to anyone who paid, could earn money, and merchants in Liverpool and Manchester, frustrated by slow and costly canal carriage, set out to build a better one.

The Liverpool & Manchester Railway, opened on 15 September 1830, turned the coal railway into modern transport. Its directors held trials at Rainhill in October 1829 to choose a locomotive, and Rocket, a locomotive built by George Stephenson and his son Robert, reached about 30 miles an hour because its boiler, heated by many tubes carrying hot gas from the fire, raised steam quickly. The line was double-tracked, worked entirely by steam and run to a timetable, and passengers flocked to it, so railways became a passenger business as well as a freight one. The opening day also brought the first famous railway death, when the politician William Huskisson was struck by Rocket. Within a decade trunk lines, meaning the main routes between major cities, joined London to Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool; the London & Birmingham, running from Euston station in London, opened throughout in 1838, and the engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s Great Western Railway reached Bristol in 1841. In a single decade the railway had grown from a local experiment into a national system.

The national network was built in a burst of private speculation, and its effects reached far beyond transport. During the mania, a speculative boom in railway shares, investors poured in their savings; in 1846 alone Parliament passed about 270 railway acts authorising some 4,500 miles of line, and the York businessman George Hudson, nicknamed 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, built at the 1847 peak by some 250,000 navvies, the labourers who dug the cuttings and raised the embankments by hand. On the map the white lines now join every coalfield and port. Railways cut the cost of carrying coal and goods, let fresh food and newspapers reach every town, and put the country on one clock, as railway time, set by the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, replaced local times. By 1850 the railway had joined coal, iron and machines into a single system that kept itself growing, which made Britain the world’s first industrial economy.

WHY IT HAPPENED

Coal needed cheaper carriage. Coal was bulky and cheap, so the cost of moving it often exceeded the cost of mining it. Collieries, as coal mines were called, had used horse-drawn wagons on rails for two centuries, and the steam engines that already pumped their pits offered a way to haul the wagons as well. The Stockton & Darlington Railway, opened in 1825 to carry Durham coal to the sea, was promoted by local Quakers, members of a small Christian movement, led by the Darlington wool merchant Edward Pease. Its purpose shows that the first railways were the coal industry’s answer to the cost of carriage.

High-pressure steam made engines mobile. The engineer James Watt’s low-pressure engines were too large and heavy to move themselves. The Cornish engineer Richard Trevithick’s high-pressure engines of around 1800 delivered more power from a smaller boiler, and later refinements, such as the many fire-tubes that carried hot gas through the boiler and the blast pipe that fanned the fire with spent steam, both used in the locomotive Rocket, raised steam fast enough to haul trains at speed. Robert Stephenson & Co., founded in Newcastle in 1823, was the first works built to make locomotives, turning these improvements into a reliable product.

Merchants frustrated by the canals. Canal carriers had grown complacent without competition, and by the 1820s the waterways between Liverpool and Manchester were busy, slow and, in the merchants’ view, overpriced. Cotton merchants and manufacturers, who needed raw cotton and finished cloth to move quickly between port and mill, backed the Liverpool & Manchester Railway as a rival. The scale of the cotton trade meant that any saving in carriage was multiplied many times over. The first great railway began as a merchants’ revolt against a transport monopoly.

Savings looking for a home. Britain’s middle classes had built up savings, and in 1825 Parliament repealed the Bubble Act, a law of 1720 that had restricted share-selling firms, so joint-stock companies, which sold shares to the public, became easier to form. Government bonds, which are loans to the state, paid modest interest, so railway shares promising high returns drew in clergymen, widows, merchants and manufacturers alike. Cheap credit in the mid-1840s turned that interest into a mania, a frenzy of share-buying, which financed a network far faster than any government plan could have done.

WHAT IT CHANGED

A national market and national time. Railways carried coal, cloth, fish, milk and newspapers across the country overnight, so prices converged and local monopolies collapsed. Railway companies adopted Greenwich time, set by the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, from the 1840s and towns followed, giving Britain a single clock decades before the law confirmed it in 1880. Cheap transport let the industrial cities keep growing after 1850, because railways could bring in food and fuel from far beyond the reach of canals and carts.

The continent builds its own lines. Railways became the leading industry of continental industrialisation, because they created demand for coal, iron and machines all at once. Belgium opened the continent’s first state-built steam railway in 1835, and the German states and France followed within a few years, often with British locomotives and engineers. Because continental governments often planned the routes themselves, their networks served national strategy as well as private profit.

Railways across the world. British capital and engineers built railways from India to Argentina, and the transcontinental lines of the United States, Canada and Russia opened continents to settlement and trade. Chapters 9 and 11 follow the lines that carried grain, cotton and migrants into a single world economy, and the costs they brought to the people who lived in their path. Wherever they went, railways turned distant land into suppliers for industrial markets.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

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

The chronology of events favours the second view. Railways appeared after cotton, coal, iron and steam were already transforming Britain, they grew out of the coal industry’s needs, and they were paid for with savings that an industrial and commercial economy had produced. Measured by social savings, the extra cost of moving the same traffic without them, as the economic historian G. R. Hawke did, they made Britain richer by several per cent of national income, a large gain but one the economy could partly have made up with canals and roads. Yet the railway also changed the industrial economy’s character. It created a mass market for coal and iron, made engineering a leading industry, built towns, standardised time and drew ordinary investors into a national market for shares, so the system that emerged after 1850 differed in kind from the one before it. The best judgement is that an industrial economy created the railways, and the railways then created a fully industrial society. For any innovation it helps to separate the change that starts a process from the change that completes it.

AN INTERESTING FACT

Before the railways, every British town kept its own time by the sun, so the clocks of Bristol, about 170 kilometres west of London, ran roughly ten minutes behind the capital’s. When the Great Western Railway began running its trains on London time in 1840, Bristol’s citizens found themselves living by two clocks. The compromise is still visible: the clock on the Corn Exchange, Bristol’s eighteenth-century trading hall, in Corn Street has two minute hands, one showing London time and one showing Bristol time, ten minutes apart. Greenwich Mean Time, the time kept by the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, became the legal time of Great Britain only in 1880, long after the railway timetable had made it the clock most Britons actually lived by.

CHAPTER 5 · 1800–1850 · 1851

Industrial Society

The industrial town was the new environment of the age, and the speed of its growth explains most of its problems. Factories needed workers close by, and workers poured in from the countryside, from Scotland and from Ireland, especially after the Great Famine of 1845–52, when the potato crop failed, killed about a million people and drove many more abroad; the map’s arrows trace them into Liverpool, Manchester and Glasgow. Builders put up the cheapest housing they could: back-to-back terraces sharing a rear wall and therefore without through-draughts, courts of houses crowded around small yards and reached by narrow passages, and cellars that flooded. In Little Ireland, a slum beside the River Medlock in Manchester, Friedrich Engels, a young German working for his family’s cotton firm, found families living in cellars, a single outdoor toilet shared by dozens of people and a river black with dye and sewage. Towns had no authority responsible for drains, water or rubbish, so disease filled the gap.

Disease and early death were the measurable cost of urban growth, and they slowly forced the state to act. Cholera, a waterborne infection of the gut, reached Sunderland in October 1831 and killed about 32,000 people in Britain in 1831–32, and in 1848–49 it killed over 53,000 in England and Wales; typhus, a fever spread by lice, and tuberculosis killed more steadily still. The civil servant Edwin Chadwick’s Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population (1842) showed the gap in stark numbers. In Manchester the average age at death was 38 for professional families and 17 for labourers, against 52 and 38 in rural Rutland, averages pulled down by the deaths of infants. Chadwick, who believed foul air caused disease, argued that drains and clean water would save money as well as lives. The Public Health Act of 1848 created a General Board of Health and let towns set up local boards, a cautious first step toward the sanitary city.

