The Birth of the Modern Age

Two Revolutions

 1. Economic - The Industrial

Revolution in Britain, 1750-1850

2. Political – The French Revolution,

Bastille Day, July 1789
The Rise of Empires
 What were the economic gains and
losses in securing colonies?

 What were the particular economic

reasons for Belgium to secure a colony
about 80 times bigger than itself?
War and Economics
 War in the nineteenth century – colonial
 War in the twentieth century – global

Economic aspects of World War One

Economic aspects of World War Two
Economic Aspects of the Cold War
Twentieth Century Economics
 The Great Depression
 The Boom (trente glorieuses)
 The End of the Boom
 The Slide into Recession
 Into the twenty-first century
The European Union
 Origins and Development
 Position after the Treaty of Lisbon
 The specific issue of agriculture and the
CAP
 The euro and the economic crisis
 BREXIT
Examination
 Written exam, no materials for
consultation
 Multiple choice and possibly essay
 Two hours
Books that are still worth
consulting

Eric Hobsbawm’s Industry and Empire and

his tetralogy Age of Revolution, Age of
Capital, Age of Empire and Age of
Extremes
Tony Judt’s Postwar: A History of Europe
since 1945
A new book that is worth
consulting
 Robert Skidelsky (biographer of Keynes)
Government and Money (published 2018)

 Denis MacShane – Brexiternity (published

2019)

 Very useful for current issues

Rules for classes
 I can cope with people not coming,
coming late, going early, going in and
out during the lectures or consulting
dictionaries, using computers, texting,
eating, drinking or sleeping…..

 BUT I CANNOT TOLERATE…..

NOISE!!!!!
The first topic is…
 The Industrial Revolution

 1750-1850, ie it is a process rather than

an event, and cannot be pinned down
to a specific date…
The background - Britain in
1750
 Lived from shipping and overseas trade.

 Large navy, 6,000 merchant ships and

100,000 sailors, (Press gangs), the
largest number of workers in any
occupation apart from agriculture.
Hence….
Britain in 1750….
 Was a nation of shopkeepers, not
industrialists, living from TRADE, but
able to use its leverage over the ocean
highways…

Which meant that if it could develop

something everyone needed it could
probably corner the export market…
And that something appeared
in the form of…cotton
Crompton’s Mule
 Invented by Samuel Crompton in 1779.
 There is one left, in a museum in
Bolton.
 It was one of many machines that
made it easier to spin textile fibres into
yarn. Another was James Hargreaves’
Spinning Jenny, invented in 1764.
This shows the Industrial
Revolution
 Did not need ‘brains’ so much as practical
skill. This was not something ‘new’ like
electricity or atomic energy.

 Britain became known as ‘the workshop of

the world’, not ‘the university of the world’ or
‘the laboratory of the world’. The skills
needed were those of a practical mechanic.
The best universities were elsewhere.
The Industrial Revolution
 Did not need a great deal of capital either

 Cotton production rose through the

application of relatively simple machinery. It
started on a small scale, often staying as a
cottage industry, and expanded in a
piecemeal fashion. Those ‘power looms’ and
factories came later.
So what did it need?
An ability to buy something important (we all need
clothes) cheap (you can’t grow cotton in
England) and sell it dear….

And control of the markets through war and

protectionism in order to monopolise the carry
trade and force customers to buy your goods

This was what made it possible to make a fortune

out of cotton.
A very important advantage
when you have 100,000
sailors

You can monopolise the carrying

trade by insisting that exports be
carried in British ships (this was
an issue in the American
Revolution 1776).
Buy cheap
Slave labour abroad. All the raw material is
imported, seven million Africans transported to the
Brazilian plantations from Africa in 18th
Century….then from the 1790s the slave plantations
of the southern USA take over…

 Cheap labour at home because of a rising

population and rural depopulation. So the raw cotton
is cheap to buy and cheap to process…and it can be
done on a large scale with mules and jennies…..as
Marx and Engels pointed out, cheap labour can be
worse than slave labour!
Sell Dear
Because in many cases you are selling abroad to
markets you control

2/3 of cotton 1805 is exported, using a huge merchant

marine fleet. With depressed wages at home it
was hard to develop a domestic market.

Remember this point – cheap wages means fewer

consumers and that can harm production! But the
domestic market is only 1/3 of your total sales…
As for protectionism…..
 This means destroying the competition. In 1700 British
producers win protection against Indian textile
imports – the prohibition of foreign calicoes means that
the British cotton industry can control the domestic market.

