The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (30 page)

     T
he international system which developed in the half-century and more following Napoleon’s downfall possessed an unusual set of characteristics, some merely temporary, while others became permanent features of the modern age.

The first was the steady and then (after the 1840s) spectacular growth of an integrated global economy, which drew ever more regions into a transoceanic and transcontinental trading and financial network centered upon western Europe, and in particular upon Great Britain. These decades of British economic hegemony were accompanied by large-scale improvements in transport and communications, by the increasingly rapid transfer of industrial technology from one region to another, and by an immense spurt in manufacturing output, which in turn stimulated the opening of new areas of agricultural land and raw-materials sources. The erosion of tariff barriers and other mercantilist devices, together with the widespread propagation of ideas about free trade and international harmony, suggested that a new international order had arisen, quite different from the eighteenth-century world of repeated Great Power conflict. The turbulence and costs of the 1793–1815 struggle—known to the nineteenth century as “the Great War”—caused conservatives and liberals alike to opt as far as possible for peace and stability, underpinned by devices as varied as the Concert of Europe or free-trade treaties. These conditions naturally encouraged long-term commercial and industrial investment, thereby stimulating the growth of a global economy.

Secondly, this absence of prolonged Great Power wars did not mean that all interstate conflict came to an end. If anything, the European and North American wars of conquest against less developed peoples intensified, and were in many ways the military concomitant to the economic penetration of the overseas world and to the swift decline in its share of manufacturing output. In addition, there still were regional and individual conflicts among the European powers, especially over questions of nationality and territorial borders; but, as
we shall see, open struggles such as the Franco-Austrian War of 1859 or the wars of German unification in the 1860s were limited both in duration and area, and even the Crimean War could hardly be called a major conflict. Only the American Civil War was an exception to this rule, and deserves to be examined as such.

Thirdly, technology deriving from the Industrial Revolution began to make its impact upon military and naval warfare. But the changes were much slower than has sometimes been represented, and it was only in the second half of the century that railways, telegraphs, quick-firing guns, steam propulsion, and armored warships really became decisive indicators of military strength. While the new technology increased the lead in firepower and mobility which the Great Powers enjoyed in the overseas world, it was going to be many decades before military and naval commanders revised their ideas of how to fight a European war. Nevertheless, the twin forces of technical change and industrial development were steadily having an impact, on land and at sea, and also affecting the relative strengths of the Powers.

Although it is difficult to generalize, the shifts in the Great Power balances caused by the uneven pattern of industrial and technological change probably affected the outcome of mid-nineteenth-century wars more than did finance and credit. This was partly because the massive expansion of national and international banking in the nineteenth century and the growth of governmental bureaucracies (treasuries, inspectors, tax collectors) made it easier for most regimes to raise funds from the money markets, unless their credit rating was appallingly bad or there was a temporary liquidity crisis in the international banking system. But it was chiefly due to the fact that most of the wars which occurred were relatively short, so that the emphasis was upon a speedy victory in the field using existing military strength, rather than the long-term mobilization of national resources and the raising of fresh revenues. No amount of newly available funds could, for example, have saved Austria after its battlefield defeats of 1859 and 1866, or a very wealthy France after its armies had been crushed in the war of 1870. It was true that superior finances aided the North in its Civil War victory over the South, and that Britain and France were better able to afford the Crimean War than a near-bankrupt Russia—but that reflected the general superiority of their economies rather than the singular advantage they had in respect of credit and finance. For this reason, there is less to say about the role of war finance in the nineteenth century than there was about the previous period.

This cluster of factors—the growth of the international economy, the productive forces unleashed by the Industrial Revolution, the relative stability of Europe, the modernization of military and naval technology over time, and the occurrence of merely localized and short-term wars—naturally favored some of the Great Powers more
than others. Indeed, one of those countries, Britain, benefited so much from the general economic and geopolitical trends of the post-1815 era that it became a different type of Power from the rest. All the other countries were affected, often very seriously, in their relative strength. By the 1860s, however, the further spread of industrialization was beginning to change the balance of world forces once again.

One further feature of this period is worth mentioning. From the early nineteenth century onward, historical statistics (especially of economic indicators) help to trace the shifts in the power balances and to measure more accurately the dynamics of the system. It is important to realize, however, that many of the data are very approximate, particularly for countries lacking an adequate bureaucracy; that certain of the calculations (e.g., shares of world manufacturing output) are merely estimates made by statisticians many years later; and that—the most important caveat of all—economic wealth did not immediately, or always, translate into military power. All that the statistics can do is give rough indications of a country’s material potential and of its position in the relative rankings of the leading states.