Work itself was the other great question, and the campaign against child labour turned it into law. Children had always worked on farms and in workshops, but factories and mines made their work visible, regimented and long. A parliamentary committee led by the reforming MP Michael Sadler took testimony from mill workers in 1832, and the Factory Act passed at Westminster in 1833 banned children under nine from textile mills, limited those aged nine to thirteen to nine hours a day and appointed four inspectors to enforce it. After 26 children drowned at Huskar Pit, a Yorkshire coal mine, in 1838, the Mines Act of 1842 banned women, girls and boys under ten from working underground, and the Ten Hours Act of 1847 limited the working day of women and young people. Paternalist owners, who offered housing, schools and order in return for loyalty, much like a company town today, gave another answer, such as the wool manufacturer Titus Salt’s model village for his workers at Saltaire. These laws were narrow and often evaded, yet they established the principle that the state could limit how industry used human beings.

WHY IT HAPPENED

Factories pulled workers into towns. Steam power let mills and works gather where coal, canals and railways met, and the jobs they offered drew people from a countryside where enclosure, the fencing of common land into private farms, falling demand for hand spinning and a growing population left many underemployed. The population of England and Wales roughly doubled between 1801 and 1851, from about 8.9 to 17.9 million, and most of the growth went to the towns. Wages there were higher than in farming, which is why people came despite the conditions.

No one was in charge of the towns. Most industrial towns had no elected council with power over building, drains or water until the Municipal Corporations Act of 1835, which gave the old boroughs elected councils, and many new towns had none even then. Builders and landlords faced almost no regulation, and private water companies supplied only those who could pay. This absence of authority, together with the sheer speed of growth, explains why towns grew for decades without sewers. Reform had to wait until disease made the cost of doing nothing impossible to ignore.

Families needed children’s wages. Working-class families depended on several earners, because one adult wage rarely covered rent and food, especially when a father was sick, dead or out of work. The economic historian Jane Humphries’ study of working-class autobiographies shows that children from fatherless and large families started work earliest, often before the age of ten. Mill owners valued children for tasks such as piecing broken threads and for their low wages, so demand met supply. Poverty sent most children to work, and employers were glad to hire them.

Evidence made the costs visible. Industrial Britain counted itself as no society had done before. Censuses from 1801, the civil registration of births and deaths from 1837, parliamentary inquiries and newly appointed inspectors produced numbers and testimony that campaigners could use. The civil servant Edwin Chadwick’s mortality tables and the evidence gathered after the Huskar Pit disaster, in which 26 children drowned in a flooded mine, turned private suffering into public facts that Parliament could not ignore. Statistics became a tool of reform. Numbers persuaded MPs who would never visit a mill or a mine.

WHAT IT CHANGED

Protest grows from hardship. Low wages, hunger and the loss of skilled trades fed the protest movements of the same decades, from machine-breaking to Chartism, a mass movement demanding the vote for all men. The crowded industrial towns described in this chapter were their recruiting grounds, and their meetings filled the moors and squares outside them. The towns that concentrated hardship also concentrated the people who suffered it, which made mass protest possible for the first time.

Living standards rise after 1850. Real wages, life expectancy and heights improved clearly only after about 1850, as food grew cheaper, sanitation spread and working hours were limited. The gains of industrialisation reached most workers a generation or two after its costs. Trade unions and the vote, won by many working men in 1867 and 1884, helped them claim a larger share, so what workers received depended on political power as well as productivity.

Regulation spreads abroad. Britain’s factory and public health laws became models elsewhere. Prussia, the largest German state, limited child labour in 1839 and France in 1841, and by the end of the century most industrial countries had factory inspectors and public health boards, as chapters 7 and 8 show. The idea that the state should regulate industry became one of the Industrial Revolution’s most lasting legacies. Each new industrial country rediscovered the problems that Britain had met first.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

Did the first industrial generations gain or lose from industrialisation?

The answer depends on which evidence carries the most weight. Wage data show modest gains: the economic historian Charles Feinstein’s careful series suggests that working-class living standards rose by less than 15 per cent between the 1780s and the 1850s, while optimists such as the economists Peter Lindert and Jeffrey Williamson found much larger rises. Other evidence points the other way. Average heights fell for men born between the 1820s and 1850, a sign of poorer nutrition and more childhood disease, and life expectancy in the largest industrial towns fell far below the national average. Child labour, on the evidence of the economic historian Jane Humphries, grew more intense. Yet many migrants chose the towns because wages there were higher than on the land, and the factory laws, sanitation and cheaper goods of later decades rested on the wealth those years created. Most historians conclude that the first generations bore heavy costs for gains their grandchildren enjoyed. In judging any transformation, the useful questions are who paid and when, as well as whether average incomes rose.

AN INTERESTING FACT

The most famous account of Manchester’s slums was written by a young clerk in his family’s cotton firm. Friedrich Engels, the son of a German textile manufacturer, came to Manchester in 1842 to work for his family’s firm, Ermen & Engels, and wrote The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845) from what he saw there. He returned in 1850 and stayed for almost twenty years, eventually as a partner, and much of the income he earned from cotton supported his friend Karl Marx, the revolutionary thinker, while Marx wrote Capital, his critique of capitalism. The two founders of modern communism were in part financed by a Lancashire cotton mill.

CHAPTER 6 · 1811–1848 · 1848

Resistance

Luddism was a targeted protest by skilled workers, and its targets reveal its logic. In the Midlands stocking trade, framework knitters, who worked rented knitting frames at home, faced falling pay per stocking and wide frames that made cheap, poorly finished stockings. Beginning at Arnold on 11 March 1811 they broke the frames of employers who paid low rates while sparing those who paid fairly. In Yorkshire the croppers, who finished woollen cloth by hand with heavy shears, faced shearing frames that did their work with a fraction of the labour, and in April 1812 about 150 of them attacked William Cartwright’s mill at Rawfolds, where defenders shot two of them dead. In Lancashire, hand weavers attacked mills that used steam-powered looms. These were precise attacks on specific practices, carried out in a decade of war, dear food and trade depression by men who had no vote and no legal union.

The state’s response shows how seriously the propertied classes took the threat, and it pushed protest toward political demands. Parliament made frame-breaking punishable by death in 1812, about 12,000 troops occupied the disturbed districts, and after a special court at York in January 1813 seventeen men were hanged. In 1817 hundreds of Lancashire weavers set out to march to London carrying blankets, to petition the Prince Regent, who ruled for his incapacitated father George III, and were stopped by troops around Stockport. On 16 August 1819 a crowd of perhaps 60,000 gathered at St Peter’s Field in Manchester to hear the orator Henry Hunt demand reform. The yeomanry, part-time cavalry of local property owners, and then regular cavalry charged the crowd, and about 18 people died. Journalists named it Peterloo, a bitter echo of Waterloo, Britain’s victory over Napoleon in 1815, and the government answered with the Six Acts restricting meetings and the press. The lesson many radicals drew was that only a reformed Parliament could protect them.

Repression and a narrow reform of Parliament pushed protest in the 1830s and 1840s toward mass political organisation, after one last great wave of machine-breaking in the countryside. In the Swing Riots that began at Lower Hardres in Kent in August 1830, farm labourers destroyed threshing machines, which separated grain from straw, and sent letters signed by an imaginary Captain Swing; 19 were executed and about 480 were transported, shipped as convicts, to Australia. Because the Reform Act of 1832 gave the vote only to men of property, about one adult man in five, industrial workers turned to politics. From 1838 the Chartists campaigned for the People’s Charter, a six-point programme whose demands included votes for all men and a secret ballot. In 1839 troops shot dead about 22 armed Chartists marching on Newport. In 1842 a petition claimed over three million signatures, and that summer, as employers cut wages in a deep depression, a general strike, a stoppage across many trades at once, spread from Stalybridge across the industrial north. The last petition, launched at Kennington Common in April 1848, was rejected. Chartism failed in its own time, yet five of its six demands later became law.

WHY IT HAPPENED

Machines threatened skilled trades. New machines threatened skilled trades within a few years: shearing frames trimmed woollen cloth by machine, wide knitting frames turned out broad sheets of fabric cut and sewn into cheap, poorly finished stockings, and steam-powered looms began to do the hand weaver’s work. A cropper, a hand finisher of woollen cloth who had served a seven-year apprenticeship, or a weaver who had once earned a craftsman’s wage, could see the machine that would replace him in the next valley. Their protest defended a whole way of life, with its customs of training, fair rates and independence, at a time when employers were cutting rates in a depressed wartime economy.