 In 1813 the East India Company loses its monopoly in India

and the sub-continent is de-industrialised and opened
up to Lancashire cottons. So now it is not just that India is
forbidden to export to Britain – it is forbidden to produce.
Colonisation means that you can monopolise those
parts of the foreign market which you control.
The Industrial Revolution
also…
 Required an infrastructure

- transport networks
- financial networks
- political stability
Infrastructure – Transport
networks
1. Canals, rivers and roads (18th century)

Nowhere in Britain is more than 100km from the sea. It

may cost as much to move goods 20 miles by land as
to produce them. Manchester Ship Canal reduces
costs by 80%
Developments in rivers and canals, locks and towpaths,
and the improvement of roads through the Turnpike
Trusts, which cover 15,000 miles of road by 1770.

2. Railways (19th century). This comes in the second

phase of the Industrial Revolution.
Infrastructure – financial
arrangements
Banks, borrowing facilities, bills of exchange, insurance,
money.

Bank of England 1694. Isaac Newton Master of the

Mint 1700-1727.

Two big problems are: getting insured (this begins with

marine insurance) and having available cash (some
firms mint their own ‘coins’)
Infrastructure – political
stability
The ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 means that
Britain’s monarch is effectively under control.

Britain becomes a comfortable oligarchy, limited

royal powers and very limited democracy –
but the aristocracy were prepared to get their
hands dirty because….
They owned a lot of the
industry!
 It was located in the countryside, on
their lands…

 If you have a mine on your land, you’ll

want to exploit it in the same way as
you want to graze your sheep or
cattle….you have farmers for your
sheep and miners for your mines….
They were the ‘landed
interest’
 Who maintained their own form of protectionism
through the Corn Laws…the industrialists resisted,
saying that if the Corn Laws were repealed they
could pay their workers less! (repeal came 1846)

 But they weren’t hostile to industry, though they

disliked some ‘nouveau riche’ industrialists. And the
Corn Laws were eventually repealed - in 1846. The
aristocracy had to take into account the needs of
industry.
Another very important thing
happened 1750-1850
 It was mentioned earlier in the context
of emphasising the advantages of
CHEAP LABOUR.

 It was the….
 Population Explosion
The population explosion – in the mid-18th
Century the islands of Britain and Ireland had
roughly equal populations.

Then the population in Britain rose from about

7 million 1750 to 10 million 1800 and 20
million by 1850. The population of Ireland
(North and South) is under 7 million today.
Why was there a population
explosion in Britain?

No significant changes in terms of emigration/immigration

until there is a rise in Irish immigration to Britain after
the famine in the 1840s.

There is a RISING BIRTH RATE because women are, on

average, marrying younger (26 in 1700, 23 in 1800).

There is a FALLING DEATH RATE. This is not due to

medicine, which remains primitive, despite the first
vaccinations against smallpox. But there is an
improvement in DIET following the simultaneous
AGRICULTURAL REVOLUTION. People grew bigger….
The Agricultural Revolution
 Provides food for a growing population and causes it
to rise further. Crop rotation, fertilisers, stockbreeding,
drainage, by 1846 even the repeal of the Corn Laws
can be managed because there are huge increases in
production….
 Facilitates the movement of large numbers of people
from rural to urban areas. By the 1840s no more than
a quarter of the population works in farming. NB.
Increase in production despite fall in employment
levels (c.f. manufacturing later…)
 BEWARE BLAMING UNEMPLOYMENT ON LACK OF
PRODUCTIVITY
So agriculture increases its
productivity

But does not increase its

workforce – indeed it reduces it.
This is similar to the experience of
developing (and developed)
countries in the 20th Century
Population growth need not
mean a growing supply of labour
Unless people have no alternative to working in
the cotton industry. But this is what
happened because of the other social
changes, particularly in agriculture. People
were no longer needed on the land, so they
were forced to find work elsewhere…
Couldn’t they resist this?
 No. There were few obstacles to transferring people
from rural to urban settings….
 No landholding peasantry with protection, unlike in
France. They had no legal rights to hang on to the
land. They became subject to the system of..
 ENCLOSURES – essentially rearranging common
fields into self-contained private land units. Farms
grew larger and farmers fewer…farm-servants
become hired labourers, taken on for a week or a
season – no security.
Could they do nothing?
 This is 1750-1850! There is no ‘benefits
system’. There is a measure of ‘relief’, but the
Poor Law Act 1834 ensures that all relief is
below the lowest wage rates available (and
there was no minimum wage). It was work or
starve (or go to the workhouse), and the
workhouse was not nice….
The alternative to work was the ‘workhouse’,
‘that place of punishment for poverty’ –
conditions worse than in prisons
Urbanisation
 Manchester rises from 17,000 in 1760 to
180,000 in 1830.
 Towns rapidly become cities. They spring up
without infrastructure, lack of water-supply
and sanitation, epidemics of typhoid etc., lack
of open spaces, trees, ‘public furniture’, even
churches - pollution because forced to live
near the factories (no commuters until later in
the 19th Century). And yet there is still a rise
in population overall….
The Industrial Revolution - social
as well as economic changes
 At first the earliest inventions can be accommodated
within cottage industry, but later inventions like the
‘power loom’ require factories. It is the condition of
these that comes to the attention of a certain person
busy writing all day in the British Museum, Karl Marx,
and a factory owner called Friedrich Engels.
Engels wrote (in Germany) The Condition
of the Working Class in England in 1845
 It was published in England in 1887

