A History of the World (65 page)

Boulton, despite having received a second marital windfall (new wife, new fortune), struggled desperately for capital. Many of the new machines were sold to Cornish tin companies, who derived the money to pay for them partly from what they had saved on coal. But sharp
practice and protests about monopolies, as well as slow payment for other products sold abroad, caused him serious difficulties.

Watt’s engines were first employed in mines, but soon also in mills grinding flour, in breweries and then in other factories. Altogether, between 1775 and the end of the century the firm produced about 450 steam engines. Boulton was now expanding into coin production. At this time Britain was experiencing a plague of fake coinage, so crippling that the Royal Mint had stopped minting. Boulton at his ‘Soho Mint’ had already produced free-market coins as well as coins for foreign governments, for the British in India, and then for the British at home. Coins depended for their high quality on fixed amounts of metal, accurate shaping and industrial-scale manufacture: accuracy and reliability Boulton’s new system, with its Watt engines, could deliver.

Looking back at their story, it becomes easier to see why industrialization took off first in Britain. The state was still old-fashioned. What we today call ‘infrastructure’ was primitive. There were some good roads and some new, useful canals, but muddy and dangerous travel was the norm. The banks were shaky, commercial law was full of holes, Parliament was a cockpit where vested interests fought the newcomers, and the country as a whole was obsessed with its overseas wars. But in both Scotland and England a vigorous, free exchange of new ideas was taking place. Far from London, and outside the ancient guild restrictions, men were able to build, trade and experiment freely, lobby the politicians and take pride in the new philosophy of capitalism explained by Watt’s friend Adam Smith in his
Wealth of Nations
, published in 1776. They could also get rich. Watt and Boulton represent pioneers of railways and iron bridges, of new types of ship, gas lighting, electricity; initiators of revolutions in pottery, glass, fabrics and machine-tools, men of genius as varied as Humphry Davy, Michael Faraday and Abraham Darby. They were all remarkable. They were also all lucky: that time, that place.

Dark, Satanic and Infectious

But the industrialization of parts of Britain came at a terrible price. Wrenched from the old seasonal rhythms and religious holidays,
people were being forced to work differently. During the 1700s, it has been calculated, the average number of work days in a year in Britain rose from 250 to 300. Those were lost days for living and loving, for storytelling and teaching. People who had risen with the sun found themselves stumbling to work in the dark, to artificially lit factories and workshops where they would spend twelve hours on their feet, their time regulated by large mechanical clocks. The famous coal-black factories with their huge chimneys were rare enough at first, mainly in the Lancashire cotton towns, but the packed, cheap housing and the ubiquitous coal smoke soon presented a convincing image of hell to writers as various as Charles Dickens, Friedrich Engels and Queen Victoria.

Although children had always worked in the fields, doing the lighter jobs, they were now pressed into an industrial labour force where they would be so ill-treated that even in these tough times a movement to limit their hours arose. Driven by the same Christian outrage as fuelled the anti-slavery movement, it resulted in a series of Factory Acts limiting hours and setting out health and safety requirements. But the lives of early-nineteenth-century child workers are grimly apparent from the clauses of the first of these Acts, in 1802, which specified that children could work up to eight hours a day from the age of nine, and twelve hours from the age of fourteen; that they should not begin work until after six in the morning; and that they should sleep no more than two to a bed and get an hour’s instruction in Christianity on Sundays. Even with light fines, these laws were much ignored. Further reports, scandals and laws followed; Dickens and his novelist friend Elizabeth Gaskell highlighted factory conditions in their books, and pioneering journalists explored the northern cities as if they were alien jungles – which, for middle-class southerners, they were.

Industrialization also changed the politics of the British, in many unexpected ways. During 1811–16 in Nottinghamshire, Yorkshire and Lancashire, the old artisan, cottage-based handloom weavers revolted violently against the new mechanized factory looms that were destroying their livelihoods. Taking their battle name from a fictitious woodland freedom fighter called King Lud, these ‘Luddites’ smashed machines, attacked employers and magistrates and, having practised night manoeuvres outside industrial cities, ended up clashing with the
army. Many were hanged or sent to Australia. In 1830, agricultural workers in Kent began the ‘Swing Riots’ – another attack on the new job-destroying technology, in this case mechanized threshing machines.