War, hunger and depression. Hunger turned grievance into action, because the worst protests came when war, bad harvests and blocked trade made food dear and work scarce. The Luddite machine-breaking of 1811–13 fell during the long war against France, when trade with Europe and America was blocked and unemployment rose, and the Corn Law of 1815, which barred foreign wheat until British prices were high in order to protect landowners’ rents, kept bread dear after the war ended. Protest peaked in the hard years of 1811–12, 1816–19, 1830 and 1842, so hunger set the timing of revolt even where machines supplied the grievance.

Laws that silenced workers. The Combination Acts of 1799 and 1800 made trade unions illegal until 1824, and working men had no vote, so they had no lawful way to bargain or to change the law. Parliament had also repealed old laws that fixed wages and protected apprenticeships. When petitions failed, as the weavers’ appeals for a minimum wage did in 1808 and 1811, direct action seemed the only means they had left. The law had closed the peaceful routes before workers chose violent ones.

Reformers gave anger a programme. Radical writers and orators such as the journalist William Cobbett and the public speaker Henry Hunt argued that hardship came from a corrupt Parliament elected by a small minority, so the cure was reform of the vote. Cheap newspapers, reading rooms and mass meetings spread that argument across the industrial districts. By the 1830s it had turned local grievances into a national political movement with a single programme, the People’s Charter, whose six demands began with votes for all men. Political reform promised a remedy that machine-breaking could never deliver.

WHAT IT CHANGED

Reform reaches the middle classes first. Industrial wealth won political power before industrial labour did. The Reform Act of 1832 gave new industrial towns such as Manchester, Birmingham and Leeds their own members of Parliament and gave the vote to many middle-class men, but it excluded almost all workers, a betrayal that fed Chartism, the mass campaign for votes for all men. Many urban working householders gained the vote in 1867, and many in the counties in 1884, so the vote followed organised pressure one slow step at a time.

Trade unions become lawful. The law turned slowly from punishing trade unions to protecting them. The Combination Acts, which had banned unions, were repealed in 1824–25 and unions grew in the skilled trades, yet in 1834 six Dorset labourers from Tolpuddle were transported, meaning shipped as convicts to Australia, for swearing a union oath. By the 1870s unions had secure legal standing in Britain. The right to organise, a crime in 1800, had become part of how industrial society governed itself.

Resistance spreads with industry. Wherever machines arrived, workers resisted them in similar ways. The silk weavers of Lyon rose in 1831 and 1834, the Silesian linen weavers in 1844, and textile workers in Japan and India later struck against long hours and wage cuts. The British pattern of protest proved the first of many, and states everywhere answered it with the same mixture of force and reform.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

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

The modern use of “Luddite” to mean someone who fears technology misreads the people it is named after, the machine-breaking textile workers of 1811–13. The evidence shows targeted, disciplined action: knitters broke the frames of employers who paid low rates and spared the rest, and croppers, who finished cloth by hand, attacked the mills where shearing frames were being installed. In a decade when unions were illegal, wages were falling and food was dear, machine-breaking was a way to bargain, which is why the historian Eric Hobsbawm called it collective bargaining by riot and the historian E. P. Thompson defended the Luddites against the condescension of later historians. Yet the Luddites could not stop technical change, and the machines they fought eventually made cloth and stockings far cheaper for everyone, workers included. The fairest judgement is that they were rational defenders of their livelihoods who lost to a change whose benefits went mainly to other people and later generations. Any society facing a new technology must decide how the costs of change are shared, and the Luddites were among the first to ask.

AN INTERESTING FACT

The poet Lord Byron made his first speech in the House of Lords, on 27 February 1812, against the bill that made frame-breaking, the smashing of knitting frames, a crime punishable by death. He had seen the distress of the Nottinghamshire knitters near his family estate at Newstead Abbey, and he told the Lords that the men breaking frames were driven by hunger and that the law would not feed them. The bill passed into law regardless. In 1816 Byron wrote a short poem, “Song for the Luddites”, imagining the weavers trading the shuttles of their looms for swords. His was one of very few voices in Parliament raised for the frame-breakers, a measure of how little men without votes could expect from those who made the law.

CHAPTER 7 · 1815–1870 · 1870

The Continent Follows

Belgium industrialised first on the continent because it held the same ingredients as Britain and had a government willing to use them. The coal belt running from Mons through Charleroi to Liège had been worked for centuries, and Liège had a long tradition of metalworking. Britain banned the emigration of skilled artisans until 1824 and the export of textile machinery until 1843, yet skills travelled anyway. William Cockerill, a Lancashire mechanic, built spinning machines at Verviers from 1799, and his son John founded a giant machine works and ironworks at Seraing in 1817, soon one of the largest industrial plants in the world. After winning independence from the Netherlands in 1830 the Belgian state planned and paid for a national railway network, beginning with the line from Brussels to Mechelen on 5 May 1835. In proportion to its size Belgium became the most industrialised country on the continent, the first proof that Britain’s lead could be copied.

The German states industrialised through a common market and the railway, and the Zollverein, a German customs union, made both possible. In 1834 Prussia, the largest German state, led eighteen states with about 23 million people into a customs union that abolished internal tariffs, and the dashed outline on the map shows it growing to cover almost all of the future German Empire. The economist Friedrich List, who promoted the railway from Leipzig to Dresden opened in 1839, argued in his National System of Political Economy (1841) that new industries needed protection by tariffs, taxes that make imported goods dearer, until they could compete with Britain’s, an argument later followed from the United States to Japan. Railway building, which created demand for coal, iron and machines all at once, became the leading sector of German growth from the 1840s. Deep shafts opened the Ruhr coalfield, and the Krupp works at Essen grew from a struggling family steel foundry into one of the largest firms in Europe. A protected market and a railway boom could build industrial giants within a generation.

France and the rest of the continent followed other paths, and the map shows that everywhere industrialisation came region by region. France had less coal and a large peasant population that stayed on the land, so it industrialised more gradually, concentrating on high-quality goods such as Lyon silk and on great centres such as the Schneider brothers’ ironworks at Le Creusot and the cotton mills of Mulhouse in Alsace. In Saxony, Bohemia, Catalonia and the Polish city of Łódź, textile districts grew inside largely farming countries, like islands of industry in a rural sea. The costs fell hardest on handworkers. In June 1844 the linen weavers of Peterswaldau and Langenbielau in Silesia, whose earnings had collapsed under competition from machine-spun yarn, wrecked a merchant’s house; troops fired on the crowd and killed eleven. The continent followed Britain, yet its industrial revolution was its own, built on borrowed machines, state action and regional strengths.

WHY IT HAPPENED

Coal and old industrial skills. The continent’s first industrial regions combined coal or fast water with long traditions of craft. The Sambre–Meuse valley had mined coal and worked iron since the Middle Ages, and Flanders, Saxony and Alsace had old textile industries. Where coal, skill and water transport met, British techniques could be adopted quickly, which is why the hatched coalfields and red districts on the map lie close together. Where any one of them was missing, industry came later.

Borrowed machines and migrant experts. Britain guarded its lead by banning the emigration of artisans until 1824 and the export of textile machinery until 1843, but machines were smuggled and men moved. British mechanics, engineers and navvies, the labourers who dug canals and railways, built mills and railways from Liège to Rouen, and continental entrepreneurs toured Lancashire to copy what they saw. The Cockerills, a Lancashire family of mechanics who built Belgium’s first spinning machines and the Seraing ironworks; the Irish mining engineer William Mulvany in the Ruhr; and the English contractor Thomas Brassey’s railway gangs in Normandy all carried British know-how abroad. Such migrants let followers skip the pioneers’ costly experiments.