 It is still very readable

 Engels returned to England in 1849

Why was there so much attention
to the British working-class?
 Because Britain was the first country to
industrialise.
 Marx and Engels were studying a new
phenomenon, the ‘industrial revolution’, and
saw it as a key moment in history (cf a new
moment in ‘evolution’)
 It was the moment when ‘the machines’ take
over (not quite AI!)
 In the machine age people no longer lived from
their own property – a rural smallholding or a
hand loom.

 Hence the idea of the ‘proletarian’ you don’t

have your own spade or smallholding and
therefore you have nothing to sell except your
labour.
 You don’t own – or have a hand in - the
means of production.
In Das Kapital Marx wrote:
 ‘World history offers no spectacle more
frightful than the gradual extinction of the
English hand-loom weavers’ – where whole
families might work together in cottages, but
under very different conditions

 The mythical Ned Ludd and the ‘Luddites’ –

breaking machinery.
In the small spaces of the mines children
and women were especially ‘useful’
So were there protests?
 On and off. It was difficult to protest when unions
were illegal.
 There’s a preference for women and children in the
factories (reducing pay and protests).
 1838 only 23% of textile factory workers are adult
men. Long working hours after 1805 through gas to
illuminate factories.
 Legislation to limit working hours comes only in the
mid-nineteenth century….
The introduction of machinery meant that
physical strength was less important so women
and children could be employed on lower wages
Marx and Engels compare the
‘proletarian’ to the ‘slave’
 ‘The slave is sold once and for all. The proletarian
must sell himself by the hour or by the day. Each
individual slave, being the direct property of a master,
has his existence assured, be that existence ever so
wretched, if only because of the interest of the slave
owner’
 Wincey the white mouse.
 ‘The slave is excluded from competition; the
proletarian is beset by competition and is a prey to all
its fluctuations.’
You work for a pittance and eventually
work yourself out of a job

 What you produce as a worker over and above the

value of your labour-power….

 …i.e. over and above the wages you receive, which

will be enough to keep you going….subsistence
wages or even less

 is ‘surplus value’ which will be used for more

machinery and materials – and this in turn will lead to
fewer workers….
Increasing the overabundance
of supply
 With no alternative to working

 So wages could be kept very low and

conditions were very bad.
Meanwhile the owners are engaged
in a battle of competition
 Those who will win are those producing the cheapest
commodities and these, all other things being equal,
will be those with the lowest labour costs

 It wasn’t as if the owners were necessarily ‘beasts’

wanting to grind the noses of the poor in the dirt.
They were moving in an intensely competititve
environment striving to increase market share….
And there was only one
possible outcome….
 The next evolutionary stage
 As industry develops, the proletariat increases in
number. New machinery means more and more
people ‘herded’ into factories
 Conditions of life within the proletariat are equalised,
reducing internal divisions
 Competition among the owners becomes more and
more intense.
The workers begin to form
combinations…
 Trade Unions

 Improved communications mean more organisation

 Local struggles become centralised

 Only the proletariat is a truly ‘revolutionary’ class.

When raised to the position of ruling class, it will
centralise all the instruments of production in the hands
of the State.
But history turned out
differently
 Marx experienced the failure of the
revolutions in 1848 and the Paris Commune
in 1870

 As we shall see next week, the height of

radical opposition to the government in the
UK was in the 1840s with the Chartist
movement. In the second half of the century
economic conditions became easier.
Next time…
 We will look at the second phase of the
industrial revolution with the
development of the railway age, and
then at the eventual decline of Britain
as an industrial power.