Week 9 - The Industrial Revolutions I and II in Europe

• Our broad topic this semester is the notion of Westernization of the world as modernization
• This week we'll focus on the economic foundations of European power
  • Our topic then, is industrialization, which roughly begins in late 18th c. Britain and takes speed during the 19th c. at the end of which we even talk about a Second Industrialization
    • What is the industrialization associated with usually?

Outline

• Outline
  • Overview of the Industrialization in Europe
  • Social and Political Impact of Industrialization

Introduction to Industrialization

1 Overview of the Industrialization in Europe

• For a long time small manufacturing leading the manufacture economies of Europe (imalat/production)
  • Clothing, production of tools, pots pans
• A number of factors will contribute to the development of industrialization: Which are they, what do you need for industrialization and how does it work?

Factors Driving Industrialization

• One of the first steps in Industrial revolution is the development of credit institutions, banks, lending money against interest (this was previously done privately)
  • Wealth accumulated by trade
  • Credit favors investment
  • Land consolidation, modernizing equipment
• Communications also dramatically evolved with the advent of steamships, railroads, etc.
• In its turn agricultural productivity rose dramatically in those years
• The economic push led to large-scale phenomena of urbanization, cities developed very quickly, drawing people from the countryside even on a seasonal basis
• Mechanized production slowly revolutionized the textile and metallurgical industries, increasingly bringing together workers, including women and children in large workshops and factories.
• Industrialization undercut artisans with the abolition throughout Europe of the guilds
• Impressive rise in the population of Europe:
  • Population rose from 187M in 1800 to 266M in 1866.

Agricultural Production and Capital

• Agricultural production sustains the rise in population.
  • It also allows the accumulation of capital which can be reinvested in commercialized farming or in manufacturing
    • More and more lands earlier considered useless (marshes, bogs, etc./bataklık) are being reclaimed and cultivated.
  • Farming also accompanies the development of cities
    • Many agricultural productions are specialized in supplying the urban markets
  • This development of agriculture is also increasing certain disparities as it leads to a consolidation of plots
    • Greater farms develop but also a proletarianized landless agricultural class develops => Enclosure movement

Transportation Revolution and Railroads

• Transportation revolution
  • Steamboats and railroads
• First train began to haul coal in England in 1820
  • Britain had about 100 miles of rail in 1830 and 6,600 in 1852.

WHY IS THE DEVELOPMENT OF RAILROADS SO IMPORTANT?

• Railroad development is a significant catalyst for investment
  • Private investment completely financed the development of railroad during that period
• Railroad construction also spurs the metallurgical industry
• It also reduces significantly the costs of transportation
• Things pick up speed during the Second Industrial Revolution from the mid-19th c. onward

Steel and the Second Industrial Revolution

• Steel led the industrial revolution then electricity accelerated European economic growth providing power for the industry => When both were incorporated into the manufacturing process their effect was essentially to allow prices of production and therefore of distribution to drop significantly
• Inventor Bessemer, 1856 devised a method which allowed the mass production of steel at low cost
  • Steel's strength, durability and flexibility gave it a marked advantage over iron => Steel became widely used in a variety of areas, weapons (Krupp dynasty) and transportations most significantly => The first huge conglomerates or big companies were actually steel producing companies
    • Rail networks extend their reach into the countryside, carrying manufactured goods and returning with meat, vegetables, fresh milk and fruit for burgeoning cities
    • Three years after Bessemer's invention, the first British ship constructed of steel slides into the sea.
    • Steamships bring American cereal grains, cattle and meat to Western European ports reducing their prices
    • The drop in the prices of food has a great effect on Europe's demographic explosion: Between 1870 and 1914, Europe's population increased by half, rising from 290 to 435 million.

