A History of the World (63 page)

As the revolution spread to the United States and continental Europe, then Japan, the same thing happened to the huge rivers and lake systems there. This revolution also made wars far more
destructive. It made it easy for the industrially advanced countries to bully, take over and exploit the less advanced ones, destroying in the blink of an eye cultures that had existed for centuries. Indeed, this was the most significant period of ‘creative destruction’ that human societies had ever experienced. And although the countries leading it included some that would dominate the story of the twentieth century, above all the United States and Germany (with France and Russia following not far behind), this transformation began in the damp islands of Britain.

There, the harnessing of coal, chemicals, ores and electricity was slow, compared with any political revolution. It took place in Britain over the course of a century or so, from the mid-1700s to about 1850, beginning in relatively remote areas such as Coalbrookdale in the Iron-bridge Gorge, Shropshire, where coal and iron were traditionally found near the surface, and in the Cornish tin-mining areas; and around the then modest town of Birmingham. Its pioneers were men of business and gentleman-scientists, rather than visionary change-makers; their ceramics and their metal trinkets were deliberately made to mimic old, familiar handmade objects, and the use of machines was all about immediate profit. There was no master plan, no revolutionary cell. The profits were big enough to inspire rapid, even desperate, copying and competition. By the time the industrial revolution spread to Germany and the United States, as well as to smaller countries such as Belgium, the cascade of changes was gathering speed, and on the back of early British breakthroughs.

So why Britain? And why then?

Industrialization was more about politics than about geographical chance, even though Britain did have large deposits of coal and iron. It could not have happened without capitalism – the capital-intensive, market-based, relentlessly disruptive, creative/destructive system of funding, buying and selling that the world still lives under today. Industrialization can also happen without capitalism. The Soviet Union and Communist China showed that. But in both cases it required extreme violence, huge waste and above all, the theft or purchase of capitalist-created technology. We cannot run control experiments with history, but it seems that industrialization could not have been brought about and sustained outside a market system. And that, in turn, to get going properly, needed a special set of circumstances.

Such circumstances occurred first in Britain in the eighteenth century, not because the British were specially gifted by nature – think of the Chinese and Greek inventors, the French and Spanish explorers, the Italian and German craftsmen – but because happy coincidences collided to make something entirely new, rather as a chance mixture of chemicals can produce a chain reaction.

The coincidences occurred in what had seemed a pretty poor country. Britain had nothing like the gold and silver wealth of the Spanish colonies, nor the huge army and glittering court of France. It had decapitated one monarch, had had to beg his exiled son to return, and had then imported a foreign dynasty. Any overseas conquests it had at the beginning of its capitalist period were still marginal and, with the notable exceptions of tobacco and some sugar plantations, still unprofitable. Nor was this a time of peace when Britons could concentrate on affairs at home. Having just staggered through destructive civil wars, Britain was now entering a period, from 1689 to 1815, when almost one year in two would be spent at war with her European rivals. The country was still thinly populated but already mostly denuded of timber. In 1696 a civil servant called Gregory King had reckoned the population of England and Wales to be just five and a half million, of whom about a tenth lived in London. Many of the more independent-minded and ambitious, particularly religious dissenters, were desperate to emigrate and start again.

Yet behind this somewhat desolate picture, huge changes were afoot. The first was happening away from the cities, on flat and rolling agricultural land where improving landowners, making use of shorter leases, plus some new, professional, farmers, were greatly increasing the yield of their fields. The key effect would be on people, both on their numbers and on where they lived. It has been estimated that before the seventeenth century, no developed country had been able to feed its population without four-fifths of its people being employed as farmers.
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From China to France, from the new USA to Russia, this left an absolute maximum of a fifth of the population to do everything else – to be the soldiers, sailors, priests, rulers, bureaucrats, craftsmen and traders. These had surplus wealth, but they did not add up to nearly enough consumers for a capitalist take-off.

In England, however, the enclosure of common land, drainage, and new systems of crop rotation changed those proportions radically.
You cannot much improve agricultural yields on the traditional small strips of land; nor is there an incentive to invest in new techniques, hedges or drainage if the leases are short. But from the late 1500s and accelerating through the following century, the takeover and enclosure of what had been common land was changing the shape of the English countryside. Larger fields, where more food could be grown, were being carved out, protected by longer hedges and longer leases. This was a controversial procedure, ripping up by the roots ancient traditions of ownership and husbandry. To modern eyes the English countryside can look cosy, even dozy, but to country people of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries much of it would have looked bleakly new, raw and unfamiliar, with its great, stark squares of tillage. The Church and many writers protested at the devastating effect of all this on the new rural poor. The pain being caused to Old England echoes through plays by Shakespeare and from the angry rural poetry of John Clare.

But the consequence was that by 1700 England’s agriculture was the most productive in Europe, probably twice as productive as that of her nearest rivals. A year later, Jethro Tull introduced his famous horse-drawn seed drill. Soon after that, four-field crop rotation, using clover and turnips to keep fields rich and abundant, was brought in from Flanders. Lacking any scientific knowledge, farmers nevertheless successfully bred new, much larger varieties of sheep and cattle: within a century, at London’s Smithfield market the average weight of a sheep rose from twenty-eight pounds to eighty.
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The changes happened raggedly, with Essex, Hertfordshire, Norfolk, Suffolk and Leicestershire leading the way, but by the 1750s or thereabouts they were reaching more of the Midlands and the north too, driven by enthusiastic reforming propaganda in the newspapers, themselves the product of new and faster printing presses. Far fewer people were producing much more food, allowing far more people to do . . . something else. Soon the labour force in the English fields was not 80 per cent of the population, but around 32–33 per cent, an astonishing change.
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Other countries were also learning to feed themselves with fewer farmers, but not to the same extent.