The New Poor Law of 1834, which replaced the Elizabethan system of parish relief with a national network of grim workhouses designed to force the poorest out of the countryside and into towns to find work, or to live in deliberately harsh conditions, segregated by sex, in prison-like buildings, provoked violent protests in cities such as Bradford, Oldham and Huddersfield. In 1834, too, the ‘Tolpuddle Martyrs’, six agricultural labourers from Dorset who had formed a union against low wages, were transported to Australia. The popular protest that ensued resulted in a campaign that became seminal in the development of trade unionism. For many visiting continentals, from the German capitalist Engels to the French artist Gustave Doré, Britain was both an amazing example of new ways of making things and a vision of human inequality pressed too far.

Before the advent of industrialization, British politics had been a balance between the influence of the old elites – landowners and gentry – the city merchants and the clergy, plus the new entrepreneurs. Now that balance ended. From 1780 to 1830 the population of England doubled. Industrial output leapt threefold. Much of the increased wealth accrued to the towns, and governments found themselves forced to defend the property rights of mill-owners, to send soldiers to put down workers’ protests, and to tilt both the law and the political system to reflect the new wealth and the new power. The House of Commons had originally been elected from constituencies whose origins were now half lost in time, many of them tiny ‘rotten boroughs’ bearing no relation to the growth of industrial cities. The most important tariff system, the Corn Laws, taxed imported food to protect the income of British farmers and landowners, so keeping the price of bread artificially high. In an orgy of reform, both of these imbalances would be swept aside.

The food issue had been sharpened by Britain’s long war with France and her continental allies. We have seen how huge advances in British farming made the industrial revolution possible; but the further leaps in population then outpaced the farming revolution, so that by the late 1790s Britain had stopped exporting grain. ‘Food security’,
which would be such an issue for the British during the two world wars, was a prime national concern during the Napoleonic era too. Tariffs were seen as a way of protecting and promoting home-grown food. Yet industrialization was feeding – literally – on what now had to be imported.

Though clouded by the high-flown rhetoric of free trade and the advance of civilization, this was really a fight between the more southerly Britain of the fields and the northerly Britain of the factories. In 1846 the factories, and the north, emerged as the winners, when a Tory prime minister, Robert Peel, abolished the Corn Laws at the cost of his own position. By then, the political change was under way too. The Great Reform Act of 1832 swept away the most corrupt boroughs and increased the franchise by around 60 per cent, but it failed to extend the vote to enough poorer citizens to satisfy the growing working- and middle-class movement for democracy. Much of the story of later-nineteenth-century politics would be about the constant pressure for reform, and the series of further Acts that would extend voting rights and begin to give cities like Birmingham the political clout they had lacked in the lifetimes of Watt and Boulton.

So the British state shifted from a position of essentially supporting the power of land, of the ancient city guilds and of the chartered merchant companies, to one of essentially supporting capitalism and industry. Religious controversies, always important, were gradually crowded out by class struggles, as trade unions and political reformists such as the Chartists demanded new rights. British industry had emerged victorious in the competition stakes. Having overwhelmed foreign competitors, the British began to adopt free trade as a national religion. This may have been unfair to other countries, struggling to catch up, who would require a period of protection to develop their own industries; it certainly gave the British a reputation for stinking hypocrisy, as well as for skill and hard work.