Electricity and Communication Technologies

• The wide adoption of electricity made possible the invention of the electromagnetic telegraph, the undersea cable, and the telephone and after the invention of the incandescent lamp in 1879 by Thomas Edison, it was adopted in an increasing number of residences
• However the real usage of electricity was again industrial => The advantage of electricity is that it can be transported easily as opposed to water, coal and gas: The steel, textile, shoe-making and construction industries came to depend upon electric power
  • It also turns night into day and allows plants to continue to work non-stop

Electricity and Public Transportation

• Electricity also had a very deep impact onto public transportation => Electric power led to the construction of modern public transportation systems, first trams and then subways. Mass transportation transforms residential patterns in large cities
  • 1863, London underground, 1900 Paris metro, 1904, New York subway

Automobile Industry and Financial Concentration

• After Carl Benz puts together in 1885 a small automobile with internal combustion engine the automobile industry explodes
• Automobile manufacturing quickly became a major catalyst for industrial growth and the implementation of new production methods, stimulating the production of steel, aluminum, rubber and tools =>
  • Trickle-down effects: Car travel necessitated better roads. Governments ordered the paving of roads and gas stations began to dot the landscape
  • A huge innovation is the assembly line and particularly the method called Taylorization which will later be adopted by most industries
• The creation of huge conglomerates in turn facilitated financial concentration in the forms of investment banks and the stock exchange
  • The influence of the City, London's banking and finance district extended around the world, channeling capital to innumerable countries within and beyond the empire
  • German banks play a great role in the industrialization of Germany => While providing investment capital, large investment banks acquired large blocks of industrial shares particularly in heavy industries like coal mining, electricity and railways
• Naturally all these changes deeply affected the lives of millions of Europeans, sometimes for the best, other times for the worse

Transition to Social and Political Impact

2 Social and Political Impact of Industrialization

• Urbanization = marked increase in the populations leaving in towns

Urbanization and Spatial Segregation

• Urbanization also creates dynamics of spatial segregation
  • The poor and working-class are pushed in the peripheries of the cities
  • The wealthier no longer want to leave in the same neighborhoods as with the poor

Expansion of the Middle Classes

• Expansion of the middle-classes = people who are not nobles nor are workers or peasants depending on their manual labor
  • Diverse group including well-connected banking families, industrial magnates, lawyers, notaries and the petty bourgeoisie (shopkeepers of modest means and expectations, wine merchants, schoolteachers, some craftsmen)
  • Roughly 15 to 25% of the total population in Western Europe
• The middle classes swelled during the Second Industrial Revolution taking their places in Europe's burgeoning cities. So did the lower-middle class occupations
  • Architects needed draughtsmen, companies needed accountants and bookkeepers, and the London underground and Paris subway needed agents
  • The expansion of governmental functions generated thousands of jobs: tax collectors, postal workers, food and drug inspectors and recorders of official documents
  • The number of schoolteachers increased dramatically between the 1870s and 1914

Education Reforms and Schooling Functions

• All of this necessitated in turn huge efforts from all the countries in the matter of education (which provided social mobility for many peasant families)
• In the last decades of the 19th c. more governments enacted educational reforms.
  • In Britain in 1880, Parliament passed a law requiring that all children between five and ten years of age attend primary school up to age twelve beginning in 1899 and in 1891 primary education became free
    • Besides familiarizing young people with the letters, primary schools in late Victorian Britain sought to teach them how to be good Englishmen and good English wives, idealizing social harmony in Britain while espousing British superiority over the indigenous peoples of the empire
  • In France the Ferry Laws (1879-1881) made primary schools free, obligatory and secular for all children from age three to thirteen => French was bulldozed over regional dialects
  • Spectacular results in overall literacy => only 6% of adult men don't know how to read in France at the turn of the century; in Germany at the turn of the century less than 1% of the population remained illiterate
• Schooling had four functions in the eyes of European governments:
  • Feed the industry with skilled and reasonably educated people
  • Cultivate nationalism especially with a view to combat against other, potentially threatening ideologies such as socialism and communism
  • Instill a sense of imperial pride in little children and racial superiority over indigenous peoples
  • Break the hold of religious authorities (the Church essentially) who could challenge the power of the state (1905 French Law on secular education)
• Transformation of the notion of "respectability": Being respectable is no longer linked to privilege but to principles of hard work, obedience
  • Getting rich is becoming respectable according to this philosophy
    • Getting bankrupt is a great social stigma.

