#25 Transformation is Revolutionary

In the last half of the 18th century, war was followed by colonial revolution in the Americas, then by Revolution in France, and then continent-wide war. It was this terrible set of violent events, one after the other, which swept away much of the old feudal order, and provided conditions for industrial capitalism in large parts of Europe.

A key pillar of these blogs and the arguments that will be put forward is the idea of “transformation”. Britain, France and the Netherlands slowly and violently transformed their societies ready for industrialisation over 200 years. Germany unified its small ancient kingdoms and followed suit. The USA destroyed all vestiges of the ancient civilisations of the indigenous people of the continent thus transforming their environment ready for Industrialisation.  A key component of transformation was the wide acceptance of private property as the centrepiece of national policy, especially land. Private property had never before been the cornerstone of national policies.

The rest of the world was not transformed until after 1918 and especially after 1945. The transformation of Europe and the USA had been violent and over long periods as peoples and ideas were violently debated. Old axioms of the ancient societies had to be destroyed to allow free reign to private property and greed as the new ‘natural’ order.

Transformation is Revolutionary

The transformation from an ancient society towards an industrial urban capitalist world has nearly always been a revolutionary process which has torn society apart. The almost complete breakdown of societies in the multi-layered wars between the 1780s and 1815, and then from 1914 to 1945, reflect these long-term processes at work. At the end of both periods, not only was the world a very different place with many millions of people dead, but many of the necessary conditions towards the industrial urban capitalist world had also been established.

It is important to that understand that all the ancient pre-capitalist empires had been destroyed by 1918: the Holy Roman Empire in 1815, and the Ottoman, Chinese, Russian and Austro Hungarian by 1918. Fundamental changes at the centre of political power were set out in law. Capitalism requires private capital accumulation. Old boundaries of small political entities were prised apart to make way for larger states, Germany was the main example. A new international system of colonialism, trade, investment and control of money was set up in the 19th century. Again, this new system was broken by the second wave of death and destruction between 1914 and 1945. After these wars, the colonised societies became free to develop their economies for the first time, and the entire system of capital accumulation was revised.

Historians rightly focus on the horrors of these periods, but few have the perspective to understand the transformation process at work. In the 20th and 21st centuries, all people on the planet had been forced into a transformative revolution.

Why did America, Western Europe and Japan manage to transform their societies in the 19th century to industrial capitalism before the rest of the world in the 20th century? It is difficult to exaggerate the difficulties facing any people who decided to make such a move. In 1815, most societies were ancient and could trace their origins back for a minimum of 1000 years. Why should they voluntarily throw out established religious and ethical values and ideas that had stood the test of time, and replace them with secular frames of reference? The answer is that none did so voluntarily. Even the peoples who began the processes of movement towards industrial capitalism, the Europeans, were working under continuous pressures of war and wished to retain all that was precious and valuable.

The Americans and the Australians had to kill the existing indigenous peoples to free up not just the land but also ideas, so they were not encumbered with resistance. The colonised of course did not have any options. Of the rest - and I include the Russians in this - they maintained their ancient forms of leadership and their relations to their populations to the very last. Only the Japanese were able and willing to overthrow an ancient and established government to industrialise and colonise.

Those non-colonised peoples at the beginning of the 19th century across the world - the Chinese, Japanese, Egyptians and the Ottomans - fully recognised the existential threat that European colonial aggression and invasion posed to their ways of governing themselves. Knowledge of the wars in Europe under Napoleon, 1793 to 1815, and then the invasion of China in 1842, soon reached rulers across the world. Pankaj Mishra’s excellent book From the Ruins of Empire argues that world leaders knew about the fate that could befall them, and so they would take steps to prevent it.

Buying western arms was not enough to defend themselves from invasion. Russia, often considered by scholars as a European power, had been following this strategy for many years. She was also protected by her huge landmass. China followed only after she had been invaded. No regime attempted an industrial capitalist transformation, which included overthrowing the established government, because all moved under fierce duress. Japan alone understood that only a near-complete process that overthrew their ancient form of government would achieve this result. Russia and China had not fully understood that re-arming was simply not enough to keep the wild beast of the Europeans from invading.

It is worth noting that the Europeans, who initiated the whole process, had not planned to industrialise; each nation-state in Europe was merely struggling for dominance over the others. Industrialisation was not a process planned by governments. Rather industrial capitalism was initiated by market forces, and the ideological ethos of the age allowed a combination of science and greed to work side by side.

Why Did China not have an Industrial Revolution?

For at least 70 years, historians and scientists have asked why did China not industrialise herself. Joseph Needham, perhaps the most important intellectual from Europe to visit China in the 1940s, asked this vital question. Most recently, Kenneth Pomeranz in his book The Great Divergence asks the same question. Pomeranz argues:

Why did sustained industrial growth begin in Northwest Europe, despite surprising similarities?  The Great Divergence brings new insight to one of the classic questions of history: Why did sustained industrial growth begin in Northwest Europe, despite surprising similarities between advanced areas of Europe and East Asia?

As Pomeranz shows, as recently as 1750, parallels between these two parts of the world were very high in life expectancy, consumption, product and factor markets, and the strategies of households. Perhaps most surprisingly, Pomeranz demonstrates that the Chinese and Japanese cores were no worse off ecologically than Western Europe. Core areas throughout the eighteenth-century Old World faced comparable local shortages of land-intensive products – shortages that were only partly resolved by trade.

Many global historians have been transfixed by this question for many decades. But is it the right question? Is “normality” an industrial urban society where money has become a thing in itself, where the values of becoming rich have dominated the ethics of the society as a whole? The main body of western scholarship assumes that we Europeans are the 'norm', and therefore that industrialisation was the process to be aimed for.

What occurred in Western Europe was abnormal in all history. It was so globally encompassing that all of us have been forced to follow suit. The argument of these blogs is not that we can turn back history; but rather that normality was represented by the older societies in Asia and Africa that had developed their rural-based systems, their ideological understanding of nature and means of production. Many had developed widespread global trade, yet in essence, remained rurally based, historically they were normal. Our present world is the new abnormal. Our world has created a historically unique secular way of understanding life and nature. We have wrenched this way of understanding away from long-held religious views which understood humans, nature and the world as a whole. As it turned out, every society has had to be forcibly pulled out of its past to produce their industrial revolution; that is why peoples resisted for the new European model of development for so long. The Pomeranz view of normality has ignored this religious-secular frame. 

What Europe did was to rip up global history and force the rest of the world into their model of industrial and urban capitalist development. As we saw in earlier blogs: transformations from the feudal systems of power and thought took 300 years and an excessive amount of violence to achieve.

Photograph: “Street view of Canton” (Guangzhou) by Afong Lai (Chinese, 1839–1900).

---

Copyright Notice. This blog is published under the Creative Commons licence. If anyone wishes to use any of the writing for scholarly or educational purposes they may do so as long as they correctly attribute the author and the blog. If anyone wishes to use the material for commercial purpose of any kind, permission must be granted from the author.