#31 Britain and the 19th Century
The year 1815 ended 65 years of inter-European wars and prepared the political conditions for France, Germany, and Italy to industrially transform their societies. The following 100 years, between 1815 and 1914, were relatively peaceful in Europe but not in the rest of the world. Colonial invasions continued both in the continents of Africa and China. The inter-European wars that ended in 1815, and the processes of industrialisation that followed, were merely a historical interlude before the Europeans not only went to war again, but this time involved the rest of the world.
Here and in future blogs I will connect and explain the fundamental causes of twentieth-century bloodletting after 1914. The wars which began in 1914 were not caused by the events in Sarajevo; these were simply the triggers to light the bonfire of nations. By 1914, the nations of Europe were already stacked competitively to decide on who would be the dominant world nation-state, who would own by conquest the worlds colonial peoples. By the beginning of the 20th century, this dramatic global story was ready to be set ablaze.
This and future blogs will attempt to explain this historical story.
The Connection between Industrialisation and Colonisation
Colonisation continued apace throughout the 19th century. European invaders had focused on the Americas during the17th and 18th centuries. New financial resources out of slavery had altered the European social and political landscape. New entrepreneurial classes had arisen and challenged the old Feudal political order. Simultaneously, the Reformation had altered the core framework of ideas, in particular the material understanding of the world. Out of Luther and Calvin, came scientific development and from this came the ability to manipulate the natural world. Cannonballs were to be made from iron ore instead of stone. Small numbers of people began to conduct scientific experiments. Out of this combination of new wealth and material experimentation arose the industrial revolution.
The nineteenth century in Europe was important saw the following important processes occur:
A. The main colonising countries came from Europe (only at the end of the century did Japan and the USA join this small band). Colonisation and industrialisation were closely connected. Whether Industrialisation could have occurred without colonization is unlikely.
B. Industrialisation transformed western Europe. France, Britain, the Netherlands, and then Germany began to experience visible annual economic growth. Their people began to congregate in cities which altered the balance between the countryside and urbanisation. Cities were not new in history, but cities as the dominant form of habitation were unprecedented in history.
C. Last, and not least, the 19th century brought into being what has been called the 'self-regulating market'. The belief that the marketplace should determine the balance between wealth and poverty was also unprecedented in history.
These three historical processes took place throughout the 19th century in Western Europe and the USA. Colonisation, of course, continued unabated. Indeed, colonisation took on a new meaning as the 19th century progressed, as it was the main foreign policy of all wealthy nations. Owning and running other people’s lands provided monopoly control for the invading state: it provided a market for cheap manufactured goods; a monopoly-controlled source of natural resources and last but not least a flow of financial resources from exploiting the peoples, the essence of how colonial peoples were impoverished.
The industrial world of the 19th century arose on the back of structures of economic activity that had arisen throughout the 18th century. This included the wealth imported from colonial India and West Indian Islands, as well as from the trade in slaves and the importation of sugar, cotton, and tobacco. Many of these products needed processing, which in turn created industries and the growth of manufacturing towns at home from the 1750s onwards.
The growth of 19th century manufacturing was built on the back of African born slavery and the taxes of Indian peasants and the subsequent impoverishment of the Indian peoples. Enslaved peoples provided cotton, the raw material, from which industrial textile manufacturing became the leading product of the industrial revolution. The money derived from Indian taxpayers became the backbone of the City of London.
Competitive national industrialisation and colonisation provided many of the conditions for an even greater cataclysmic bloodletting in 1914. Conventional 19th century history books have tended to focus on the growth of the European colonisation separately to industrial development and the 1914 wars that followed.
The 19th century was a time when capitalism finally arrived in Western Europe and the USA. For Britain, the 19th century was already part of phase two of the movement into industrial colonial capitalism. This meant the creation of a market system for labour, land, finance capital and goods, unhindered by the controlling hand of the monarch or state. The creation of all this alone was unprecedented.
19th century France and Germany
Map of the French departments in 1801. By BrightRaven, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
The 19th century for France began with recovery from her defeats in the Napoleonic Wars and then growing into an industrial society free from the limitations of monarchical rule. For Germany to become a centralised secular unity capable of introducing capitalist production, she needed to bring together Austro-Hungary and the small monarchical groupings of the past which had all previously been part of the old Holy Roman Empire.
“Europe in 1812. Political situation before Napoleon's Russian Campaign.” By Alexander Altenhof, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
The 100 years from 1815 to 1914 saw explosive growth of cities and factories across the major European and US nations. Measurable annual growth for these nations alone appeared for the first time in history. Capitalism became the dominant system of production, with its peaks and troughs and regular technological innovations accepted widely as normal. The rhythms of living had been altered as never before. The ancient rural life for the majority became a thing of the past.
The national boundaries within Europe set by the Congress of Vienna in 1815 by Alexander Altenhof, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Industrialisation, Wealth and Poverty
The Industrial Revolutions benefited a small class of owners and traders across Europe. The old wealth of the aristocrats merged with a new industrial owning class in much of Europe. In America, a new hugely wealthy and powerful entrepreneurial class emerged. Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Edison were a few of the well-known names. New wealth and political power at the centre of each society merged seamlessly. During the century, a new set of political rulers emerged.
The ancient ruling classes of the old regimes of Europe had been the lords and lesser gentry who owned the landed estates at the behest of the monarch. Like ruling classes, the world over, they had an intimate tie to the peasants who tilled the land and paid taxes or tithes. In inevitable times of famine, taxes and tithes had been reduced, and staple crops saved from good years were dispensed to the peasants. These intimate ties between lords and peasantry had been part of the land for centuries.