For Britain this meant two things, both important for the leap into capitalism. First, the ancient fear of famine was receding. There would still be times of hunger after wet, cold springs, but surplus grain was
being stored and new foods imported. People are less likely to take risks when they are scared of being hungry, so the spirit of adventure thrived. Second, there were now far more people available to become shopkeepers, artisans, traders and the like, paid with coins rather than, in the old days, with food. The new town-dwellers would be the new consumers. Thanks to the accelerated international trade already described, bringing spices, Indian fabrics, wines, tobacco, sugar, silks and ceramics to Britain’s shores, these people now had things to consume – new wants they had not known before. Supplied and protected by her ships, both merchant and military, Britain became a market economy long before she was an industrial one.

A better-fed market economy meant more people. By 1700 life expectancy in England was around thirty-seven years, which sounds very low but was better than France’s twenty-eight. It requires only a very slight improvement in the rate of reproduction and survival to produce a very fast growth in population. By 1850, at the zenith of the British industrial revolution, the population had tripled.
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Without the changes in the fields and villages, this could not have happened. But without the right political system, the same is true. As we have seen, the wars and the political revolution of the previous century had hacked away much of the independent power of the British monarchy, which now found itself embedded in Parliament. This set-up represented not ‘the people’, but the well-off people such as landowners (who included owners of mines), wealthy merchants and investors in trade, as well as the ruling cliques of towns and cities.

Put like this, Britain might seem to have simply swapped a monarchy for an oligarchy. But the wars of religion had shaken Britain up quite a lot more than that. The overthrow of royal supremacy resulted in a genuinely independent judiciary, while Parliament had sole authority for setting taxation. Britain still had her great landowners, but her tradition of primogeniture kept the numbers of the aristocracy limited, while the trauma of the Civil War led the earls, the barons and the viscounts to tread more carefully. France, by contrast, had an ever-growing aristocracy entitled to many perks and rights and weighing more heavily on their food-producing peasants.

In Britain, one consequence of the relative weakness of the old order was that the bad habit of raising money by selling such perks and monopolies began to wither. Under James I, it has been said, the
typical Englishman had a house built with monopoly bricks and heated by monopoly coal. ‘His clothes are held up by monopoly belts, monopoly buttons, monopoly pins’, and he ate ‘monopoly butter, monopoly currants, monopoly red herrings, monopoly salmon, monopoly lobsters’.
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The countless trade tariffs and barriers continued across France, Germany and Italy, but were disappearing in Britain. The British developed a national bank using the government’s authority to back its loans, thereby stabilizing the national debt and bringing some sense of security to the capital markets. London was nothing like as important a financial centre as Amsterdam, but it was getting there. After the Bank of England was founded, in 1694, local banks began to spring up all across the country.

If it is hard for us today to be sure about the meaning of the changes happening around us, it was just as hard for the Britons of this fast-changing age of markets. Many did not feel particularly free. Gamekeepers with their man-traps, punitive local magistrates, the threat of the naval press-gang, tight religious restrictions constraining ambitious young men – petty tyranny was everywhere. But absolute tyranny had vanished. The law relied on barbarous punishments, but it could also be used by many who were not rich to protect their interests. Parliament could be lobbied, in response to the rising interest in changing laws that stymied change. When inventors and the first capitalists challenged the old order, patent law and parliamentary debate would be the cornerstones of their success.

There was another key difference from most of the European continent. Alongside better farming, more secure laws and less oppressive government, the British now had a freer press than anywhere else. This had started with the cranking-out of pamphlets and broadsheets full of libels, and the vituperative arguments over religion that plagued the 1600s, but had developed into the nearest thing yet seen to a free market in ideas. Scientists, or ‘natural philosophers’ as they still called themselves, could publish their speculations without fear of the censor. Newspapers carried a mass of information about new systems of farming and newfangled gadgets, as well as the doings of princelings and generals and the prices of commodities. In Britain, arguments about trade policy and finance could be fought out openly.

Importantly, even though Britain was hobbled by many trade
restrictions and poor transport, industry was already in place. It was simply not yet organized into factories. Rich men funded families working with spinning and weaving machines in their Yorkshire cottage homes; in the growing Midland towns and villages, makers of nails, buckles, screws and buttons operated in their family workshops. In the traditional coalmining areas, above all around Newcastle, owners were experimenting with machines as they struggled with the ancient problem of how to keep the deeper mines free of water. As with the tin industry, they had used waterwheels and pulleys as far back as anyone could remember, but were now trying out primitive steam engines.

In 1679 the French inventor Denis Papin exhibited his ‘steam digester’ at the Royal Society and eight years later had developed a better pressure-cooker and steam pump. Two Devon engineers appropriated his idea, and improved on it. Thomas Savery had made some primitive but ingenious devices including an early steam engine, which was being used by Cornish miners during 1708–14; then, about 1712, a Baptist preacher and engineer called Thomas Newcomen produced his more efficient version. It was slow to take on in the West Country tin-mines, but after he persuaded colliery owners in Warwickshire and Newcastle to give his engines a try, their use rapidly increased in the mining areas of Yorkshire, Lancashire and Staffordshire too. But they seemed to be for just one thing, as suggested in the description that Newcomen gave of his company: ‘Proprietors of the Invention for Raising Water by Fire’. The engines were for clearing mines of water, but they used so much coal they could only be sited right beside coalmines.

Even at this point, Britain had things other countries had not – inventors, plentiful raw materials, a food surplus; and there were small local outbreaks of ingenuity. But nobody would have predicted the almost volcanic eruption of inventiveness about to take place here, such as had not happened in Italy, Germany, China, France or Japan.