Piper Black

6-1-22

Period 5

Industrialization

During 1750-1900, the combination of rapid industrialization and urbanization had taken

a previously poor and serfdom-orientated region into a powerhouse of economic production.

This not only led to economic benefits but had played a huge role in the political dynamics of the

world and introduced not only western-centered ideology across the globe, but also fostered new

racial biases such as eugenics to facilitate the power westerns had. Westerns kept their positions

in global trade and politics by taking advantage of their economic power to coerce

unindustrialized states to produce textiles for European factories, as well as invading

unindustrialized states to export their resources and materials to be transported back to European

factories.

Industrialization had fostered urbanization and factories. These factories changed the way

in how goods were produced, and drastically changed how the work force operated. Before

industrialization, many countries had heavy agricultural focus, and the products that they did

produce were hand-crafted. Asia held most of the global and economic power during pre-

industrialization, however after the Industrial Revolution, Europe had quickly and severely

become a major political power, and after a few decades succeeded Asia. Taking advantage of

their access to prime materials and their abundance of silver, they had steadily increased their

economic output and stressing an export and import dynamic and accomplished this by

establishing the British East India corporations. This new global power was then facilitated as

well as maintained by creating reliance on the West for the economic benefit of global trade. At
this point, if the West’s markets had suddenly crashed, it would have a large-scale affect on the

rest of the global trade. At the end of the nineteenth century, the global powers were now more in

favor of the industrialized and this dynamic had lasting effects on the development of the West,

and how countries adjusted their development in response to this.

As previously mentioned, the West were becoming the powerhouse for global trade, and

their wants and needs became a good opportunity for countries to engage in trade with them. The

West took advantage of their influence to inadvertently coerce countries into providing products

they need for very low prices when they are objectively worth more. An example of this is how

the Britain had a heavy reliance on India for their textiles. Britain used these textiles in

manufacturing and was in high demand. However, they bought these textiles for grossly low

prices, especially when considering how the end products finished in British factories were

priced much higher. The reason this dynamic was facilitated was because India relied on Britain

to buy these textiles, and this became their main source of revenue. If Britain were to suddenly

stop buying them, India would not have any factories to use them themselves, nor many other

markets that had demand for these textiles. While they both were economically dependent on

each other because Britain had a global political and economical power, this changed the

dynamic in much more of a favor to them. However, this was not inadvertent imperialism, and

India was not directly forced. Physical imperialism was much more brute and much more forced.

As the West began to manufacture new machines, the eventual development of railroads was a

fundamental foundation for the beginnings of imperialism. Now able to transport materials

across continental distances, the West took advantage of this new land-based transportation to

imperialize many south Asian and African countries. With the justifications of “civilizing” these

nations, referred to as the “white mans burden”, and a combination of eugenics, western
countries invaded these lands with the intentions of exporting their resources and then

transporting it back to be used in the European factories.

In the time 1750-1900, the global world was witnessing a rapid boom in technological

advancements in not only industrialization, but as well as economic and political advancements

as the west became a more and more prominent global power. This, combined with the more

favorable resources and the opportunistic values of the west, had set the pretext for an increasing

global dominance. The process of industrialization transformed the global economy in this

period by changing the global trade dynamics more in favor with the west and creating and

facilitating processes such as imperialism, both physical and economical.