How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity (56 page)

As he prepared to return to the United States, Fulton ordered the latest steam engine model from Boulton and Watt. He had it shipped to the United States (by sailboat, of course) and used it in 1807 to power a steamboat that eventually became known as the
Clermont
. The boat was 150 feet long and 16 feet wide and had a paddle wheel on each side—this came to be a classic steamboat design. It could sustain a speed of about five miles an hour. The
Clermont
was an immediate commercial success, carrying passengers on the Hudson River between New York City and the state capital at Albany. The boat could make this 150-mile trip in about thirty hours, far faster than any other means of travel. And it was much cheaper—to haul freight the same distance by wagon cost hundreds of times more.
¹⁷

Once the
Clermont
had shown the way, steamboats soon crowded the American waterways, especially the Ohio, the Mississippi, and the Great Lakes. Nor were steamboats limited to America. Soon western Europe’s rivers were crowded with steamboats, too. Eventually oceangoing steamboats were constructed.

Urbanization and Agriculture

The rapidly growing demand for factory workers drew large numbers of people from rural areas to the cities. Here, too, Britain led the world. In 1700 about 13 percent of England’s residents lived in towns having populations of 10,000 or more. A century later 24 percent did so. In 1600 the population of London was about 200,000; by 1700 it had increased to 575,000; and by 1800 about 960,000 lived in London.
¹⁸
Early in the twentieth century Britain became the first nation wherein the majority of people lived in urban areas.

The early and rapid migration of workers from rural areas to the cities was possible only because of corresponding increases in the productivity of agriculture: between 1700 and 1850 British agricultural output more than trebled.
¹⁹
By the early eighteenth century—even before machines played a major role in replacing agricultural labor—British farms had become more productive than those in western Europe. For one thing, as is discussed in the next chapter, British taxes were so low that farmers were not discouraged from investing in improvements, as they were in Europe. In addition, urbanization raised the prices for farm products, and many farmers used their increased incomes to buy more land. The average size of British farms greatly increased, making for savings in scale. British agriculture, moreover, was no longer mired in traditional peasant-landlord relations, which discouraged progress in Europe. Instead, landlords were free to pursue new methods and new crops.

Even as farm technology produced its immense benefits, however, Britain’s population grew so much that the nation came to rely on imported food. Of course, given Britain’s large volume of manufactured exports, this was a favorable exchange.

Modernity and Its Discontents

From the start, the Industrial Revolution has been denounced as a catastrophe that devastated the quality of life. Critics have imagined a now-lost bucolic utopia wherein no one hungered or shivered, and everyone enjoyed doing creative work, with short hours, allowing ample time to tend their vegetable gardens and enjoy an intimate family life. In truth, life in preindustrial rural villages was, as Thomas Hobbes put it, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Most people had little or no conception of the world more than five miles beyond their village. Most families lived without any privacy in one-room hovels. In winter they often shared their dwelling with their livestock. No one ever bathed. From time to time most people went to bed hungry. Seldom did anyone have more than two sets of clothes and often not even that. Most lived by doing backbreaking labor. Half the children did not live to the age of five. And people were old, and often toothless, by forty.

With this reality in mind, we now turn to examining some of the “evils” of industrialization.

Child Labor

Without a doubt, in its early days the Industrial Revolution exploited children to labor in the factories. In 1788 two-thirds of the workers in 143 water-powered cotton mills in England and Scotland were children, some of them younger than twelve.
²⁰
Hours were long—twelve hours a day was not unusual. Pay was low. Conditions often were dangerous and even debilitating.

But before joining the chorus that condemns the evils of capitalism, consider this: the Industrial Revolution did not initiate child labor, it
ended
it. From earliest times most children had labored long and hard. But by gathering child laborers into factories, industrialization made them visible. This shocked genteel sensibilities to such an extent that governments began to pass laws to reform and subsequently to end these practices. The British Parliament passed Factory Acts in 1833 and 1844 that imposed age limits, reduced the number of hours children could work, and initiated government inspections to enforce these rules. The United States soon began to limit child labor as well. Over the years the rules have been made progressively more restrictive. Throughout the Western world it has become very difficult for anyone under age sixteen to hold any sort of employment.

Technophobia

The technological basis of the Industrial Revolution has always inspired fear and antagonism, especially among urban intellectuals. The romantic movement in art, music, and especially literature was partly a reaction against the rationality embodied in the new technology and against the “pollution” of nature and of spontaneous feelings by the rise of the mechanical. Technophobia began with poets such as Wordsworth and Blake, was celebrated in Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein
(1818), and launched a whole series of movies in which technology dehumanizes or even attacks people—from Charlie Chaplin’s
Modern Times
(1936) to
The Day the Earth Stood Still
(1951) to
The Terminator
(1984) and on to
Avatar
(2009). In the political sphere, technophobia propels many so-called green proposals, such as allowing all the agricultural land in the Midwest to return to a state of nature and outlawing most forms of electrical generation—not only fossil and atomic fuels but even dams.
²¹

This hatred and fear of technology can be traced back to intellectuals who visited the earliest factories and were revolted by the way the
fast-moving machines restricted human action. They found it dehumanizing for people to work in coordination with machines. But many of these critics had never done physical labor and therefore failed to comprehend that factory work was less physically demanding than the traditional forms of labor they deemed to be more natural and humane. The truth is that field hands flocked to the factories not only because they paid much better but also because the work was less grueling. Sadly, too many of the critics’ intellectual descendants have failed to catch on.