Middle-Class Culture and Childhood

• Middle-class culture and development of notions of childhood and adolescence
  • In wealthier middle-class families this also comes with a separation of spaces and rooms
  • By contrast in peasant and working-class families by contrast there was no such separation between rooms and children often had to work.

Working-Class Conditions and Division of Labor

• Aside from this expanding middle-class, great development of working-class living in extremely poor and unsanitary conditions
• Income of a working-class family is mostly concentrated on nutrition and above all bread; then comes clothing and lodging; anything in addition is a luxury
• Division of labor
  • Up to 40% of working-class women worked as maids and house-servants
  • Country women spun and wove wool, linen and cotton and worked in fields or gardens
  • Urban women worked as laundresses, seamstresses or street merchants and peddlers
  • Increasingly, women work in textile factories and clothing workshops
    • They usually earn less than half of what working-class men do
  • High rise in prostitution which is not only symbolically described as a moral failure but in fact tolerated by governments because it corresponds to a demand of middle-class men => Exploitation of women which is tolerated by the state
• Child labor
  • Children had always worked in the fields with their parents
  • With industrialization, children are also employed in tasks where their small size can be useful
    • Extracting objects stuck in operating machines
    • Very low wages, about ¼ what their fathers earnt
    • In Britain a law passed in 1833 bans work for children under 9 years old
• With urbanization and moving to the cities comes the end of the community support from fellow villagers.
  • Atomization, many people left to their own
• Because of the rapid way in which the cities and the industries of the cities grow, the living conditions are very difficult
  • Badly built housing amid sewage and garbage and unhealthy still waters and streams
    • Big outbreaks of epidemics
    • One-third of all people died of epidemics in Britain between 1848 and 1872

Migration Overseas

• Migration:
  • Migration overseas: Between 1816 and 1850, over 5M Europeans push overseas, particularly during the "hungry forties"
    • Germans second largest group of migrants

Literary Criticism of Industrialization

• Criticism of the effects of industrialization
  • Novelists
    • Charles Dickens describing English industrial cities as Coketown, cf. Hard Times, 1854

Charitable Activities and Fear of Insurgency

• Charitable activities emerged as an important part of middle-class life in 19th century Europe, often in close connection to religion
  • Moralizing campaigns directed at the working class by associations made by merchants, lawyers, members of the professions and manufacturers
• Behind all this there is also a fear of popular insurgency
  • Cf. organization in England by Robert Peel of the bobbies in the cities

Responses to Poverty - Malthus and Mill

• Different means are considered to combat what are considered to be the adverse effects of industrialization in terms of poverty and morality of the poor
  • One influential thinker is Thomas Malthus (1766-1834): English clergyman preoccupied with effects of overpopulation
    • Rise of population would rapidly outdistance the capacity of farmers to produce enough food
    • Education necessary
  • Another one is John Stuart Mill and his Principles of Political Economy (1848)
    • In contrast to Adam Smith, does not think that everything should be left to the invisible hand
    • The state needs to intervene to rectify the adverse effects of industrialization

British Poor Relief and Workhouses

• Great-Britain one of the first countries to implement a state policy of poor relief (1795)
  • Poor receive a small percentages as supplementary wage from tax levied from big properties => Speenhamland system
    • A bad consequence of this system => employers find justification in paying smaller salaries
    • The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 puts an end to this system
    • Poor people without jobs are just being incarcerated in workhouses that function like prisons
    • The consequence of this is that poor families were broken apart
    • There were 200000 workhouses inmates in England in 1841