Civilization: The West and the Rest (36 page)

The consumer society is so all-pervasive today that it is easy to assume it has always existed. Yet in reality it is one of the more recent innovations that propelled the West ahead of the Rest. Its most striking characteristic is its seemingly irresistible appeal. Unlike modern medicine, which (as we saw in the previous chapter) was often imposed by force on Western colonies, the consumer society is a killer application the rest of the world has generally yearned to download. Even those social orders explicitly intended to be anti-capitalist – most obviously the various derivatives of the doctrine of Karl Marx – have been unable to exclude it. The result is one of the greatest paradoxes of modern history: that an economic system designed to offer infinite choice to the individual has ended up homogenizing humanity.

The Industrial Revolution is often misrepresented as if a broad range of technological innovations simultaneously transformed multiple economic activities. This was not the case. The first phase of industrialization was firmly concentrated on textiles. The archetypal factory
was a cotton mill, like the Anchor Mill in Paisley, which still stands today as a monument to Scotland’s industrial heyday.
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What exactly happened? One simple answer is that at some point in the nineteenth century British economic output per person, which had already begun to accelerate in the seventeenth century, took off like a rocket. Because of the extreme difficulty of retrospectively calculating anachronistic measures such as gross domestic product or national income, scholars differ about the precise timing. One authoritative estimate is that the average annual rate of growth of per-capita national income rose from below 0.2 per cent between 1760 and 1800 to 0.52 per cent between 1800 and 1830 and to 1.98 per cent between 1830 and 1870.
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All these figures are miserably low by twenty-first-century standards. Nevertheless the effect was revolutionary. No such sustained acceleration in economic growth had happened before; nor did it stop. On the contrary, even faster growth meant that the average Briton in 1960 was nearly six times richer than his great-grandfather had been in 1860.
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Especially striking was the speed with which the British labour force left agriculture for other sectors (not only manufacturing but also services). As early as 1850 little more than a fifth of the active population in Britain was engaged in farming, at a time when the figure was closer to 45 per cent even in the Low Countries. By 1880 fewer than one in seven Britons worked on the land; by 1910 it was one in eleven.
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Aggregate growth figures mask the dramatic nature of this change. Though it was spread over decades, the Industrial Revolution was highly localized. In Gloucestershire, for example, it was barely visible. In Lancashire it was unmissable – though swathed in smog. The Highlands of Scotland were untouched; that was why the Victorians learned to love what had struck Dr Johnson’s generation as merely a grim wasteland. Glasgow, by contrast, was transformed by trade and industry into the ‘Second City’ of the British Empire, its smokestacks out-reeking its famously malodorous rival Edinburgh.

The Industrial Revolution has been characterized as a ‘wave of
gadgets’.
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Certainly, it was technological innovation that explained much of the decisive increase in the productivity of land, labour and capital (the so-called factors of production). The second and third of these increased in quantity in the nineteenth century,
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but it was the qualitative improvement that really mattered – the fact that total output exceeded the combined increments of workers and mills. In terms of supply, then, the Industrial Revolution was a hunt for efficiency. James Hargreaves’s spinning jenny (1766), Richard Arkwright’s water frame (1769), Samuel Crompton’s mule (1779), Edmund Cartwright’s steam-powered loom (1787) and Richard Roberts’s self-acting mule (1830): these were all ways of making more thread or cloth per man-hour. The spinning jenny, for example, allowed a single worker simultaneously to spin cotton yarn with eight spindles. Thanks to these innovations, the unit price of British cotton manufactures declined by approximately 90 per cent between the mid-1790s and 1830.
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The same applied to the other key breakthroughs in iron production and steam-power generation. James Neilson’s blast furnace, patented in 1828, hugely improved the coke-smelting process invented by Abraham Darby in 1709. Iron output at Darby’s Coalbrookdale furnace leapt from 81 tons a year in 1709 to 4,632 in 1850. Likewise, Thomas Newcomen’s 1705 steam engine was of little practical use; but James Watt’s addition of a separate condenser greatly improved it, and Richard Trevithick’s high-pressure version was better still. Newcomen’s engine had burned 45 pounds of coal to produce a single horsepower hour. A late nineteenth-century steam engine could do the same with less than 1 pound.
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By 1870 Britain’s steam engines together were generating 4 million horsepower, equivalent to the work of 40 million men. Feeding such a large human workforce would have required three times Britain’s entire wheat
output.
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None of this was as intellectually profound as the big scientific breakthroughs of the seventeenth century, though Boulton’s and Watt’s membership of the Birmingham Lunar Society, which also counted the pioneering chemist Joseph Priestley among its luminaries, shows how close the connections were between the two revolutions.
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Rather, it was a cumulative, evolutionary process of improvement characterized by tinkering, sometimes carried out by men with minimal scientific education. The spirit of the age had got off its cavalry charger and was now to be found toiling in the workshop of Boulton & Watt’s Soho Manufactory. Innovation, personified by the dour Watt, and entrepreneurship, personified by the ebullient Boulton: that was the quintessential partnership at the heart of the Industrial Revolution.