Governments built markets and railways. Continental governments took a direct hand in starting industry. Belgium planned its railways, and Prussia, the largest German state, led the Zollverein, a customs union that abolished taxes on goods moving between its German members, much as the European Union does today. Prussia also ran state mines in the Saar and Silesia, and France laid out its main railway lines in a law of 1842 before leasing them to private companies. The economist Friedrich List’s case for protecting infant industries, young industries not yet able to compete, gave this activism a theory. States took on the risks that private investors would not yet bear.

Peace and new borders after 1815. The peace of 1815, agreed by Europe’s great powers at Vienna after Napoleon’s defeat, ended a generation of war, blockade and occupation, and the settlement redrew borders in ways that shaped industry. Prussia, the largest German state, gained the Rhineland and Westphalia, including the Ruhr and the Saar, and the new Kingdom of the Netherlands, from which Belgium broke away in 1830, gained the coal and iron of Liège and Hainaut. Peace allowed capital, goods and people to cross borders again. The diplomats who redrew Europe’s borders in 1815 were also deciding, largely without realising it, which states would own the coal of the industrial age.

WHAT IT CHANGED

Germany overtakes. The German customs union known as the Zollverein, the Ruhr coalfield and the railways laid the foundations on which a united Germany, created in 1871, overtook Britain in steel and chemicals by the 1890s. Political unification grew partly out of the economic unification of the Zollverein, which had already tied the smaller German states to Prussia, the largest of them. The new empire’s industrial strength would rest on science and big business as much as on coal.

The workers’ question crosses borders. Industrial distress made the protection of workers a European political question within a generation. The Silesian weavers’ revolt of 1844 inspired a poem by the German writer Heinrich Heine and, half a century later, the dramatist Gerhart Hauptmann’s play The Weavers (1892), and in the 1880s Germany, under its chancellor Otto von Bismarck, introduced state insurance against sickness, accidents and old age, partly to undercut the socialists. The social question had become a European one, shared by workers and feared by governments across the continent.

A model for late developers. The German economist Friedrich List’s case for protecting infant industries, those too young to face foreign competition, and the German partnership of banks and state, became templates for later industrialisers. The United States raised tariffs to shelter its factories, and Japan’s Meiji leaders, in power from 1868, barred by unequal treaties imposed by the West from raising tariffs until 1911, studied Germany and used the state to found industries. Both refused to leave industry to the free market that Britain, secure in its lead, recommended to everyone, advice List had compared to kicking away a ladder after climbing it.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

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

Imitation was everywhere at the start. The continent’s first steam engines, spinning mills and railways were British in design, often British-built and sometimes British-run, from the Cockerill family’s ironworks at Seraing in Belgium to the railways the English contractor Thomas Brassey built in Normandy, and continental entrepreneurs measured themselves against Lancashire. Yet the conditions in which they worked were different, and so were their solutions. Belgium and Prussia, the largest German kingdom, used their governments to plan railways and run mines, German banks financed heavy industry on a scale British banks never attempted, and the German economist Friedrich List’s protectionism, the sheltering of young industries behind tariffs, rejected the free trade Britain recommended. France’s more gradual, skill-based path, which the economic historians Patrick O’Brien and Caglar Keyder argue suited its resources, shows that there was more than one road. The economic historian Alexander Gerschenkron’s insight that backwardness changes the method of industrialisation explains much of this variety, and even British institutions, from patents to joint-stock companies, firms owned by many shareholders, were copied selectively. The best answer is that the continent borrowed Britain’s technology and invented its own institutions, a combination that later industrialisers, from the United States to Japan, would repeat.

AN INTERESTING FACT

Germany’s first railway locomotive was English. The Adler, or Eagle, which opened the six-kilometre line from Nuremberg to Fürth on 7 December 1835, was built by the locomotive makers Robert Stephenson & Co. in Newcastle and shipped to Bavaria in pieces. With it came an English engine driver, William Wilson, whom the company paid more than its own director, because nobody in Bavaria knew how to drive a locomotive. Wilson stayed, trained German drivers and died in Nuremberg in 1862. For years most of the line’s trains were still pulled by horses because coal was expensive, which shows that Germany could import the railway long before it could cheaply fuel one.

CHAPTER 8 · 1870–1914 · 1913

The Second Industrial Revolution

Steel was the material of the second industrial revolution, and its story shows how new processes redrew the industrial map. The English inventor Henry Bessemer’s converter of 1856 blew air through molten iron to make steel cheaply, and the Siemens–Martin open-hearth furnace of the 1860s made it in larger, more controllable batches, yet both failed with iron ore containing phosphorus, which made the steel brittle. In 1878 two cousins solved the problem: Sidney Gilchrist Thomas, a London police-court clerk who studied chemistry in his spare time, and Percy Gilchrist, chemist at the Blaenavon ironworks in Wales, lined the converter with limestone, which absorbed the phosphorus. Their basic process, named for its chemically basic, or alkaline, lining, turned the phosphoric ores of Lorraine, much of it annexed by Germany in 1871, into Europe’s largest ore field, worked by firms such as the de Wendel family’s ironworks at Hayange. The arrow carries Lorraine ore north to the coal of the Ruhr, where the steelmaker Krupp of Essen employed about 70,000 people by 1912, and German steel output passed Britain’s in about 1893. Ore from one region, coal from another and a chemical discovery tested in Wales together made Germany Europe’s steel power.

Chemistry and electricity were science-based industries, and they rewarded the countries that trained scientists and engineers. German universities and technical colleges produced chemists by the thousand, and firms such as BASF at Ludwigshafen, Bayer and Hoechst built research laboratories where teams developed synthetic dyes from coal by-products. BASF began selling synthetic indigo, a blue dye, in 1897, which ruined the indigo planters of Bengal and Bihar in India, and in 1913 its plant at nearby Oppau began fixing nitrogen from the air, turning it into ammonia, by the Haber–Bosch process, the basis of modern fertilisers and explosives. Electricity grew from the engineer Werner von Siemens’ dynamo of 1866, which turned motion into electric current, and the industrialist Emil Rathenau’s firm, renamed AEG in 1887, built power stations, trams and motors, making Berlin the Elektropolis, or electric city, of Europe. These industries needed huge capital, so giant firms, banks and cartels, agreements among firms to fix prices or output, shaped the German economy.

The second industrial revolution carried industry across Europe, and the colours of the map change accordingly. Engines burning petrol, built in 1885–86 by the engineers Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach at Cannstatt and by Carl Benz at Mannheim, created a new kind of transport. Hydroelectric power from the Alps let northern Italy industrialise with little coal, and the carmaker FIAT, founded at Turin in 1899, joined the textile mills of Lombardy. Russian industry grew about 8 per cent a year in the 1890s under the finance minister Sergei Witte, largely financed by French loans, and the map shades the empire’s western provinces as industrialising. Britain remained rich, yet 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 argue whether that relative decline reflected British failure or the natural catching-up of larger countries.

WHY IT HAPPENED

Science became a source of invention. Science had begun to outrun the workshop: by the 1860s chemistry and physics had produced knowledge, such as the structure of carbon-based molecules and the laws of electromagnetism, that practical tinkering alone could not reach. Firms that employed university-trained researchers, such as BASF, Bayer and Siemens, turned that knowledge into products: synthetic dyes, drugs, the electric generators called dynamos, and electric light. Invention moved from the workshop into the laboratory, and Germany, with more universities and technical colleges than any rival, gained most from the shift.

Cheap steel replaced iron. The English inventor Henry Bessemer’s converter of 1856, which blew air through molten iron, the open-hearth furnace of the 1860s, which made steel in larger batches, and the basic process of 1878, which could use iron ore rich in phosphorus, cut the price of steel so far that it replaced iron in rails, ships, bridges and machines. Steel rails lasted many times longer than iron ones, and steel ships were lighter and larger. Countries with coal and the right ores, above all Germany and the United States, built the largest steel industries, so geology helped decide which nations would lead heavy industry.

Unification, tariffs and banks. The German Empire of 1871 combined the market of the Zollverein, the German customs union of 1834, with a single currency, a dense railway network run by the individual states, and the coal and ore of the Ruhr and Lorraine. From 1879 the chancellor Otto von Bismarck’s tariffs protected German industry and agriculture, and the great banks financed mergers and cartels, agreements among firms to fix prices or output. Large, protected, well-financed firms could invest in research and in plants bigger than any in Britain, although critics then and since argue that they also fixed prices at consumers’ expense.

