Why the West Rules--For Now (81 page)

By 1850 all these similarities were being washed away by one massive difference: the rise in the West of a new, steam-powered class of iron chieftains that, according to its most famous critics, “
has pitilessly torn
asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his ‘natural superiors.’” This new class, Marx and Engels went on, “has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation.”

Opinions differed—violently—over just what this new class was doing, but most agreed that whatever it was, it was changing everything. To some, the millionaires who tapped and sold power were heroes whose “
energy and perseverance
, guided by sound judgment, [merely] secured their usual reward.” Thus Samuel Smiles, author of the Victorian classic
Self-Help
. “In early times,” Smiles explained, “the products of skilled industry were for the most part luxuries intended for the few, whereas now”—thanks to the captains of industry—“the most exquisite tools and engines are employed in producing articles of ordinary consumption for the great mass of the community.”

To others, though, industrialists were hard-faced, frock-coated brutes, like Dickens’s Mr. Gradgrind in
Hard Times
. “
Facts alone
are wanted in life,” Gradgrind insisted. “Plant nothing else, and root out everything else.” Dickens had learned about the industrial revolution
the hard way, laboring in a boot-black factory while his father languished in debtors’ prison, and had strong views on the Gradgrinds. As he saw it, they leached the beauty out of life, herding workers into soul-destroying cities like his imaginary Coketown, “
a triumph of fact
… a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever.”

There were certainly real-life Gradgrinds aplenty. The young Friedrich Engels described running into one in 1840s Manchester and lecturing him on the plight of this Coketown’s workers. “
He listened patiently
,” said Engels, “and at the corner of the street at which we parted company, he remarked: ‘And yet there is a great deal of money made here. Good morning, Sir!’”

The businessman was right: by tapping into the energy trapped in fossil fuels, Boulton and Watt’s engines had unleashed a storm of moneymaking. Yet Engels was right too: the workers who made the money saw precious little of it. Between 1780 and 1830 output per laborer grew by more than 25 percent but wages rose barely 5 percent. The rest was skimmed off as profits. Anger mounted in the slums. Workers formed unions and demanded a People’s Charter; radicals plotted to blow up the government. Farmworkers, their livelihoods threatened by mechanical threshers, smashed machines and burned hayricks in 1830, signing threatening letters to the gentry under the piratical-sounding name “Captain Swing.” Everywhere magistrates and clergymen caught the whiff of Jacobinism, their catchall term for French-style insurrection, and men of property bore down on it with the full weight of the state. Cavalry trampled demonstrators; unionists were jailed; machine breakers were shipped to penal colonies at the farthest fringes of Britain’s empire.

To Marx and Engels, the process seemed crystal clear: Western industrialization was driving social development up faster than ever before but was also kicking the paradox of development into warp speed.
*
By turning men into mere “hands,” flesh-and-blood cogs in mills and factories, capitalists were also giving them common cause and making them revolutionaries. “
What the bourgeoisie therefore produces
, above
all,” Marx and Engels concluded, “are its own gravediggers … Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workingmen of all countries, unite!”

Marx and Engels believed that capitalists had brought this on themselves by fencing off the countryside and driving the dispossessed into cities to be wage slaves, but they had the facts wrong. Rich landlords did not drive country folk off the land; sex did. The nineteenth century’s intensive agriculture actually needed more field hands, not fewer, and the real reason people exchanged farms for cities was reproduction. Life expectancy increased by about three years between 1750 and 1850, and although historians cannot agree why this happened (Fewer outbreaks of plague? More nutritious foods? Better water supplies and sewers? Smarter child-rearing practices? Cotton underwear? Something else completely?), those extra childbearing years meant that unless women married later, had sex in different ways, or aborted/starved their young, they would raise more children. Women did in fact change their behavior, but not enough to cancel out their longer lives, and Britain’s population roughly doubled (to about 14 million) between 1780 and 1830. About a million of these extra people stayed on the land, but 6 million sought jobs in towns.

These hard facts of reproduction make the industrial revolution’s glass look half-f rather than half-empty: industrialization was traumatic but the alternatives were worse. In the sixteenth century wages had collapsed all over the West when population grew, but British wages actually rose after 1775 and pulled away from everyone else’s (
Figure 10.3
). When Britons did starve en masse, in the horrific 1840s Irish famine, it had more to do with greedy landlords and stupid politicians than with industry (which was strikingly scarce in Ireland).

The irony is that the tide turned in workers’ favor in the very years Marx and Engels formulated their doctrines. Since 1780 capitalists had been spending much of their profits on country houses, peerages, and the other trappings of the arriviste, but they had plowed even more back into new machines and mills. By about 1830 these investments were making the mechanically augmented labor of each dirty, malnourished, ill-educated “hand” so profitable that bosses often preferred cutting deals with strikers to firing them and competing with other bosses to find new ones. For the next fifty years wages grew as fast as
profits, and in 1848, when Marx and Engels published
The Communist Manifesto
, British workers’ pay was finally regaining the heights it had reached after the Black Death.

