The Transformation of the World (142 page)

The statistics of rising coal production are an indication of the level of industrial development, but they also tell us something about the underlying causes. The figures should be taken with a pinch of salt, since no one has tried even to estimate the output of nonmechanized coal mines in China, for example. (Admittedly they almost never produced coal for industrial applications at that time.) The middle of the nineteenth century marked the turning point for pit coal production; it rose sixteenfold from a maximum of 80 million tons a year in 1850 to more than 1.3 billion tons in 1914. At the beginning of this period, Britain's 65 percent share made it by far the largest extractor, but on the eve of the First World War it had dropped to second place (25 percent), behind the United States (43 percent) and ahead of Germany (25 percent). All other countries were of secondary importance beside these giant producers. Russia, India, and Canada were climbing the ladder and would have a respectable coal industry within a few more years. But even the largest of these smaller producers—Russia—averaged only 2.6 percent of world output in the years between 1910 and 1914.
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Many countries, such as France, Italy, or (southern) China, could not avoid making up their resource deficit by importing coal from regions with a surplus, such as those in Britain, the Ruhr, or Vietnam.

Whereas in the 1860s some commentators had gloomily forecast an impending exhaustion of global coal deposits, a half-century later the opening up of new fields had ensured an adequate supply and a geographical fragmentation of the coal market that meant Britain could no longer maintain its old dominance.
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Some governments saw the need for an energy protection policy; others did not. Russia failed to develop an adequate coal base while Sergei Witte, the finance minister from 1892 and architect of late-Tsarist modernization, one-sidedly promoted high-tech projects in the steel industry and machine building.
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In Japan, by contrast, the state encouraged coal mining to keep in step with industry; although the country certainly lacked the large reserves to be found in the United States or China, its output in the first post-1885 phase of industrialization was
enough to cover its own needs. Only in a second phase, when the metalworking industry had undergone considerable expansion, was the quality of Japanese coal no longer sufficient. If Manchuria was of such interest to Japan as a colony, one reason was that its high-grade coal was better suited for carbonization, and deposits were being mined after 1905 in colonial territory controlled by the South Manchurian Railroad Company.
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There are few clearer instances of “resource imperialism,” that is, the subjugation of another country with the purpose of gaining control over raw materials necessary for one's own economic development.
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China offers the example of a colonial situation in reverse. Energy shortage was a chronic problem for that densely populated country, large stretches of which were almost completely denuded of forest. Northern and northwestern China sit on huge coal deposits, some of them even today not yet opened up for mining, and it cannot be said that they were unknown and unutilized. They were used early on for the production of iron on a grand scale; indeed, serious estimates suggest that around the year 1100, this may have been higher than the output of the whole of Europe (except Russia) in 1700.
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It is difficult to tell why such levels were not maintained, but in any event China's coal production was sharply lower in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, especially because the fields in northwestern China were a long way from the commercial centers that sprang up after the opening of the treaty ports in 1842. The advantage of short distances and good waterways, which made it cost-effective to mine English coal so early on, was absent in China. When large enterprises began mechanical extraction there after 1895, the major mines were under foreign control, and those in Japanese possession either shipped their output straight to Japan or sent it to nearby Japanese-owned iron and steel factories. If, roughly after 1914, the newly emerging conurbations—above all, Shanghai—suffered from an energy shortage that presumably hindered their industrial development, this was due not only to insufficient output and colonial exploitation but also to the political chaos in the country, which meant, for example, that individual railroads were repeatedly out of service. China was potentially an energy giant, but in the first phase of its industrialization it was able to make only very limited use of its fossil fuels. Unlike in Japan, there was no central government that might have given priority to energy supply in its economic policies and its promotion of industrial growth.

A Global Energy Gulf

All in all, a deep energy gulf had opened up in the world by the early twentieth century. In 1780 all societies on the planet relied on the use of energy from biomass, differing from one another by the particular preferences they developed, or were forced to develop, under the pressure of their natural circumstances. In 1910 or 1920 the world was divided between a minority of countries that had gained access to fossil fuels and established the infrastructure necessary to use them, and a majority that had to cope with traditional energy sources under a
growing threat of shortage. In terms of the distribution of world coal output, the gap between “the West” and the rest of the world was clear. In 1900 Asia accounted for just 2.82 percent of global production, Australia for 1.12 percent, Africa for 0.07 percent.
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Country-by-country comparisons are another matter: Japan produced more coal on average than Austria-Hungary in the years from 1910 to 1914, with India only a short distance behind.
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Per capita consumption of commercially supplied energy in 1910 was probably a hundred times greater in the United States than in China. At the same time, new hydroelectric technologies made it possible for water-rich countries to raise the old water-mill principle to a new level. Whereas the steam engine at first generated energy more efficiently than the waterwheel, the water turbine had reversed the relationship by the second half of the nineteenth century.
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For countries such as Switzerland, Norway, or Sweden and for some regions of France, dam and turbine technology offered a chance from the 1880s on to offset their dearth of coal. Outside the West, however, only Japan took advantage of these new possibilities. Under certain ecological conditions there were anyway no alternatives: huge areas of the Middle East and Africa had neither coal reserves nor water that could be used to produce energy. Egypt, for instance, which has little coal and can hardly use the weak Nile current for watermills, was at a strong disadvantage in comparison with Japan. During the first phase of industrialization, when processing factories were set up for the export economy and irrigation plants were partly mechanized, people still depended mainly on human and animal motive power.
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And when oil extraction began in the Middle East in the early twentieth century—Iran, for example, virtually without an industry, first exported the fuel in 1912—it was destined entirely for abroad and had no other connection with the domestic economy.

