The Transformation of the World (138 page)

In the civil societies of the West, too, the ideal of simple government and a small state kept evaporating. New kinds of bodies proliferated between people and rulers: no longer the old estates but bureaucracies, political parties (increasingly compact organizations or, in the United States, local “machines”), syndicates, labor unions, all manner of lobbies and interest groups, desacralized churches representing special interests, and mass media under pressure to cut loose and play an independent role. The rational and simple political systems of classical liberalism became rather complicated affairs. By the First World War, the seeds had been sown in many places for those corporatist elements that would come to the fore in the 1920s, and not only in Europe.

PART THREE

 

THEMES

CHAPTER XII

 

Energy and Industry

Who Unbound Prometheus, When, and Where?

Few historiographical fields have recently been as innovative and exciting as (global) economic history. Cherished set pieces of historical lore such as the Industrial Revolution are undergoing critical reappraisal. Long-term developments across the centuries or even millennia find unprecedented attention. Culture and meaning are returning to economic analysis, “capitalism” has ceased to be vilified as a term of Marxist polemics, and a rehabilitation of materiality has prompted even committed students of discourse and imagination to turn to the world of objects and commodities. The towering issue of the “global rift,” or “great divergence,” is intriguing the most astute minds. Its extent, chronology, and causation remain hotly contested, and no consensus seems to be in sight.

Since almost anything is in flux, it may be appropriate to place an essay on industry and energy at the beginning of the third part of this book. No longer aimed at comprehensiveness the way the previous “panorama” chapters were, this essay and the ones that follow survey a given topic in a lighter, more playful, and more selective vein. Dealing with industrialization in such a more deliberative mode, with fewer pages and a smaller number of references, is intended to send two different messages to the reader. First, some of the issues at stake are too complex for the author—who is not a professional economic historian—to put forward his own considered solution with the necessary confidence; even a world historian is not obliged to have an opinion on everything. And second, the organization of production and the creation of wealth are absolutely crucial aspects of the nineteenth century. At the same time, it would be unduly reductionist to present them as independent variables and as the only sources of dynamism propelling the age as a whole. We are familiar with accounts of that kind where everything boils down to the “dual revolution” at the end of the eighteenth century. They retain some of their value. Nevertheless, it is time to decenter the Industrial Revolution.

1 Industrialization

If large parts of the world looked different around 1910 as compared with 1780, the main reason for the physical transformation was industry. The nineteenth century saw the spread of the industrial mode of production and of particular forms of society associated with it. But it was not an age of even, uniform industrialization. Whether industry sank root or whether it failed to catch on, whether it began late or was not even attempted: all this depended on complex combinations of multiple causes in specific local settings. Out of such combinations a new global geography of centers and peripheries, dynamic and stagnant regions, took shape. But what is industrialization? This concept, seemingly so straightforward, continues to arouse debate.

Controversies

Although the term “industrialization” was already in use in the 1830s, and “Industrial Revolution,” first documented in 1799, had gained academic respectability in the English-speaking world by the mid-1880s, historians have been unable to agree on a precise usage.
¹
The ramifications of the discussion among experts are difficult to penetrate. There is not just one question up for debate; rather, what is really at stake has to be repeatedly clarified anew. Another source of confusion is the fact that the historians involved each bring their own understanding of economic theory to bear. For example, some see industrialization as a process of measurable economic growth, driven mainly by technological innovations, whereas others attach greater importance to institutional change, seeing this as a contributory factor or even wishing to replace the term “Industrial Revolution” with “Institutional Revolution.”
²
Scholars seem to be agreed mainly on two points:

1. that the economic and social changes associated with industry, visible on all continents by 1900, can be traced back to an innovatory impetus in England after 1760 (not even those who consider that impetus relatively undramatic and the term “Industrial Revolution” as exaggerated would deny this); and

2. that industrialization, at least in its beginnings, has always been a regional, not a national, phenomenon.

Even someone who underlines the significance of a legal-institutional regulatory framework, such as that which nation-states developed in the nineteenth century, will concede that industrialization is closely linked to resource supply at certain locations and that it does not necessarily mark
entire
national societies in the long term. By 1920 only a few countries in the world were “industrial societies,” and even in parts of Europe such as Italy, Spain, or Russia the islands of industrial development by no means radiated out to mold society as a whole.
³

The most interesting discussions today revolve around the following questions.

First.
New and sophisticated evaluations of the fragmentary statistical material have demonstrated that in the last quarter of the eighteenth century and the first quarter of the nineteenth, the English economy grew more slowly and less regularly than champions of the big-bang theory have hitherto claimed. It has proved difficult to find data for a dramatic acceleration of growth, even in “leading sectors” such as the cotton industry. But if industrialization began gradually and proceeded at a gentle pace even in its “revolutionary” English period, then we have to ask in which older continuities it had its origins. Some historians actually go back to the Middle Ages, seeing the “Industrial Revolution” as one of several growth spurts since then.