Followers started with the newest technology. Late industrialisers built their steelworks and power stations with the latest designs, while Britain’s older industries still used machinery and methods from the 1850s. The American economist Thorstein Veblen called this the penalty of taking the lead. Followers also had larger or faster-growing populations, so catching up with Britain, and then passing it in total output, was partly a matter of arithmetic. Being first carried costs as well as advantages.

WHAT IT CHANGED

An arms race of steel and chemistry. Steel and chemistry made the weapons of the twentieth century: the arms maker Krupp’s guns, steel battleships and explosives made from nitrogen captured from the air. The Haber–Bosch process, which turned that nitrogen into ammonia, freed Germany from imported Chilean nitrate, a nitrogen-rich mineral, and so later let it keep making explosives despite the British blockade of the First World War. Navies and armies now competed through their countries’ factories, so industrial power had become military power.

Commodity frontiers move. Synthetic indigo, a factory-made blue dye, ruined indigo planting in Bengal and Bihar in India, and nitrogen captured from the air would later undermine Chile’s exports of mined nitrate fertiliser, while demand for rubber, copper and oil for the electrical and motor industries drew new regions into the world economy, often by force. Historians call such zones of extraction commodity frontiers, and they ran from the Congo to Persia, today Iran. A discovery in a European laboratory could now make or break an economy on the other side of the world.

America takes the lead. The United States applied the new technologies on a continental scale, with the largest steel industry, the first great electric power systems and mass-produced cars. By 1913 it made about a third of the world’s manufactured goods, more than Germany and Britain combined, and firms such as Carnegie Steel and General Electric matched the German giants in scale. In the new industries, the size of a country’s market had become as important as being first.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

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

Three kinds of explanation compete for attention. The first stresses German strengths: universities and technical colleges that trained chemists and engineers by the thousand, banks that financed huge plants, a protected and growing market after 1871, and the coal and ore of the Ruhr and Lorraine. The second stresses British weaknesses, in the tradition of the historians David Landes and Martin Wiener: family firms content with old methods, an education system that prized Latin and Greek, and capital that flowed abroad. The third, argued by the economic historian Deirdre McCloskey and others, doubts that Britain failed at all, since British firms often chose rationally to keep profitable older technologies, and a larger, later starter was bound to catch up. The evidence supports a mixture of all three. In science-based industries such as dyes, Germany’s institutions gave it a real advantage, while in steel and cotton the gap mainly reflected differences in resources, markets and timing. The institutions that win one technological era are seldom the ones best suited to the next.

AN INTERESTING FACT

The modern electric grid was first shown to the public at a trade fair. In August 1891 visitors to the International Electrotechnical Exhibition in Frankfurt saw a thousand electric lamps and an artificial waterfall powered by electricity generated 175 kilometres away, at a cement works beside the River Neckar at Lauffen. Engineers from the German electrical firm AEG and the Swiss firm Oerlikon, among them Mikhail Dolivo-Dobrovolsky and Charles Brown, sent the power along overhead wires using a new system, three-phase alternating current, in which three linked currents rise and fall in turn, at high voltage. The demonstration settled a fierce argument over how to transmit electricity over long distances, and the same system still carries power in almost every grid on earth.

CHAPTER 9 · 1865–1914 · 1890

America Industrialises

America’s industrial rise began before the Civil War, and its first stage was tied to slavery and to Britain. Samuel Slater, who had memorised the inventor Richard Arkwright’s spinning machines in England, began spinning cotton in Rhode Island in 1790, and in 1823 a group of Boston merchants began production at Lowell in Massachusetts, a planned factory town whose mills hired young women from New England farms, who struck against wage cuts in 1834 and 1836. The cotton these mills spun came from the slave South, where the enslaved population grew from about 700,000 in 1790 to almost four million in 1860. The Civil War of 1861–65 destroyed slavery and confirmed the power of the industrial North, because its factories and railways outproduced the South’s. Emancipation freed four million people, yet most of them remained poor farm workers and sharecroppers, tenants who paid their rent with a share of the crop, in a South kept poor and segregated.

Railways turned the United States into a single continental market, and they were built with immigrant labour and public land. Congress gave the Union Pacific and Central Pacific companies land grants and loans, and on 10 May 1869 their tracks met at Promontory Summit. The Central Pacific, building east from Sacramento over the Sierra Nevada mountains, employed 10,000 to 15,000 Chinese workers at a time, about 90 per cent of its workforce in 1867, at lower pay than white workers; how many died is unknown, with estimates from about fifty to over a thousand. By 1893 five lines crossed the continent, and because a factory in Chicago or Pittsburgh could now sell to the whole country, firms grew to a size no local market could have supported; the railroads themselves became the first big businesses, run by professional managers. The railway that united the country’s market was built by men the country then refused to admit, through the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.

Steel, mass production and mass immigration made America the world’s leading industrial power by the 1890s, and conflict accompanied every stage. The steelmaker Andrew Carnegie’s Edgar Thomson works near Pittsburgh, opened in 1875, made steel rails by the Bessemer process, which blasted air through molten iron to burn out impurities in minutes, from ore shipped across the Great Lakes, and American steel output passed Britain’s around 1886. Chicago’s meat-packing plants moved carcasses along overhead lines past rows of workers, a disassembly line that the carmaker Henry Ford said inspired his moving assembly line at Highland Park, where each worker repeated one task as the work moved past. About 22 million immigrants entered between 1880 and 1914, many through Ellis Island, New York’s immigration station, after 1892. Strikes were met with force: at Carnegie’s Homestead steelworks in 1892 a battle between strikers and private guards left seven workers and three guards dead, and the union was broken. By 1913 the United States made about a third of the world’s manufactured goods, more than Britain and Germany together. The economy Britain had pioneered was now outbuilt by one with a continent behind it.

WHY IT HAPPENED

A continent of resources. The United States held some of the world’s largest deposits of coal, iron ore, copper and oil, as well as vast forests and farmland taken from Native American nations by treaty and war. The hatched patches on the map show the Pennsylvania coalfields and the Lake Superior iron ranges whose ore fed Pittsburgh. Cheap resources rewarded technologies that used them lavishly, which is why American industry became so hungry for energy and materials.

A huge protected market. American industry grew inside the largest protected market in the world: the population of the United States rose from about 31 million in 1860 to 92 million in 1910, and railways joined it into one market with no taxes on trade between states. High tariffs, taxes on imports, raised during the Civil War and kept afterwards, sheltered American factories from British and German competition, much as Friedrich List, the German economist who argued that young industries need protection, had recommended for Germany. Firms that could sell to a whole continent could build plants of enormous scale and spread their costs over millions of customers.

Immigrant and coerced labour. Industry’s workforce came from Europe, China, Mexico and the American countryside. Immigrants supplied the hands for mines, mills and railways, often at low wages and in dangerous conditions, while Black southerners, freed from slavery but bound by debt and segregation, grew the cotton that remained a leading export. Labour from abroad kept wages lower than they would otherwise have been, although they stayed higher than in Europe, which kept the migrants coming.

Capital, organisation and the state. British and European investors financed American railroads, and federal land grants and loans lowered their risks. The railroads pioneered the large company run by salaried managers, which the business historian Alfred Chandler called the visible hand because managers’ planning now did the coordinating that markets had done, and steel, oil and meat firms copied them. Courts and governments generally sided with employers, sending troops and issuing injunctions, court orders that banned strikes, which kept labour costs down and profits high. The state built the conditions in which private enterprise flourished.

WHAT IT CHANGED

America overtakes Britain. By about 1886 the United States made more steel than Britain, and by 1913 about a third of the world’s manufactured goods. American methods, from interchangeable parts, standard components that fit any copy of a product, to the assembly line, spread to Europe and Japan in the twentieth century, and American consumers, with the highest wages in the world, became the first mass market for cars and electrical goods. Britain’s old title of workshop of the world had crossed the Atlantic, and with it the lead in mass production that would shape the twentieth century.