Like every other age, the 1830s got the thought it needed, and as workers became more valuable the middle classes discovered sympathy—of a kind—for the downtrodden. On the one hand, unemployment came to seem positively wicked, and paupers were herded (for their own good, said the middle classes) into workhouses; on the other, Dickens’s picture of these same workhouses made
Oliver Twist
a bestseller and reform became the watchword of the hour. Official commissions decried urban squalor; Parliament banned children under nine from factories and limited under-thirteens to a forty-eight-hour workweek; and the first stumbling steps were taken toward mass education.

These early Victorian reformers can seem hypocritical today, but the very idea of taking practical steps to improve the lives of the poor was revolutionary. The contrast with the Eastern core is particularly strong: in China, where Gradgrinds, Coketowns, and factory hands remained conspicuously rare, learned gentlemen carried on with the centuries-old tradition of sending hand-painted scrolls about utopian reform schemes up to the imperial bureaucrats, who maintained the equally old tradition of ignoring them. Would-be reformists continued to come mostly from the margins of the elite. Hong Liangji (condemned to death for “extreme indecorum” after criticizing government inactivity on social issues) and Gong Zizhen (an eccentric who dressed strangely, used wild calligraphy, and gambled madly), arguably the most constructive social critics, both failed the highest exam multiple times and neither had much impact. Even eminently practical schemes, such as an 1820s program for shipping rice to Beijing by sea to avoid the decay and corruption along the Grand Canal, were allowed to languish.

In the West, but nowhere else, a brave new world of coal and iron was being born, and for the first time in history the possibilities seemed truly limitless. “
We consider it
a happiness and a privilege to have had our lot cast in the first fifty years of this century,” the British journal
The Economist
enthused in 1851; “the period of the last fifty years … has witnessed a more rapid and astonishing progress than
all
the centuries which have preceded it. In several vital points the difference between the 18th and the 19th century, is greater than between the first
and the 18th, as far as civilised Europe is concerned.” Time was speeding up in the West, leaving the rest of the world behind.

ONE WORLD

London, October 2, 1872, 7:45 p.m
. It is a famous scene: “
Here I am, gentlemen
!” announces Phileas Fogg as he strides into his club. Despite being mistaken for a bank robber in Egypt, attacked by Sioux in Nebraska, and drawn into saving a beautiful widow from enforced suicide in India (
Figure 10.4
), Fogg had done what he said he would do. He had traveled around the world in eighty days, with one second to spare.

It is also a fictional scene, but like all Jules Verne’s tales,
Around the World in Eighty Days
was firmly grounded in fact. The aptly named George Train really did travel around the world in eighty days in 1870, and although the fictional Fogg fell back on elephants, sledges, and sailboats when technology let him down,
*
neither he nor Train could have managed their tours without brand-new triumphs of engineering—the Suez Canal (opened in 1869), the San Francisco–New York railroad (completed the same year), and the Bombay–Calcutta train line
^†
(finished in 1870). The world, as Fogg observed before he set off, was not as big as it used to be.

Rising social development and expanding cores had always gone together as colonists carried new lifestyles outward and people on the peripheries copied, resisted, or ran away from them. The nineteenth century differed only in scale and speed, but these differences changed the course of history. Before the nineteenth century, great empires had dominated this or that part of the world, bending it to their will, but the new technologies stripped away all limits. For the first time, a lead in social development could be turned into global rule.

Converting the energy of fossil fuels into motion annihilated distance. As early as 1804 a British engineer showed that lightweight, high-pressure engines could push carriages along iron rails, and by the 1810s similar engines were driving paddleboats. After another generation of inspired fiddling, George Stephenson’s famous
Rocket
was puffing along the Liverpool–Manchester railroad at twenty-nine miles per hour
*
and boats were paddling across the Atlantic. Social development transformed geography faster than ever before: freed from wind and wave, ships could sail not just where they wanted but also when they wanted, and so long as someone laid the rails, goods could move over land almost as cheaply as over water.

Figure 10.4. Around the world: Western rule shrinks the globe.

Technology transformed colonization. More than 5 million Britons (out of a population of 27 million) emigrated between 1851 and 1880, mostly to the ultimate new frontier in North America. Between 1850 and 1900 this “
white plague
,” as the historian Niall Ferguson calls it, felled 168 million acres of American forest, more than ten times Britain’s farmable area. Already in 1799 a traveler had recorded that American pioneers “
have an unconquerable aversion
to trees … they cut away all before them without mercy … all share the same fate and are involved in the same havoc.” A hundred years later their aversion had only grown, fed by stump-removing machines, flamethrowers, and dynamite.

An unprecedented agricultural boom fed equally astonishing cities. In 1800 there were 79,000 New Yorkers; in 1890, 2.5 million. Chicago meanwhile became the wonder of the world. A prairie town of thirty thousand in 1850, by 1890 it was the sixth-largest city on earth, more than a million strong. Chicago made Coketown look genteel. “
For her
,” one astonished critic wrote,

all the Central States, all the Great Northwest roared with traffic and industry; sawmills screamed; factories, their smoke blackening the sky, clashed and flamed; wheels turned, pistons leaped in their cylinders; cog gripped cog; beltings clasped the drums of mammoth wheels; and converters of forges belched into the clouded air their tempest breath of molten steel.

It was Empire.