Second
. Even skeptics at pains to make an industrial revolution quantitatively invisible have to face the fact that numerous testimonies of the time saw the spread of industry and its social consequences as the dawning of a new age.
⁴
This was the case not only in England and in European countries that soon took a similar path of development but everywhere in the world where the advent of large-scale industry, new work regimes, and new social hierarchies had a perceptible impact. We must therefore always consider the relationship between quantitative and qualitative factors in describing and analyzing industrialization.
⁵
Representatives of so-called institutional economics, who see themselves as a (not too radical) alternative to the ruling neoclassical theory, have proposed a useful distinction between “formal” constraints on economic activity (above all, contracts, laws, etc.) and “nonformal” constraints within the respective culture (norms, values, conventions, etc.).
⁶
This richer, more variegated, picture of industrialization is certainly welcome. But there is a danger that too many aspects and factors will crowd in and make it necessary to give up the elegance of more “economical” explanatory models.

Third
. Industrialization is generally thought of as the key to Europe's “special path” in history. The fact that unprecedented differences in prosperity and living standards were observable in various regions of the planet at the end of the nineteenth century can indeed be mainly attributed to the fact that many societies had embarked on the change to industrial society, while others had not.
⁷
But this can give rise to more than one problematic. In considering the reasons for this European “miracle” (Eric L. Jones), some conclude that England, Europe, and the West (or whichever counts as the main entity here) disposed of natural geographical, economic, and cultural prerequisites that were lacking in other civilizations—a familiar viewpoint going back to the studies of world economic history and the economic ethic of the world religions that Max Weber began after 1900. Others turn the tables and look for similar prerequisites in China, asking why it did
not
make a comparable breakthrough in productivity.
⁸
Should it turn out that the prerequisites for industrial development existed in China as well as Europe, it would have to be explained why they were not actually brought to fruition. All these debates hover delicately between informed numerical guesswork,
anthropological assumptions about human behavior in different “cultural” framings, and counterfactual thought experiments.

Fourth
. The older textbook accounts of industrialization used to assume, with Walt W. Rostow, that one national economy after another reached a “takeoff point” from whence it could progress along a stable, future-oriented path of selfsustaining growth. Determining the chronology of “takeoffs” provided a set of data marking the onset of economic modernity for various countries—an approximation still useful today. What is less convincing is the implied assumption that by some internal logic of its own, a standard model of industrialization was serially repeated from country to country. Against this, economic acceleration was in reality always fueled by both internal (endogenous) and external (exogenous) sources; the problem is to determine the proper proportions in each individual case. Since no catching-up industrialization took place without at least some transfer of technology, we may also say that “transnational” connections invariably played a role. No national or regional process of incipient industrialization has ever been entirely homemade and isolated from the larger world.

Early-nineteenth-century Britain was already swarming with technological spies from continental Europe and the United States, and there is much to be said for the view that (at least before 1914) extensive industrialization failed to occur in countries such as India, China, the Ottoman Empire, or Mexico largely because of a lack of political and cultural conditions for the successful import of technology. Only the adoption of new production and management know-how could have led to the modernization of their highly developed manufacturing traditions—as had already happened in France, the land of the artisan and the scientist.
⁹
Particular regional, and sometimes national, industrialization processes differ in their degree of autonomy. At one end of the spectrum, industrial forms of production take root almost entirely in small enclaves and as a result of the activity of foreign capital, without any noticeable, let alone beneficial, impact on the host country beyond the enclaves. At the other end, a whole national economy may be thoroughly industrialized under indigenous control, with very little “colonial” involvement. Most cases in historical reality were located somewhere between these polar opposites.

Classical Theories of Industrialization

Today's controversies among academic specialists have not entirely devaluated older or “classical” concepts of industrialization. Common to these is the idea that industrialization is part of a more comprehensive social-economic transformation.

Karl Marx and the Marxists (post-1867)
: industrialization as a transition from feudalism to capitalism by means of the accumulation and concentration of capital, factory organization, and the establishment of relations of production in which the owners of the means of production appropriate the surplus product created by nonservile wage labor—later supplemented by theories of
the transformation of competitive capitalism into monopolistic (or organized) capitalism.
¹⁰

Nikolai Kondratiev (1925) and Joseph A. Schumpeter (1922/1939)
: industrialization as a cyclically structured growth process of a capitalist
world
economy with changing leading sectors, joined on to older processes.
¹¹

Karl Polanyi (1944)
: industrialization as part of a wider Great Transformation, in which an autonomous market sphere detaches itself from exchange embedded in a regulatory economy focused on the satisfaction of needs rather than the realization of profit; more generally: the emergence of an autonomous economic logic.
¹²

Walt W. Rostow (1960)
: industrialization as a temporally staggered but universal passage through five stages, of which the third and most important, “takeoff,” ushers in durable, “exponential” growth—although this is not necessarily bound up with a qualitative remodeling of society.
¹³

Alexander Gerschenkron (1962)
: industrialization as a process in which latecomers learn to overcome obstacles by using the advantages of imitation and state agency, thereby engendering special national forms and developmental paths within the framework of a single overall process.
¹⁴

Paul Bairoch (1963)
: industrialization as the continuation of a previous agricultural revolution and the slow spread of industrial economic forms around the world, together with the marginalization of other, nonindustrializing economies.
¹⁵

David S. Landes (1969)
: industrialization as a process of economic growth driven by the interplay of technological innovation and rising demand, which in the second half of the nineteenth century, through the imitation of England by Continental countries, led to a pan-European development model.
¹⁶

Douglas C. North and Robert Paul Thomas (1973)
: industrialization as by-product of Europe's centuries-long creation of an institutional framework guaranteeing individual property rights and hence an efficient use of resources.
¹⁷