Grain and migrants remake Europe. Cheap American grain carried by rail and steamship flooded European markets from the 1870s, lowering bread prices for workers but ruining many farmers and pushing millions of rural Europeans to emigrate. Germany and France answered with tariffs, taxes on imported grain, while Britain, committed to free trade without such taxes, let its farming shrink. The same railways and steamships that carried American grain east carried European migrants west, so one wave of globalisation fed the other.

The labour question goes national. Strikes at the Homestead steelworks in 1892, broken by Pennsylvania’s state militia after strikers fought off guards from the Pinkerton detective agency, and at the Pullman railway-car works in 1894, broken by federal troops, made the power of corporations a national political issue. Reformers of the Progressive Era, a movement of the 1900s and 1910s that set out to curb corporate power, passed laws against monopolies, firms that dominate a whole market, and unsafe food, states restricted child labour, and unions grew slowly. Industrial power had grown too large for American politics to leave it to the market alone.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

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

Resources made the scale of growth possible. Coal, ore, oil, timber and land, much of it taken from Native American nations, gave American industry cheap inputs, and the economic historian Gavin Wright’s evidence shows how resource-intensive its exports were. Yet resources needed people to exploit them, and the people came from everywhere: inventors and managers who built the large corporation, about 22 million immigrants between 1880 and 1914, Chinese railway workers later barred from the country, and the formerly enslaved and their children whose cotton remained a leading export. Institutions shaped how both were used. High taxes on imports, federal land grants and courts friendly to employers channelled wealth toward industry and kept labour costs low, at the price of fierce conflict. The most convincing answer is that America’s abundance of resources set the direction of its technology, while its ability to draw labour and capital from the whole world set the speed. Abundance and openness together explain the rise, and exclusion and conflict show who paid for it.

AN INTERESTING FACT

Railways gave the United States its time zones. Before 1883 American towns kept their own local times, and the railroads used dozens of different times on their timetables. On Sunday 18 November 1883, known as the day of two noons, the railroads of the United States and Canada switched to standard time zones, four of them across the United States, and in many eastern towns clocks struck noon twice as they were set back to the new standard. Most towns adopted railway time at once, and Congress made the zones law only in 1918, so a private industry had set the nation’s clocks for thirty-five years.

CHAPTER 10 · 1868–1914 · 1910

Japan: Industrialisation from Above

Japan industrialised because its leaders had watched what Western industrial power did to China and resolved to escape the same fate. The Opium War of 1839–42, which Britain fought after China tried to stop British merchants selling Indian opium, showed that steam-powered navies could humble the greatest empire in Asia, and when Commodore Perry’s American steam warships arrived in 1853 Japan had no answer. The commercial treaties of 1858, unequal treaties imposed under threat, opened ports including Yokohama, fixed Japan’s import tariffs low, at about five per cent from 1866, and gave foreigners their own courts; Japan regained full control of its tariffs only in 1911. After seizing power in 1868 the Meiji government abolished the domains, the semi-independent territories of some 270 feudal lords, each rather like a province with its own prince. Led by former samurai of the old warrior class, it created an army raised by compulsory service and taxed land in cash to fund modernisation. Its slogan was fukoku kyōhei, “rich country, strong army”, which made industry a matter of national survival.

The state led the first phase and private business the second, and the textile industries show how. In 1872 the government opened the Tomioka silk mill with French machines and a French engineer, Paul Brunat, and recruited young women to learn modern silk reeling, unwinding thread from cocoons, and teach it elsewhere. Railways followed, from Tokyo to Yokohama in 1872 and to Kobe in 1889. In the 1880s, with the state deep in debt, the finance minister Matsukata Masayoshi cut spending and sold most state factories to private firms such as Mitsui and Mitsubishi, which grew into zaibatsu, family-controlled groups spanning banking, mining, shipping and trade, much like South Korea’s Samsung today. The banker Shibusawa Eiichi’s Osaka Spinning Company, opened in 1883 with steam-driven spinning machines, became the model for private mills; on the map red patches around Osaka, Nagano and Gunma mark the new textile Japan. The state had taken the first risks, and private capital took over once those risks had been shown to pay.

Industrial Japan was built on the labour of young women and the resources of an empire, and the costs fell on both. Women made up about 80 per cent of textile workers, recruited from poor farm families on contracts, housed in dormitories and worked twelve hours or more a day; a government doctor, Ishihara Osamu, reported in 1913 that many went home with tuberculosis. Heavy industry needed coal and ore, so the state built the Yawata steelworks beside the Chikuhō coalfield, opening it in 1901 partly with the indemnity, a compensation payment forced on the loser, that China paid after the war of 1894–95. That war gave Japan Taiwan, and victory over Russia in 1905 gave it a lease in southern Manchuria and control of Korea, annexed in 1910; Japanese railways from Seoul and a colonial land survey tied Korea’s farms to Japan’s economy. At Ashio, copper waste poisoned the farms along the Watarase river, and the politician Tanaka Shōzō led the protests. Japan’s success was real, and others paid part of its price.

WHY IT HAPPENED

The shock of Western power. Japan’s leaders watched Britain’s steam-powered navy defeat China in the Opium War of 1839–42, fought after China tried to stop British opium sales, and in 1853 the American Commodore Perry’s steam warships showed that Japan could not keep foreigners out. The unequal treaties that followed, signed under threat, capped Japan’s tariffs, its taxes on imports, and the reach of its courts. Many samurai, members of the hereditary warrior class, concluded that only an industrial economy could pay for the army and navy needed to escape China’s fate, which made industrialisation a matter of national survival. Fear of the West became the driving force of Japanese modernisation.

A state that chose industry. The Meiji government, the regime that took power in 1868, abolished the domains of the daimyo, the feudal lords who had ruled Japan’s regions, created a national army by conscription, compulsory military service, and a land tax paid in cash, and used the revenue to build railways, telegraphs, shipyards and model factories for private firms to copy. It sent the Iwakura Mission of 1871–73, a delegation of senior ministers, to study the United States and Europe, and hired about three thousand foreign experts. Where private capital was lacking, the state took the first risks, much as the economic historian Alexander Gerschenkron’s theory of late development predicts.

An educated, commercial society. Japan began its modern era in 1868 with assets from the Tokugawa period, the 265 years of military rule before it: large cities such as Edo, today’s Tokyo, and Osaka, national markets for rice, silk and cotton, merchant houses such as Mitsui that dated from the seventeenth century, and a population in which perhaps 40 per cent of boys received some schooling. Rural households already spun, wove and reeled silk, unwinding it from cocoons, for sale. These traditions supplied modern industry with workers, managers, capital and customers.

Silk paid for machines. Raw silk was Japan’s great export, helped in the 1860s by a disease that devastated European silkworms. Reeled, or unwound from cocoons, by young women in Nagano and Gunma and shipped through Yokohama to France and the United States, silk earned the foreign currency that paid for imported machines, ships and Indian raw cotton. Japan’s heavy industry of steel and ships was financed in part by its light industry of textiles, and its light industry by the labour of its daughters.

WHAT IT CHANGED

Japan competes in Asian markets. Japan’s mills soon challenged their teachers: by the 1900s Japanese cotton yarn and cloth competed with British and Indian goods in China and Korea, and Japanese shipping lines carried Indian cotton to Osaka. Japan became the first Asian country to beat the industrial West at its own trade in Asian markets, and reformers from China to India studied its example. In a world economy that cast most of Asia as a supplier of raw materials, Japan alone had escaped that role, showing that the gap between the industrial West and the rest of the world could be closed.

Empire becomes part of the economy. Taiwan supplied sugar and rice, Korea rice and land, and the Japanese-run South Manchuria Railway coal and soya beans, all on terms that served Japan. Colonial rule brought railways and factories built for Japanese purposes, and harsh treatment for those who resisted. Many Koreans lost land in the colonial land survey of 1910–18 and later emigrated to Japan and Manchuria as cheap labour. Japan had escaped colonial rule by industrialising, and then imposed it on its neighbours to feed that industry.