It also became clear that the optimistic theories of Adam Smith and his free-trade followers underplayed the role of war. Many of Britain’s early technical skills related to her mighty fleet (think of Watt’s father, and nautical instruments, and those devastating carronades). Her young consumer economy was fed by the success of British bayonets and cannon in India, America and the Caribbean. Britain would probably have been the first to industrialize anyway, but
had France not been preoccupied by the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars during the crucial decades she might have run her old adversary close. (Gas-lighting, so important to making early-industrial city life safer and the days longer, got a major boost in Britain because of the massive accumulation of unwanted musket barrels after Napoleon’s defeat in 1815, which were turned into gas pipes.
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Both of the major nations that were the next to pick up industrialization protected their own industries and used them to promote nationalism. The United States had great advantages as a rising industrial power. It had a young people, seemingly unlimited land, long rivers for transportation, large natural resources and a new, enlightened political system that positively encouraged people to challenge European orthodoxy. Germany had different advantages. After Napoleon had abolished the Holy Roman Empire, those who spoke German were still divided into around three hundred separate countries, mini-countries, micro-countries, free cities and other political flecks and speckles. But they had huge coal and iron reserves, a long and excellent tradition in metalworking and, in Prussia, a rising national leader. The Prussians drew other smaller German states into their customs union, or
Zollverein
, which encouraged free trade and began to wear away some of the maze of different measuring systems, currencies and related laws. After defeating first the Austrians and then the French, the united Germany led by Prussia was able to forge ahead at a remarkable pace.

It seemed obvious that industrial growth needed a liberal political order to thrive in. Yet most of Europe had been under the hegemony of the illiberal Habsburgs of Austro-Hungary and other, lesser monarchies, with the Russian Czar still acting as a policeman of last resort. During the nineteenth century the struggle to build liberal political states, in which capitalism and therefore modernization could thrive, was the main internal European cause. By and large liberalism and nationalism marched together. The unification of Italy, a long and complex struggle against Austrian occupiers, local monarchies with medieval origins, such as the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and the Duchy of Modena, and against Papal conservatism, was driven by a sense that Italy needed a modern, united democratic state to pull her into the modern world. (In fact the absolute monarchs had not always
done badly; the Naples-based Kingdom of the Two Sicilies had some highly effective shipyards and railway engineering companies.)

Nowhere was the tension between traditionalism and modernization sharper than in France. The post-Napoleonic monarchy curdled into a fully reactionary one under Charles X. Ousted by a revolt in July 1830, he was replaced by the more liberal Louis-Philippe, the ‘bourgeois monarch’; but France lagged far behind Britain in its franchise and a formidable reform movement began to grow. The problem for middle-class liberals was that change was likely to be provoked by the poorer and angrier masses, who they themselves also feared. Poor crops and widespread hunger in turn provoked the ripple of uprisings that made 1848 the year of revolutions in Poland, across the Habsburg empire, and in smaller countries such as Denmark, Belgium and Switzerland. In France, the ancient monarchy was finally overthrown and a Second Republic declared, which would become, within four years under Louis-Bonaparte, the Second Empire. This two steps forward, one back pattern was widespread. Most of the uprisings failed, and few produced clear political advances. Perhaps their most important side-effect was the biggest new political idea of the mid-century: the messianic socialist creed of Marxism.

Karl Marx had come from a wealthy Rhineland family but spent his early adult years as a philosopher-rebel, finally finding safety in liberal Britain. With his co-author and financial supporter Friedrich Engels, he argued for a purely material vision of historical advance, in which the struggle between the rich owners of capital and industry and the workers who produced the real wealth would eventually result in a Communist world, where the working class owned the full value of their work, and the state – monarchical, bourgeois, parliamentary or republican – withered away. In
The Communist Manifesto
of 1848, addressed to rebelling German workers, he expressed himself in clear, biting and exciting imagery. His huge later work of 1867–94,
Capital
, attempted to use statistics to demonstrate the scientific truth underlying his vision. It became the secular bible of twentieth-century revolutionaries, even though Marx assumed the revolution must start in advanced Germany or Britain, rather than backward Russia. Marx’s work spread among the extreme socialists of Europe but was at that time a minority taste compared with Christianity-tinged and more moderate, parliamentary visions of socialist politics. His analysis
lacked the subtleties of traditional political and moral philosophers, but he had a vivid understanding of the ruthless competition hiding below the dimpled smile of bourgeois capitalism. The future would be nothing like his prediction; but the world around him in the mid-nineteenth century was very much as he described it.