The “Industrial Revolution,” most economic historians are at pains to stress, did not happen overnight. It was, compared with the political “revolutions” of 1776, 1789, and 1917, a gradual, slow-moving process; it affected only certain manufactures and certain means of production; and it occurred region by region, rather than involving an entire country.
¹
Yet all these caveats cannot avoid the fact that a fundamentally important transformation in man’s economic circumstances began to occur sometime around 1780—not less significant, in the view of one authority, than the (admittedly far slower) transformation of savage Paleolithic hunting man to domesticated Neolithic farming man.
²
What industrialization, and in particular the steam engine, did was to substitute inanimate for animate sources of power; by converting heat into work through the use of machines—“rapid, regular, precise, tireless” machines
³
—mankind was thus able to exploit vast new sources of energy. The consequences of introducing this novel machinery were simply stupendous: by the 1820s someone operating several power-driven looms could produce twenty times the output of a hand worker, while a power-driven “mule” (or spinning machine) had two hundred times the capacity of a spinning wheel. A single railway engine could transport goods which would have required hundreds of packhorses, and do it far more quickly. To be sure, there were many other important aspects to the Industrial Revolution—the factory system, for example, or the division of labor. But the vital point for our purposes was the massive increase in productivity, especially in the textile industries, which in turn stimulated a demand for more machines, more raw materials (above all, cotton), more iron, more shipping, better communications, and so on.

Moreover, as Professor Landes has observed, this unprecedented increase in man’s productivity was self-sustaining:

The latter remark is also vitally important. From the eighteenth century onward, the growth in world population had begun to accelerate: Europe’s numbers rose from 140 million in 1750 to 187 million in 1800 to 266 million in 1850; Asia’s exploded from over 400 million in 1750 to around 700 million a century later.
⁵
Whatever the reasons—better climatic conditions, improved fecundity, decline in diseases—increases of that size were alarming; and although agricultural output both in Europe and Asia also expanded in the eighteenth century and was in fact another general reason for the rise in population, the sheer number of new heads (and stomachs) threatened over time to cancel out the benefits of all such additions in agricultural output. Pressure upon marginal lands, rural unemployment, and a vast drift of families into the already overcrowded cities of Europe in the late eighteenth century were but some of the symptoms of this population surge.
⁶

What the Industrial Revolution in Britain did (in very crude macro-economic terms) was to so increase productivity on a sustained basis that the consequent expansion both in national wealth and in the population’s purchasing power constantly outweighed the rise in numbers. While the country’s population rose from 10.5 million in 1801 to 41.8 million in 1911—an annual increase of 1.26 percent—its national product rose much faster, perhaps as much as fourteenfold over the nineteenth century. Depending upon the area covered by the statistics,
*
there was an annual average rise in gross national product of between 2 and 2.25 percent. In Queen Victoria’s reign alone, product per capita rose two and a half times.

Compared with the growth rates achieved by many nations after 1945, these were not spectacular figures. It was also true, as social historians remind us, that the Industrial Revolution inflicted awful costs upon the new proletariat which labored in the factories and mines and lived in the unhealthy, crowded, jerry-built cities. Yet the fundamental point remains that the sustained increases in productivity
of the Machine Age brought widespread benefits over time: average real wages in Britain rose between 15 and 25 percent in the years 1815–1850, and by an impressive 80 percent in the next half-century. “The central problem of the age,” Ashton has reminded those critics who believe that industrialization was a disaster, “was how to feed and clothe and employ generations of children outnumbering by far those of any earlier time.”
⁷
The new machines not only employed an increasingly large share of the burgeoning population, but also boosted the nation’s overall per capita income; and the rising demand of urban workers for foodstuffs and essential goods was soon to be met by a steam-driven communications revolution, with railways and steamships bringing the agricultural surpluses of the New World to satisfy the requirements of the Old.

We can grasp this point in a different way by using Professor Landes’s calculations. In 1870, he notes, the United Kingdom was using 100 million tons of coal, which was “equivalent to 800 million million Calories of energy, enough to feed a population of 850 million adult males for a year (actual population was then about 31 million).” Again, the capacity of Britain’s steam engines in 1870, some 4 million horsepower, was equivalent to the power which could be generated by 40 million men; but “this many men would have eaten some 320 million bushels of wheat a year—more than three times the annual output of the entire United Kingdom in 1867–71.”
⁸
The use of inanimate sources of power allowed industrial man to transcend the limitations of biology and to create spectacular increases in production and wealth without succumbing to the weight of a fast-growing population. By contrast, Ashton soberly noted (as late as 1947):