Regulation arrives a generation late. The protests against pollution from the Ashio copper mine, the mill girls’ strikes and the government’s survey of factory conditions in 1903 led to Japan’s first Factory Act in 1911, enforced only from 1916, which limited the hours of women and children. As in Britain, regulation followed a generation behind industrial growth, because the costs of industry fell first on those with the least power to stop them.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

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

The state’s role was decisive at the start. It abolished the domains, the territories of the feudal lords, created the taxes that paid for modernisation, built the railways and telegraphs, founded factories such as the Tomioka silk mill and the Yawata steelworks, and hired foreign experts, all within a generation, as the economic historian Alexander Gerschenkron’s model of late development predicts. Yet many state enterprises lost money and were sold cheaply to private firms in the 1880s, and the industries that earned Japan’s foreign currency, cotton spinning and the reeling of silk thread from cocoons, grew mainly through private investment, from the banker Shibusawa’s Osaka Spinning Company to thousands of small rural silk workshops. Historians such as Thomas Smith stressed the state, while later work by Penelope Francks and others emphasises the inheritance of markets, merchants and literacy from the Tokugawa shoguns, the military rulers who governed until 1868, and the labour of young women. A balanced judgement credits the state with setting the direction and removing obstacles, and private enterprise and women’s labour with doing most of the work. Countries that industrialise late can use the state to accelerate industry, but they still need a society ready to respond.

AN INTERESTING FACT

Recruiting workers for the Tomioka Silk Mill in 1872 proved surprisingly hard, because of a rumour that the French staff drank the blood of young women; 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, as one of the first trainees, and other officials followed his example. The brick buildings, put up by Japanese carpenters and tilers working to a French design, still stand, and in 2014 UNESCO, the United Nations’ cultural agency, listed the mill as a World Heritage Site. Industry needed the trust of families as well as machines, and the officials who built it sometimes had to win that trust by sending their own daughters in first.

CHAPTER 11 · 1850–1914 · 1913

A Global Transformation

Three technologies shrank the world after 1850, and the arrows on the map trace them. Iron steamships with compound engines, which used their steam twice to save coal, made long ocean voyages reliable and cheap from the 1860s, and coaling stations such as Singapore refuelled them. The Suez Canal, opened on 17 November 1869, cut the distance from London to Bombay from about 10,700 to 6,300 nautical miles. The telegraph carried information faster than any ship: a cable across the Atlantic worked from 1866, and in 1870 a line from Porthcurno in Cornwall to Bombay carried in minutes messages that had taken weeks by mail. London investors could now manage mines and railways on other continents. Because the prices of grain, cotton and cloth now converged across oceans, a producer’s real competitors could for the first time be on the far side of the world.

The world economy that resulted divided the industrial exporters of manufactures and capital from the suppliers of raw materials and food. Britain enforced the division through what the historians John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson called the imperialism of free trade: opening markets through treaties and gunboats where possible, and by conquest only where necessary, much as powerful states today steer weaker ones with sanctions and loans. The Opium War, fought by Britain after China tried to stop British merchants selling Indian opium, forced China to open its ports in 1842, and the treaty port of Shanghai, where foreigners traded and lived under their own laws, became its first industrial city. Treaties of 1838–41 forced the Ottoman Empire and Egypt to lower tariffs, their taxes on imports, ending the attempt by Muhammad Ali, Egypt’s ruler from 1805 to 1848, to build state cotton mills. The cotton famine of 1861–65, when the American Civil War cut off Southern cotton, showed the system’s reach: Lancashire’s mills fell idle, while growers in India and Egypt, shipping through Bombay and Alexandria, enjoyed a boom that collapsed when the war ended. A war in America could now ruin spinners in Lancashire and enrich farmers in Gujarat and the Nile delta.

The costs of integration fell unevenly, and the map marks the sharpest of them. In India, Lancashire’s machine-made cloth destroyed the export trade of Bengal’s weavers: Dhaka, which may have held 150,000 people or more around 1800, had shrunk to about 50,000 by 1840. Yet Indian entrepreneurs, many of them Parsis, descendants of religious refugees from Persia, built cotton mills at Bombay from 1854, and India had about 260 to 270 by 1914. In Africa, the demand for rubber after the invention of the air-filled tyre led the Congo Free State, a colony owned personally by King Leopold II of Belgium, to force villagers to gather wild rubber through hostage-taking, mutilation and killing; the population losses are disputed, from about one million to perhaps ten million people. By 1900 Europe and the United States made about 85 per cent of the world’s manufactured goods, against about 23 per cent in 1750. That widening gap, which historians call the Great Divergence, was the period’s largest economic legacy.

WHY IT HAPPENED

Steam and cable shrank distance. Steamships and undersea cables cut the cost of moving goods and messages so far that distance stopped protecting local markets. Compound engines, which used their steam twice, cut the coal a steamship burned, iron and later steel hulls made ships larger, and coaling stations from Gibraltar to Singapore refuelled them. Undersea cables, insulated with gutta-percha, a latex from Malayan trees, carried telegraph messages beneath the oceans. Bulky goods such as grain and cotton could now be traded profitably across the world, the global version of what railways had done for Britain.

Industry demanded raw materials. Factories in Europe and the United States consumed cotton, jute, wool, rubber, copper, tin, palm oil and grain on a scale no local supply could meet. Lubricants and soap for industrial Europe came from West African palm oil, sacks for the world’s grain from Bengal jute, tyres from Congo and Amazon rubber. The search for these materials pulled distant regions into the industrial economy as suppliers, on terms they rarely set.

Free trade backed by force. Britain preached free trade, commerce with few barriers, and, where rulers refused it, imposed it. The Opium War, fought after China tried to stop British opium sales, opened China in 1842, treaties forced low import taxes on the Ottoman Empire, Egypt, Persia, Siam (now Thailand) and Japan, and the colonial government kept India’s import taxes low on British goods. The historians Gallagher and Robinson called this the imperialism of free trade, meaning control through trade and treaties where possible and conquest where necessary. Open markets for industrial goods were often the first demand a gunboat made.

Capital from London. London’s capital shaped what the rest of the world built: British investors held about £4 billion of overseas assets by 1914, much of it in 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 went where profits and political security lay, so it built the railways and ports that carried raw materials out, and few of the factories that might have competed with Britain’s.

WHAT IT CHANGED

Nationalism grows from economic grievance. Economic grievance gave Indian nationalism its sharpest argument. The Indian nationalist Dadabhai Naoroji argued that British rule drained India’s wealth, and the Indian National Congress, a party of educated Indians founded in 1885 that later led the independence movement, took up the charge. In 1905 the swadeshi movement in Bengal, whose name means ‘of one’s own country’, boycotted British cloth and urged Indians to buy Indian goods. The cloth that had once marked India’s loss became a weapon of its resistance.

A world of migrants. Steamships made mass migration cheap, because a voyage that had taken six weeks under sail now took about ten days. Tens of millions of Europeans crossed the Atlantic, and Indian and Chinese workers moved to plantations and mines across the tropics, many under indenture, a contract binding them to an employer for years. The epilogue’s arrows trace these movements and ask who gained from them, and who was carried away from home by debt and coercion. Cheap passages let labour move to wherever capital needed it, which redrew the population of whole continents.

The Great Divergence hardens. The Great Divergence, the gap between the West and the rest, became part of the world economy’s structure: by 1900 Europe and the United States made about 85 per cent of the world’s manufactured goods, and the income gap between the industrial core and most of Asia and Africa had widened enormously. Historians still debate how much of it came from industrial competition and how much from empire. A gap that had been modest in 1750 now separated the countries that made goods from those that supplied them, and 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?