Luddite Fantasies

In November 1811 a group of weavers of hosiery and lace destroyed several mechanical looms in Nottinghamshire, England, motivated by fears that they would be reduced to unskilled laborers as machines took over the skilled craft of weaving. These machine smashers came to be known as Luddites. Although their activities soon ended, they remain celebrated among left-wing historians and others who not only accept the premise that the Industrial Revolution displaced many skilled craftsmen but also proclaim that technology today is eliminating workers. Economists have demonstrated both claims to be fallacies.

As to the first, it is true that technology replaced some skilled occupations, but it created many more skilled jobs than it eliminated. Granted, the demand for skilled hand weavers almost vanished as power looms became capable of matching them in quality. But many new highly skilled jobs were created by the need to design, build, install, and repair power looms. Thus, although the Luddites and their intellectual supporters charged that industrialization would lower the standard of living of workers, the opposite happened.

As for the second claim, every several years new alarms are raised that computers, robots, and other advanced technologies will replace human labor, leaving millions permanently unemployed.
²²
In 1961 Walter Buckingham claimed in his well-received book
Automation: Its Impact on Business and People
that “there are about 160,000 unemployed in Detroit who will probably never go back to making automobiles—partly because automation has taken their jobs.”
²³
In fact, 300,000 new jobs opened up in Detroit’s auto plants during the next four years.
²⁴
In 1965 John Snyder claimed that automation was destroying 40,000 American jobs a week, with no end in sight.
²⁵
By now that should have amounted to about 100 million lost jobs. What these experts missed is that although technology
eliminates some jobs, it creates others. Ditchdiggers with shovels were replaced by various machines. But these machines generate jobs—directly, because they need operators and mechanics, as well as workers to build them, design them, and even sell them; indirectly, because they increase construction and other economic activities. The critics also have gone wrong by assuming that demand is fixed, when in fact new wants constantly arise to create new jobs. These alarmists missed the enormous expansion of the service sector, for example.

A Straight Line through the Centuries

The Industrial Revolution was the culmination of the rise of Western civilization that began in Greece twenty-seven centuries ago. It was the product of human freedom and the pursuit of knowledge, which is precisely why it happened where and when it did.

17

Liberty and Prosperity

K
arl Marx got very little right in his explanations of history and social structure. But he got some things half-right. Among them was the claim that the bourgeoisie played the leading role in the Industrial Revolution.

Marx borrowed the term
bourgeoisie
from the French, who used it to identify wealthy, urban commoners. He distorted the term to identify the bourgeoisie as the capitalist ruling class. In the
Communist Manifesto
(1848), Marx and Engels credited this group with having produced the Industrial Revolution: “The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together.” The wealth the bourgeoisie had produced, they said, would be sufficient to fund the coming communist state—although, to achieve this state, the people (the proletariat) must destroy the bourgeoisie. According to Marx, this was inevitable: “What the bourgeoisie … produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.”

Of course, when Marxist regimes appeared in the world, they turned out to be nothing more than the same old command economies. The only difference was that, in comparison with Joseph Stalin and Mao Tse-tung, the Ottoman sultans and the Egyptian pharaohs seemed enlightened and restrained tyrants.

Still, Marx was correct to credit the bourgeoisie—that is, a newly respectable upper middle class—with the Industrial Revolution. The
singular aspect of bourgeois societies is the belief that status and power should be achieved through merit rather than through inheritance. Innovation is valued and rewarded. Consequently, the two primary supports of bourgeois societies are education and liberty.

Bourgeois societies did not rise everywhere at the same time. Initially this class emerged only in the Netherlands and, especially, Britain. In his famous study
The Wealth of Nations
, Adam Smith (1723–1790) referred to Britain as “a nation of shopkeepers.”
¹
Therein lies the answer to the question of why Britain led the way in the Industrial Revolution as well as being unusually prolific in science. In Britain there was sufficient liberty for merit and ambition to prevail, creating a society dominated not by a hereditary nobility but by “strivers” and “achievers.” The rise of the bourgeoisie in Britain was accelerated and solidified by a flood of younger sons of the nobility into its ranks.

Compared with Britain, the Continental nations lagged in liberty and education—and achieved modernity later and less fully. Across the Atlantic, the United States was a bourgeois society from the beginning, and it quickly caught up with and then surpassed Britain in industrial and economic development.