The steam engine found many applications, not all of them in the production of industrial goods. In the Netherlands, it was introduced fairly late (around 1850) for drainage and polder installations, the higher costs being offset less by increased efficiency than by the greater control that steam engines permitted. By 1896 only 41 percent of reclaimed land was still being drained by windmills, and this aspect of the Dutch landscape, familiar from innumerable “Golden Age” paintings, gradually disappeared. More generally, there is much to be said for regarding the change in energy regime as one of the most important features of industrialization. But it did not happen overnight, in the form of a revolution, or as early as the British example might suggest. An energy economy with a broad mineral base developed worldwide only in the twentieth century, after oil came on stream in Russia, the United States, Mexico, Iran, Arabia, and elsewhere and began to be used alongside coal in the industrial countries.
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The energy-rich West confronted the rest of the world as more “energetic.” The cultural heroes of the age were not contemplative idlers, religious ascetics, or tranquil scholars but practitioners of the
vita activa
: indefatigable conquerors, intrepid travelers, restless researchers, imperious captains of industry. Wherever
they appeared on the scene, Westerners impressed, terrified, or bluffed people with a personal dynamism that was supposed to represent their society of origin. The actual strength of the West was projected as a force of nature and a mark of anthropological superiority. The racism of the age did not end with skin color: it classified the human “races” on a scale of potential physical and mental energy. At the latest by the end of the century, the West was typically characterized as “youthful” in the non-European world, while indigenous traditions and local rulers were seen as “old,” passive, and lifeless. Patriots of the younger generation considered that their main task was to revitalize their own society, to kindle its slumbering energies, to give it a political direction. In the Ottoman Empire they were Young Turks; in China they called the standard-bearing journal championing political and cultural renewal “New Youth” (
Xin qingnian
). Nationalism, sometimes even socialist revolution, was discovered almost everywhere in Asia around this time as a vehicle of self-energization.

3 Paths of Economic Development and Nondevelopment

Although there was and is no unambiguous statistical measure for a country's degree of industrialization, it was fairly clear by the eve of the First World War who in Europe did and did not belong to the “industrial world.” In absolute output figures there were two giants: Germany and the United Kingdom, followed at a considerable distance by Russia and France and in a third order of magnitude by Austria-Hungary and Italy. In terms of per capita industrial performance, the picture was a little different: Britain still had the lead over Germany; Belgium and Switzerland were on a par with Germany; and France and Sweden lay some distance behind. None of the other countries of Europe had achieved so much as a third of Britain's per capita industrial output; Russia was near the bottom of the league along with Spain and Finland.
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Of course these figures, many of them estimates, tell us nothing about per capita income or average living standards. And a closer look shows that there can be no question of an “industrial Europe” as a whole, in contrast to an unmodernized rest of the world (except for the United States).

Export Orientation, Especially in Latin America

By roughly 1880, imperial geology—a science with eminently practical implications—was at work tracking down mineral deposits in every part of the world: manganese, the chief steel stabilizer, in India and Brazil; copper in Chile, Mexico, Canada, Japan, and the Congo; tin in Malaya and Indonesia. From the seventeenth century until 1914 Mexico was the world's largest silver producer—a position that South Africa had gained in relation to gold. Chile was the main source of saltpeter, then indispensable for the production of explosives, and in 1879–83 it even fought a war with Peru and Bolivia over deposits in their border areas. Many of these natural resources were also plentiful in North America, the
best-endowed region of the world for industrial inputs. Outside Europe, mineral reserves rarely became the springboard for Western-style industrial development; they were often developed by foreign capital in export enclaves, without reshaping the respective national economy as a whole. The same was true of the production and export of agrarian inputs for the rubber, soap, chocolate, or other industries. In the two decades before the First World War, tin and rubber made British Malaya a particularly wealthy colony; production there was only partly in the hands of international corporations, and the Chinese minority played an important entrepreneurial role.

The new demand of European and American industry called export sectors into being in many countries around the world, whether formal colonies or not. In Latin America this put an end to the centuries-long dominance of precious metals in overseas trade. New products took over from silver and gold in a number of countries; Peru, the classical land of silver, became after 1890 an important supplier of copper for the electrical industry, so that by 1913 it represented one-fifth of all its export earnings. Silver also lost much of its significance in Bolivia, giving way especially to tin, which by 1905 made up 60 percent of exports. Chile first appeared on the world market as a copper producer, but the switch to saltpeter meant that by 1913 the mineral accounted for 70 percent of all exports.
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Despite these changes, however, specialization in a small number of products remained a hallmark of many Latin American economies. Exports—which also included coffee, sugar, bananas, wool, and rubber—set up growth effects, but the narrower the range of products, the more vulnerable a country was to price fluctuations on the world market; Peru's guano boom ended in a crash, before the beginning of the great worldwide expansion in tropical raw materials.
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Only Argentina managed to spread the risks sufficiently by diversifying before 1914. With less than 10 percent of the population in Latin America, it was then the region's most successful exporter and accounted for almost one-third of exports.
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Other factors in the macroeconomic success of export orientations were whether (1) production took place in labor-intensive family enterprises, keeping the profits inside the country and sharing it relatively equally in society, or (2) the dominant form was plantations and mines, mostly worked by poorly paid wage laborers and owned by foreign companies that transferred a large part of their profits overseas. In general, type 2 was less advantageous than type 1 for the national economy and the overall development of society. If there was growth under type 2, it was often confined to isolated enclaves and did not have a stimulating effect on other branches of the economy. Only South Africa was a major exception to this rule.
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