Industrial competition did real and lasting damage. Lancashire’s machines made cloth so cheaply that Bengal’s weavers lost their export markets, and the economists Clingingsmith and Williamson argue that India’s share of world manufacturing would have fallen steeply even under Indian rule, since India’s own wages and food prices had risen after the Mughal empire, which had ruled most of India, fragmented and droughts struck. Imperial rule shaped how the damage fell. The colonial government kept import taxes low on British goods and from 1896 taxed Indian mill cloth, guaranteed British railway investors their returns from Indian taxes, and paid for an army and administration that nationalists such as Naoroji called a drain. The historian Tirthankar Roy warns against assuming total ruin, since weaving by hand adapted and Indian-owned mills grew. A balanced answer is that industrial technology made the decline of Indian hand industry likely, and empire removed the tools, such as taxes on imports and an investing state, that Germany, the United States and Japan used to industrialise. Competition set the challenge, and political power decided who could answer it.

AN INTERESTING FACT

Steam made the whole world a journey of weeks: in 1889–90 the American journalist Nellie Bly travelled around it in 72 days, beating the fictional record of Phileas Fogg in Jules Verne’s novel Around the World in Eighty Days (1872). Her route was a tour of this chapter’s map: steamers through the Suez Canal to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Singapore and Hong Kong, a crossing of the Pacific to San Francisco, and a train across the United States. Verne could plot an eighty-day circuit only because the Suez Canal opened in 1869 and a railway first crossed India from Bombay to Calcutta in 1870, so even the era’s fiction ran on its new infrastructure.

EPILOGUE · 1750–1914 · 1914

Who Won and Who Lost

Measured by output, the Industrial Revolution produced a small group of clear winners. In 1750, by the economic historian Paul Bairoch’s estimates, Europe and the United States made under a quarter of the world’s manufactured goods, and China and India together about 57 per cent; by 1900 they made about 85 per cent, while China’s share fell to about six per cent and India’s to under two. Britain, the pioneer, had become the world’s banker: by 1914 the City of London, its financial district, had invested about £4 billion abroad, in railways, mines and loans to foreign governments. Within the industrial countries the gains spread slowly but widely after 1850, as real wages, pay measured by what it could buy, rose and working hours fell. The Panama Canal, opened in August 1914, was that confident world’s last great work. The lead fed on itself, because the profits of industry paid for the loans, railways and fleets that extended it across the globe.

Organised labour was how many workers claimed a share of the new wealth, and by 1914 it had become a political force across the industrial world. British trade unions grew from the skilled trades of the 1850s, through the dock strike of 1889 that organised unskilled workers, to about four million members by 1914. In Germany the Social Democratic Party, a Marxist workers’ party that the chancellor Otto von Bismarck had banned from 1878 to 1890, became the largest party in the Reichstag, the elected national parliament, in 1912, and in 1889 socialist parties from about twenty countries met in Paris to found an alliance, the Second International, which called for an eight-hour day and made 1 May an international workers’ day. Governments answered with repression and with reform. Bismarck’s Germany introduced state insurance against sickness, accidents and old age in the 1880s, and Britain followed with old-age pensions in 1908 and national insurance in 1911, which paid sick and unemployed workers from contributions by workers, employers and the state. Industrial capitalism survived its critics partly by adopting some of their demands.

Outside the industrial core the balance was harsher, and two costs stand out because they are still unfolding. The first is inequality between regions. Colonies and economies forced open by treaty supplied cotton, jute for sacks, rubber, tin and grain on terms set by others, and when harvests failed the market could fail them too: in the famine of 1876–78 in southern and western India, centred on Madras, between about 5.5 and 10 million people died while grain kept moving to market and abroad. Poverty and cheap steamship passages drove millions abroad: some 50 million Europeans left for the Americas and Australia, and over a million Indians under indenture, a contract binding labourers to plantations for years. The second cost is the climate. Coal had freed industry from the limits of the land, yet in 1896 the Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius in Stockholm calculated that doubling the carbon dioxide in the air would warm the earth by several degrees. The energy that made the industrial world rich had begun to change the planet.

WHY IT HAPPENED

Coal-powered productivity. The industrial countries’ wealth rested on machines driven by coal, which multiplied what each worker could produce. Britain mined about 287 million tons of coal in 1913, its all-time peak, and exported about a third of it to fuel other nations’ ships and factories. Countries with coal, capital and skills pulled ahead, and countries without them, or prevented from using them, fell behind. Energy was the foundation of the whole divergence.

Diffusion through states and markets. Industrialisation spread fastest where states could protect new industries, build railways and educate engineers, as in Germany, the United States and Japan. Late starters borrowed Britain’s technology and invented their own institutions, from Germany’s investment banks, which lent long-term to industry, to the model factories built by Japan’s Meiji government, the modernising regime that took power in 1868. The result by 1914 was an industrial core of several countries competing for markets, resources and colonies. Adapting borrowed methods to local conditions decided which followers succeeded.

Empire and unequal exchange. Colonial rule and unequal treaties, agreements forced on weaker states that fixed low tariffs, or import taxes, kept much of Asia and Africa in the role of supplier of raw materials and buyer of manufactures. Low tariffs, guaranteed returns for foreign investors and forced labour regimes such as the Congo Free State, the private colony of King Leopold II of Belgium, channelled the gains toward the industrial powers. The map’s tan and blue show how far that system reached by 1914. Political power decided who would capture the gains of the new technology.

Workers and voters organised. The losers of early industrialisation inside Britain did not remain powerless. Luddites, who smashed machines, Chartists, who demanded votes for working men, trade unionists and socialists built organisations that won the vote, legal unions and the first welfare laws, and similar movements spread across Europe, the United States and Japan. Their pressure explains why industrial societies grew more equal in income, though not in wealth, after the middle of the century. Reform came from below as well as from above.

WHAT IT CHANGED

An industrial war. The industrial powers’ greatest new capacity in 1914 was for total war, waged with a nation’s whole economy, and in August they turned their steel, chemicals, railways and factories against each other. The First World War mobilised whole economies for machine guns, heavy artillery and poison gas on a scale the American Civil War had only foreshadowed, and estimates of military deaths run from about 9 to 11 million. The industrial powers had never traded more with one another than in 1913, so the war showed that economic interdependence alone could not keep the peace.

Catching up, slowly. The Great Divergence, the gap between the industrial West and the rest of the world, began to narrow only in the late twentieth century. After 1945 many former colonies sought to industrialise behind tariffs, taxes on imports, and from the 1950s Japan, then South Korea, Taiwan and finally China followed the path of earlier latecomers such as Germany: state guidance, protection and exports. Their success shows that the divergence of the nineteenth century rested on circumstances, such as capital, technology and the power to set tariffs, that later policy could change.

The carbon century. Coal, and then oil, powered the twentieth century. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, about 280 parts per million before industrialisation, had reached about 300 by 1914 and passed 400 in the 2010s. The first scientists to connect burning coal with a warmer planet, such as the Swedes Arvid Högbom and Svante Arrhenius, worked in the industrial world this atlas describes, and the costs they glimpsed are now global.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

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

The clearest winners by 1914 were the owners of capital and the populations of the industrial core, who were richer, healthier and more numerous than any earlier society, and whose working classes had begun, after 1850, to share in the gains. The clearest losers were those who paid without benefiting: enslaved people whose cotton fed the first mills, handworkers from Lancashire to Bengal whose trades vanished, colonised peoples supplying raw materials on others’ terms, and the dead of famines and forced labour. Judging whether the price was worth paying raises a problem historians cannot settle with evidence alone, because the people who paid and the people who gained were mostly different, and often separated by generations and continents. Two observations help to settle it. Much of the cost came from political choices, such as slavery, empire and minimal famine relief, which were not inevitable parts of industrial technology. The gains also spread, eventually, far beyond the first industrial countries. A defensible judgement is that industrialisation was a transformation worth having, achieved at a price that was far higher than it needed to be and paid by the wrong people.

AN INTERESTING FACT

Svante Arrhenius was not alarmed by his own calculation. At the rates of coal burning in his day, he expected a doubling of carbon dioxide to take something like three thousand years, and in his popular book Worlds in the Making (1908) he suggested that a warmer climate might bring milder, steadier weather and richer harvests to the colder parts of the earth, Sweden included. He did not foresee the growth of coal and oil burning in the twentieth century, which has raised carbon dioxide by about half in little more than a century and a half. Arrhenius got the direction of change right and the timetable badly wrong, because he could not foresee how fast industry would keep growing.