‘I sell here, Sir,’ Boulton told James Boswell in 1776, ‘what all the world desires to have – POWER.’
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But what for? The Industrial Revolution would have been pointless if it had consisted only of a massive increase in the quantity of cloth, iron and mechanical power that could be produced in a year. Equally important was the rapid development and spread of a consumer society that actually wanted more of these things.
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If technological innovation spurred the supply side, the demand side of the Industrial Revolution was driven by the seemingly insatiable appetite human beings have for clothes. Nothing did more to stimulate that appetite than the large-scale import of Indian cloth by the East India Company, beginning in the seventeenth century. (Imports of Chinese porcelain had a similar effect on the demand for crockery.)
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Housewives wanted these things and adjusted their behaviour and budgets accordingly.
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Entrepreneurs sought to use new technology to imitate imported goods and then displace them.
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Cotton was indeed the king of the British economic miracle. The textile sector accounted for around a tenth of British national income, and cotton manufacturing achieved much the most rapid increases in efficiency. The factories of Manchester and the workshops of Oldham became the focal point of the transformation. The striking thing is that a very large share of British cotton production was not for domestic consumption. In the mid-1780s cotton exports were only around 6 per cent of total British exports. By the mid-1830s, the proportion had risen to 48 per cent, the bulk of it to continental Europe.
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Historians used to argue about which came first in Britain, the technological
wave or the consumer society. On the continent, there is no doubt. Europeans acquired a taste for cheap factory-made cloth well before they learned how to produce it themselves.

Why did Britain industrialize first? The consumer society was not significantly more advanced than in other North-west European states. The level and dissemination of scientific knowledge was not notably superior. There had been impressive advances in other sectors of the British economy during the eighteenth century, for example in agriculture, banking and commerce, but it is not immediately obvious why these would trigger a surge of productivity-enhancing investment in cotton, iron and steam production. It has been suggested that the explanation for Britain’s early industrialization must lie in the realm of politics or of law. The common law, for example, is said to have encouraged the forming of corporations and offered creditors better protection than continental systems like those derived from Napoleon’s civil law code.
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Institutional advantages certainly helped Britain to pull ahead of other would-be empires in the seventeenth and especially the eighteenth century, as we have seen. But it not at all clear why the doctrine of the sovereignty of parliament or the evolution of the common law would have provided Boulton and Watt with stronger incentives than their unsung counterparts on the continent.

It is possible that eighteenth-century tariffs erected against Indian calicoes gave British manufacturers some advantage, just as similar protectionist policies would later nurture the infant industries of the United States against British competition.
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David Ricardo’s doctrine of comparative advantage
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was not the sole reason why cotton exports from Britain soared in the first half of the nineteenth century. Aside from that, the case seems unconvincing that British (or, for that matter, American) political or legal institutions were more favourable
to industrial development than Dutch, French or German.
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In the eyes of contemporaries, the state of the British political and legal systems in the key decades of industrial take-off was the very reverse of favourable to fledgling industry. ‘Old Corruption’ was how the radical polemicist William Cobbett characterized the way parliament, the Crown and the City interacted. In
Bleak House
(1852–3) Charles Dickens portrayed the Court of Chancery as a grotesquely inefficient hindrance to the resolution of property disputes, while in
Little Dorrit
(1855–7) the target of his satire was the ‘Circumlocution Office’, a government department dedicated to obstructing economic progress. Joint-stock companies remained illegal until the 1720 Bubble Act was repealed in 1824, while debtors’ prisons like the Marshalsea – so vividly depicted in
Little Dorrit
– continued to operate until the passage of the 1869 Bankruptcy Act. It is also worth remembering that much of the legislation passed by Victorian parliaments in connection with the textile industry was designed to limit the economic freedom of factory-owners, notably with respect to child labour.

Britain differed significantly from other North-west European countries in two ways that make the Industrial Revolution intelligible. The first was that labour was significantly dearer than on the continent – or indeed anywhere for which records exist. In the second half of the eighteenth century a Parisian worker’s real wages (in terms of silver adjusted for consumer prices) were just over half a Londoner’s. Real wages in Milan were 26 per cent of the London level.
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Wages in China and South India were even lower, and not only because of the higher productivity of Asian rice cultivation relative to European wheat production.
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The second reason was that coal in Britain was abundant, accessible and therefore significantly cheaper than on the other side of the English Channel. Between the 1820s and the 1860s, the annual out
put of British coal mines quadrupled; the price per ton fell by a quarter. Together, these differentials explain why British entrepreneurs were so much more motivated to pursue technological innovation than their continental counterparts. It made better sense in Britain than anywhere else to replace expensive men with machines fuelled by cheap coal.

Like the French Revolution before it, the British Industrial Revolution spread across Europe. But this was a peaceful conquest.
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The great innovators were largely unable to protect what would now be called their intellectual property rights. With remarkable speed, the new technology was therefore copied and replicated on the continent and across the Atlantic. The first true cotton mill, Richard Arkwright’s at Cromford in Derbyshire, was built in 1771. Within seven years a copy appeared in France. It took just three years for the French to copy Watt’s 1775 steam engine. By 1784 there were German versions of both, thanks in large measure to industrial espionage. The Americans, who had the advantage of being able to grow their own cotton as well as mine their own coal, were a little slower: the first cotton mill appeared in Bass River, Massachusetts, in 1788, the first steam engine in 1803.
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The Belgians, Dutch and Swiss were not far behind. The pattern was similar after the first steam locomotives began pulling carriages on the Stockton and Darlington Railway in 1825, though that innovation took a mere five years to cross the Atlantic, compared with twelve years to reach Germany and twenty-two to arrive in Switzerland.
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As the efficiency of the technology improved, so it became economically attractive even where labour was cheaper and coal scarcer. Between 1820 and 1913 the number of spindles in the world increased four times as fast as the world’s population, but the rate of increase was twice as fast abroad as in the United Kingdom. Such were the productivity gains – and the growth of demand – that the gross output of the world cotton industry rose three times as fast as total spindleage.
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As a result, between 1820 and 1870 a handful of North-west European and North American countries achieved British rates of growth; indeed, Belgium and the United States grew faster.