The processes of the Industrial Revolution broke these ties irrevocably. First came the revolution from the 17th century where sheep replaced people in village after village. Land became a commodity to be bought and sold, and peasants expendable. New landlords replaced the peasants with sheep. Destitute people littered the land, and many were sent over to the American colonies and later to other suitable colonised lands such as Australia. All the colonising European states used their colonies to remove their own destitute people.
Towns and cities became the other repository for landless people. The ancient ruling classes might have had sympathy for the human needs of the new urban poor in the 19th century. But the new ruling classes were made up of people who had made their profits in the colonies, or traders and shipbuilders. They were used to slavery and quick profits. Many bought large landed estates and found their way into the political system. Most old feudal European ruling classes were able to integrate new wealth into their old system during the 18th and 19th-centuries. It is not surprising that these people developed an ideology around 'free trade' that considered labour to be an expendable commodity rather than coming from human beings.
Traveller’s stories can sometimes be telling. Domingo Sacramento, a leading Argentine-born figure, travelled widely in the United States and Europe. In 1847, he published his Travels in the United States. He visited Le Havre in France and comments:
Ah, Europe. Sad mixture of greatness and abjection, of wisdom and brutalisation, sublime and filthy receptacle of all that elevates and degrades man, kings and lackeys, monuments and pest houses, I have not been able to rid myself of the bad effects of this first impression... France was simply a hopeless backward place with regard to things her considered important... he compared France with the USA...In France there are 270,000 voters, that is among 36 million individuals.
- Sacramento’s Travels in the US cited in 1847 Princeton University Press Legacy Library pp. 14-15
It is important to explain why working people had no support whatever to handle the ups and downs of the new environment of large factories, throughout the period from 1815 right through to 1945.
The need for skilled technicians provided many new opportunities that would create a large middle class into the twentieth century. The bulk of the people who created the new working class included the Irish unskilled ‘navies’ who arrived in Britain after they had planted the potato crop in March and April; and the landless peasants who had had their land rights removed or had been driven off to be replaced by sheep. These people were often mobile urbanised and always without land.
These men built the waterways in the late 18th century, the railways, and roads, in the 19th century; they worked in the new coal mines and made iron and steel products in the new industries. They benefited hardly at all. Most of their wages were taken by the landowners. At the end of the 19th century, the English poor were mostly still uneducated and poor by any standard. The new urbanised working class had lost recourse to their fields for food. They relied entirely on wages from work, that is when they were fit enough to work. The poor laws provided the bare minimum to stay alive.
Britain and the 19th Century
Britain's 19th century was the country's finest years, as many history books tell us. Britain had ended the Napoleonic wars in 1815 as the sole victor. Her major European competitors were in ruins and had lost control of their various colonial empires, as documented in the previous blogs. However, the working people of Britain received no solace and by the end of the next century, were on average 4 inches shorter in height than their richer counterparts in the cities.
It is now widely accepted that most of the people lived in largely unexamined misery, despite the fact Britain was scientifically the most advanced nation on earth at this point. Urban squalor and environmental degradation consumed the cities. The newly created system of free markets left the people in deep misery. Unparalleled wealth existed alongside mass starvation, during a period of history when the country transformed itself into the wealthiest and most dominant world power. Life expectancy, a key measurement of human wellbeing, increased from 42 for females and 40 for males in 1841 to 44 and 48 by 1891; but that provides no nuance in the statistics for the growing middle classes.
The 19th century saw the UK’s general prestige and wealth rise to world status.
Industrial growth has been written about endlessly in a multiplicity of books and does not need repeating here. The following key themes that emerge from this time are as follows:
The growth of industrial production, especially from the cotton industry.
The new technology, from the spinning Jenny onwards, towards iron and steel technology and electricity later in the century.
The growth of canals, roads and railways transformed communication, travel and the movement of goods.
Urbanisation and the growth of towns and cities.
The developing workers’ movements throughout the century.
The slow movement towards democracy, as more peoples obtained national voting rights.
The Irish question, which included the last major European famine in the 1840s. Ireland was constitutionally part of Great Britain, but she was treated as if she was a colony. Questions around Ireland plagued the British Parliament throughout the century.
The growth of shipping and military technology. The former ended in steamships run first by coal and oil, and the latter with the machine gun capable of killing on a previously unknown scale.
The 19th century was the real beginning of the world we know today for the British, French, Dutch, and USA. The shift from a rural-based, pre-industrial, feudally organised world to one with urban cities with a large impoverished working class was monumental. What changed during this period was that the world went from being determined by the movement of nature’s annual cycle to urban-based militarised clock-based work.
The next blog will concentrate on:
1. the industrialisation of Europe in terms of ‘the harnessing of new energies'.
2. the establishment of Britain as the first major world power, along with the ideas that held it all together; an attempt to explain why it all fell apart with the war that began in 1914.
3. the growth of the City of London as the money market: the place and framework for world trade and especially the Gold Standard.
4. the uneven growth of the economy, with its ups and downs, and the unequal distribution of wealth.
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Before 1815, there had been no global world power. Today in the 21st century we have become used to living with a single dominant power. We are so used to this fact that no one questions it. It is possible that ancient China might have decided to become such a power; she had the technical shipbuilding knowledge, but she showed no interest. A world power needed a superior military force, a vibrant economy to support its military might, a navy able to travel across the world, and some purpose that encompassed the world.